Kit's Art Dump

SO MANY THINGS I didn't talk about this year ;_;

random updates on some of the social medias I'm trying to keep up with, corralled at my CARRD

Melody Amaranth - ink, watercolor limited palette study: PR122 + PG7 + PY110 + PW6

Stratus Loading into VRChat [comm, owner Max Extreme] watercolor x digital

the color signatures of various elements when ignited

something like a self portrait. watercolor/gouache 5.5 x 8.5"

pigments: [KITCHI palette] PG7 + PR122 + PY110 + PY184 (wc) + PW6 (gouache)

Oh man. So this has been sitting in my inbox for a day or two while i chew on it because i’ve realized this is a really hard question to answer!! I asked myself how i’d gotten the ideas for some of my recent work, or the sketches i’m planning out right now, and really… it’s just been me looking at my own work. Copying off my own notes. Asking myself “how can i continue to explore this theme i’ve been working in, with the shape and symbol and color language i’ve already built up?”. And that’s not really helpful advice to anyone else, especially if they don’t have an existing body of work to pull from!

So if a lot of my work right now is inspired by my… past work…. There must be a progenitor, right? An ancestral fish-thing that grew legs and crawled out of the sea? following this train of thought, I realized i really CAN trace my work back through its evolutionary tree. My current polymer clay work, which i classify roughly in my head as my “surrealist-y metaphorical-y tarot-y colorful-y narrative-y stuff” branched off from its great-grandparents at pajamas here, beginning the eventual transformation into what i think of as my real primary “style”, when i decided to give this little human-faced freak bright colors and a star pattern.

But how did HE come about? He was actually a bit of an outlier in his litter, sculpted at the same time as a bunch of little alien creatures. When it came time to paint him, i had gotten bored and was out of ideas, so i decided to rather unthinkingly and spontaneously paint some stars on him, and bam, there it is - the evolution of warm blood, or flight, or a big brain, the one tiny mutation that shapes the rest of the species for all time!

But lets trace it back further. why was i making aliens? Because i was beefing up my creature design skills for a scifi webcomic i had been raising in my head for the past few years. Why scifi? Because my sibling is a huge star trek nerd, and we brainstormed the premise and characters together.

Another example: my current clay work. I can trace most of the forms i’m using right now back to my pit firing days, where the extreme limitations of that medium really informed my work. Pit firing (or MY pit firing, at least) has a high failure rate, and even pottery that makes it through the firing without exploding is still very soft ceramics, and can be broken easily. So i made forms that were simple, sturdy, and that i could make a lot of at a time (so that if i lost a 25% or even 50% of my pieces, it wouldn’t be HOURS of sculpting work down the drain).

But when i was able to start taking pottery classes again and fire in a kiln, some of the limitations of pit firing disappeared. kiln-fired pieces are harder when finished, have a much higher survival chance, and can be glazed. Still, I kept working with the shapes i was familiar with, but with a little more freedom to push them into new things. Those round blobs with faces became slightly more complex blobs with faces, and glazes, and wings and feet!

I’m not sure how much sense i’m making, but i guess what i’m trying to get to is that none of my sculpture ideas come to me “spontaneously”. They’re all a result of an artistic evolution and exploration. Usually, they’re a happy accident that i then decide to run with. And the more work i make, the easier it is the think of the next thing, because i DONT have to make something up out of whole cloth, but continue with the momentum i’ve already built up. This might sound really discouraging, if you don’t have that creative momentum. And it can be hard to build up that momentum! But for me the only way to get ideas has been to make things. At first it might be hard to figure out what to make. What you make at the start might be fairly arbitrary (aliens because your sibling is a fan of star trek) or rooted in the limitations of the medium you’re working with (stout little unglazed faces because you’re pit firing) but if you keep making things, you will start to find these little pathways of inspiration to follow and chase, and before you know it you will be somewhere different. I believe that art always builds on itself. It’s an accumulative thing.

@topthagomizer Dogs and cats, and things that generally resemble dogs and cats, I think are a go-to for a lot of furry art partially bc familiar and partially because they're just easy to put expressions on. Cats have those big eyes and somewhat flatter faces that almost resemble the proportions of children, and dogs literally evolved to mimic our expressions so that we'd find them cuter. Just look at Judy Hopps who you mentioned, big almond shaped eyes on the front of her face, pink button nose, little snout... change her ears and teeth and she would straight up just be a domestic shorthair cat. I don't think that they made her look like this on purpose, just that when you combine Elsa Frozen with a cottontail rabbit this is the result. credit where credit is due, I think the animators were more faithful to depicting her rabbit-ness language than the designers were, and Judy ultimately did what Disney set out for her to do... be extremely marketable, and to make cops look fluffy and adorable (my lawyer is telling me to emphasize that this is a joke and I don't think cops are adorable)

Personally I have faith in people finding more exotic-looking creatures cute... A more extreme example but it's been a fun challenge to try and figure out how insect or mollusk anthro characters would express themselves through body language even though they lack practically anything we'd recognize as a face, I've seen people do this with robot/machine characters too. Wall-E? Pixar Lamp, or Aladdin magic carpet, neither of whom even have body parts? In fact, it's a common exercise for new animation students to animate a featureless sack of flour as if it were a character.

Reeling it back in I think a much better example of an expressive and stylized small mammal would be Remy Ratatouille (sorry for shilling for pixar so hard today), he isn't a photorealistic rat either, they moved his eyes closer together on the top of his head to make his expressions more readable, which IMO is a great choice since his personality still needs to read amongst his larger human castmates, but he doesn't lose his rattiness. I think the key is recognizing how you can take a real animal, capture its essence, and lose what details you don't need, which takes a lot of practice to really get an eye for it. You can sort of practice by trying to break down an animal into simple shapes. A rat's profile is basically a pointy box. A mouse is sort of just a triangle. A rabbit is more like an oval, and so on. They don't really have distinct snouts like dogs do, their eyes are on either side of the head, their mouths tend to be more on the bottom of their skulls. 

I think doing life studies is invaluable. Even if you want to base your character off a design you've seen before, just knowing what that animal looks like and how it moves will really inform you on why the original designer made the decisions they did. Maybe a controversial example, but Lauren Faust was very familiar with horses when she designed the characters of My Little Pony... very extremely stylized designs, but something about where their joints are placed and the way their bodies are shaped still make them sort of look like and move like horses. The generation immediately after, I don't get that sense, and even though they don't look too different, they just don't feel like horses anymore. since you mentioned a character based on a rabbit or a hare, I love Watership down, an absolutely beautiful movie, and it features both stylized and very realistic rabbit characters. 

Children's books are also very fun to reference, since they aren't marketed the same way animated movies and shows are, creators have a bit more freedom to make designs that are very appealing but not chemically engineered to look good on a million toys or lunchboxes or whatever. 

Even within animation, the most bland boring forgettable film is going to have some incredible concept art made by a very creative person who was nerfed for any number of reasons from practicality and time constraint to boring execs being boring. Going back to our friend Judy, I actually prefer this earlier design, the shape of the head and the smaller eyes resonate with me a lot more. 

Thumper the rabbit is also evergreen. You can sort of see how we went from a real cottontail, to Thumper, to Judy, where perhaps they pushed the dollface too far. I especially enjoy these pencil sketches that show some of the artist's process and some of these you can really see how his head can be broken down into simple shapes and how much you can push his expression even just by changing the angle of his face.

Referenced this in an ask a while ago but I can't recommend the Art of Animal drawing enough. Free PDF here! It doesn't cover every mammal ever, but he does have a section on rabbits. It breaks down anatomy, line of action, and stylzation in a good straightforward way that translates to most quadropeds.

Look outside pop culture too! Go to a historic art museum. Different parts of the world, different time periods, you might be surprised at what you find resonates with you. I've yet to find a horse design I like more than those cave paintings (sorry Lauren Faust). We've literally been drawing, painting, sculpting, carving animals since we've been human.

"You're so pretty!!"