Artistic Influences: The Text!

Yeah, I'm tired of even seeing the influence map so here it is text style! With links until I get bored of it! Yeah, go me for being too lazy to drag a few pictures together!

Music:

I live listening to music. As I start typing this I'm listening to Jimi Hendrix, one of the few times I'll listen to one artist and not just shuffle through all of my music. Then again, I've been listening to only Jimi since last night and have gotten my Jimi fill, but his guitar is stil really fucking sexy. That's neither here nor there as my ears orgasm from what he's playing. I love music and live with it. Here are a few of the artists I have an auditory boner for when it comes to creating things.

Tom Waits: His songs are almost all narratives, I can get behind that. His voice is a lost quality, it's a lost sound that if culture continues it's social stigma on smoking will be lost to time. The man put so much time, energy and effort into finding the sounds he wanted when you listen to his performances they all have a grace and nuances that are amazing. I just as much love finding the same songs on youtube when he had a different delivery or a slightly different recording from a live performance and seeing a different take.Another thing that stands out is his songs are more often a narrative and not a cyclical song that returns to a chorus or a break. Or that may just be in the songs I've decided are my favorites.
Notable favorite songs: Burma Shave, Whistlin' Past The Graveyard, Ice Cream Man

Gorillaz: This is a one-two punch, I love Jamie's art and I love Damon's music. Jamie's art from what he did with Tank Girl and what he's doing now is gorgeous. I wish I had the patients to get that much detail into a picture. There's so much going on and he handles it, I love it. For Damon's songs I get lost in the sounds before I focus on the words. That's how I love just about all songs, taking the voice as an instrument before I separate it to discern what it actually being said.
Notable Favorite Songs: White Flag, Clint Eastwood, Every Planet We Reach is Dead


Nina Simone: Her voice is so full of pain, it's always so gorgeous. Her breadth of music is also quite amazing, sh as soulful blues and peppy show-tunes. Her songs help maintain a mood when I draw so I'm not just listening to one song, it can more often be an album or a few different songs so a picture, a sketch can feel right.
Notable Favorite Songs: Love Me or Leave Me, Sinnerman, Take Care of Business

Jimi Hendrix: I know he hated his singing voice but he continued, I just plain love the sound. It's a clash of chaos and the playing. It's not just technically good, it flows. His music doesn't try to stay contained, it goes where it want to and comes back around. I really would have loved to have heard more of his jazzier or bluesier music that he was planning on shifting to.
Notable Favorite Songs: Red House, Spanish Castle Magic, Gypsy Eyes

Movie Soundtrack and Score: With my intense love of music and movies there is the lovechild of both. Not music videos, but  score and soundtracks. I buy more soundtracks than I do individual albums because I love the combination of music types and it introduces me to more artists that I would not have ventured to purchasing on my own. Score helps keep me in a mood or is a quick reminder of a movie if I'm actually drawing fan art, which is rare.

Other: Pretty much everything that can be found that I've either linked to on blip.fm or as listed on my Last.fm account are songs and music that I love. It's not always easy to explain why I love a song but something clicks, it hits an emotion and it takes a while for me to let go. Artists I listen to now that I don't as much as before include Larc~En~Ciel, the pillows, Yasushi Iishi, Rammstein, Mindless Self Indulgence. New (to me) notables include: That Handsome Devil, Cage the Elephant, Pink Martini, Arctic Monkeys, Coconut Records, Fuck Buttons, Long Division, Osymyso.

Movies, Television and Cartoons:

I get inspired by so many damn things, here I touch on some movies, TV shows and cartoons I love. Some of these cross a few boundaries but it's the nature of visual media it seems.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Twitter knows of my love of this movie, as do people I know in real life. What I love about this movie is the writing, it's ball bustingly funny and clever. It's a whodunit tied into black comedy. I love a mystery and this is a mystery that is not readily solved. I love the use of a trio, if you look at my worn most of my friendships are based around 3 people and this movie really makes it work. Each character has a shining moment and a low point of sorts. It doesn't hurt that I'm an RDJ fan, I'll use this as my love for his other movies so I can address other flicks, I'd stay in a rut.

Wes Anderson: Everything. I enjoy how his movies seem to take place next to reality. What happens is usually highly implausible but it all happens in a real-world setting. It's a weird look at life which I like, it makes it seem like life is more interesting than it is. It's interesting to see his character's motivations and how they change and grow over time. In conjunction to this I love his musical choices for his movies. They work out to be just the right type of sound that I'd rather not imagine anything else.

Bryan Fuller: Fuller has hand an illustrious career in making shows that very few people have seen but those who have often times love them. What stands out to me about his work is how he took death and made it into something people could and should laugh at. It's morbid, it's fucked up, it's entertainment. It works because he goes so over the top in his world that it seems like if they didn't go as far it wouldn't seem right. He created Pushing Daisies, Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, three shows that the world booted from television after relatively few episodes. I love how he turned the world on it's head and made death more acceptable, especially ludicrous over the top deaths. I listen to the score that Jim Dooley wrote and my mind goes to that extra brightly colored world from Pushing Daisies and I want to draw Ned or just watch the show again and be inspired by how cartoony everything was. [Note: I decided I liked him so much I wrote about him twice...]

The Fall: This movie went to the most beautiful locations, I am awe struck every time I watch it and I just want to share it with all of my friends. They story at it's core shows how selfishness can hurt others, but how it get there and what actually happens are stunning, I love the performance they got out of the kid. I also really love the costumes and have drawn them, they're just incredibly gorgeous. I love the story and I love the visuals.

Hayao Miyazaki: Is anyone allowed to say that don't like him? Also, his face is amazing, all white hair jet black eyebrows, what the fuck? I have fond memories of waiting for free Disney Channel as a kid so I could watch Kiki's Delivery Service which was my first Miyazaki film, it's still one I love on par with Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind which I enjoyed as a manga prior to seeing the film. I love the stories he tells and how everything is drawn. They style is just as complex as it needs to be at any given moment, but doesn't seem to be overwhelmingly complex.

Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Looney Tunes: Avery and Jones were my favorite of the animation leaders and directors but I did love Looney Tunes. They pushed boundaries, they were political, they were silly retellings of popular classics and Warner Brothers still tries to make money off of them. They were retired and every few years they try to bring them back because they were that amazing. When the art hit it's peak it was at it's most amazing. The stories at times were simple and they had their rules, the mice or whoever was being chased had to win. It seems an exception was if the cat was running from a dog because the dog was defending a smaller animal then the dog won, that's neither here nor there. The art was so explosive and so far reaching. Elements of their work is still being seen today in cartoons. They were also 'edgy' at times, this is most memorable for me in the  Red and Wolf cartoons that Avery did at MGM. Tex Avery cartoons are still some of my favorites and stick in my mind.

Anime & Manga: I watched a lot of anime for about 10 years, it started with Pokemon which can be seen in my much older works and possibly in how I draw hair now. Two series that I go back to time and time again in my mind for little nuances are  Cowboy Bebop and Trigun. The stories stood out in my mind in anime because they were not just the magical girl series and the characters seemed to have ramifications for at least some of their actions. They were dramatic. There were plenty of happy endings for individual episodes, but the shows ultimately took  dramatic turn. Dramatic movies and stories are some of my favorites  so I loved seeing it happen in these shows. I know as I drew I emulated the long limbs seen in both of these shows and I tried drawing these characters. Other favorite shows were Outlaw Star, Hellsing, Hellsing Ultimate and a few things by Clamp.

The Weekenders: This one is really noticeable, my story Cinema is heavily influenced and inspired by Cinema for the art direction. I had been in a depressed slump for a spell and caught a marathon of The Weekenders in 11th grade and I liked the abstraction of head-to-body and I attempted to create a group of high schoolers as a one off and they stayed. I still love the show and wish Disney would be less of a cunt bucket and drop that shit on DVD.

Disney: A love of Disney movies were important to me. Alladin, The Lion King, The Aristrocats, 101 Dalmatians, Jungle Book, The Great Mouse Detective and The Fox and The Hound are seriously some of my favorites. Every time I watch these movies now I want to draw the characters, I love how fluid the animation is on these movies. I appreciate the amount of work they did in capturing the motion that these animals did by drawing them from life and keeping them near in the early states of designing them.

90s Cartoons: The absurdists and not entirely for children cartoons of the early 90s hold a special place in my heart. Rocko's Modern Life, Ahhh! Real Monsters, Ren and Stimpy and more. I  love them and I miss them. The Animaniacs and what Warner Brothers did in the 90s was also all pretty damn spiffy too, those are also all shows I'll sit down and watch on youtube or contemplate going out to buy.

Bruce Timm: Batman: The Animated Series Seasons 1-3. Need I say more? Well yeah, season 4's art I did not like in the least. I understand it was a cheaper way to animate, but it was also a horrible way to animate. That style worked for Superman and not Batman for a reason.

Other: There way too much to list and it goes on. Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith as directors get tons of love. Edgar Wright, Charlie Chaplin, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, Simon Pegg, Joss Whedon, it goes on. The visuals to the characters portrayed to the ideas in what was created. It would be impossible for me to list them all.

Comics and Static work:

Warren Ellis: I love his writing and the ideas he addresses in his comics. He doesn't just want to tell a logical narrative, he wants to have his audiences look at the world around them and question how we got to where we did and how we're going to fix it. The artists he works with work incredibly hard to create the worlds he imagines and  combined it's an amazing force of awesome.

Every Webcomic I Read: I read a lot of webcomics and I take something from every one of them. Some of my biggest influences are from webcomics I don't read anymore. Papercuts is a big one, I read this comic for about 3 years, and Elyneara's other work. Sadly it's a dead comic but I was interested in where it was headed. If you look at my work carefully, you can still see how it influenced what I drew. Megatokyo, MacHall, and AppleGeeks are a few more that I started in high school that I pulled from, especially Megatokyo which I'm sure is still noticable in my work at times. Other comics that I still read that influence me are Dominic Deegan, Little Gamers and Other People's Business which is by the same person who did Friendly Hostility. Girls with Slingshots, Questionable Content and Shortpacked! are some of my new additions to inspirations. Journal comics have been influences more and more in recent years, so Dar, Ellerbisms, The Everyday, Kid with Experience and Journalin' Comix have been influences in recent months. There are boatloads of others, too many for me to want to link to or talk about. 

Salvador Dali: I can't help loving his work.

Deviantart: My work has improved by leaps and bounds from being on deviantart. All of the people I follow give me something new to think about as I draw something new, they give me another way to draw something. There are also the reference images and the tutorials. It's overwhelming at times, but I know my work has improved. The people I have linked on my front page as 'People I love to watch' or something I think have played the biggest influence in my work and I have considered them a challenge to emulate at times.

Photography and/or People: I'd be a shit artist if I didn't say 'real life' because it does. Everything I see, everything I do and everything I experience affects what I draw and how I draw.  I look at people around me and scribble quick thumbnails of poses or clothing. I study people who are still or sitting and figure out how to draw it. I pose myself and draw what it feels like I'm doing which is really hard because them I'm not drawing what I'm seeing, I'm drawing what I'm doing, then having to turn the mental camera around so I  can draw it. I use people around me as references all the time.

Umm, yeah. I think that's everything. This took too retardedly long to write, but I kind of explained why I like these things which in a cyclical fashion explains how it influences me. There's a lot of other things that I never wrote because it didn't come to mind, and as I said in the webcomics when I decided to lump them all together instead of go over each - I follow over 20 webcomics. I took forever going through my lumped together movies, tv and cartoons and I'm actually tired of writing. Considering how much I write normally this one just plaint ook forever, about...3 hours of writing. Yeah. Enjoy.