Inspirations

7/20/2023

i've been thinking a lot lately about what kind of art i want to make and what kind of art inspires me. so here!! here's a blog about it :) in general i'm inspired by 90s-2000s era art, especially video game and comic art.

hayao miyazaki
okay look this one is obvious so i'm not gonna go into that much detail. everyone loves studio ghibli and everyone loves miyazaki's works. theyre gorgeous and heartfelt and timeless - you understand.

osamu tezuka
osamu tezuka, the "father of anime" as we know it :) i don't have too much to say, i just very much enjoy the soft and cute feel of his illustrations. i loved unico growing up and watched the movies frequently. his little critters are my favorite. there's an aspect to his work that i can't really describe, it just feels very special to me.

bryan lee o'malley
as of writing this blog entry, i'm a comics major, and probably my biggest inspiration in the medium of comics is bryan lee o'malley. everything from his art style, his sense of humor, the way he characterizes, and his storytelling all really resonate with me, and i would love to make comics like that someday. reading his comics always makes me feel strangely invigorated, just absolutely filled to the brim with like a NEED to make comics. fun stuff ^_^

internet artists
i'm not quite sure how to explain it, but there was a subset of online artists back in the day. most if not all of them were amateurs and hobbyists doing furry and anime art. most of them are clearly dated by their visible influence from older anime and/or american cartoons that were popular at the time. i really love being able to look at these pieces when i find them in the wild. despite many lacking in technical skill, everything these creators made was imbued with this sense of pure fun, love, and care for their work. the works of these artists feel so genuine and completely unmarred by irony in a way that i feel like has become really uncommon in this day and age. i feel like the slow march of the internet into an attention-economy hellscape has made it hard to find or even create art like this, but that is an essay for another day. i want to be able to create art that feels as genuine as these pieces. i would feel bad about reuploading the art i'm thinking of, because all of it is by small artists, not by famous and even revered ones like the artists i've already listed. if you're curious, some good places to find examples would be the yerf historical archive (old furry art) and deviantart posts from around 2000 to 2008-ish. (i can't provide links to the latter because deviantart is stupid and locked searching by date behind a paywall. it's not hard to find if you know what you're looking for, though.)

rumiko takahashi
noticing a theme yet?? :p rumiko takahashi needs no introduction ... but i'll give her one anyways. she's a prolific manga artist with many great works under her belt, like ranma 1/2, urusei yatsura, inuyasha, and still more. she's kind of revered as an artist and for good reason. her art is cute and beautiful, and her stories are great fun. i was introduced to her (and anime as a whole) when i watched ranma 1/2 at... way too young an age lol ^_^; but i went on to watch and read a lot of her other stuff. i did not finish the ranma anime, way too long for my goldfish attention span and little 10 year old pea brain, but i did finish the manga a few years ago. i've read and watched some of urusei yatsura and inuyasha, and i wrote an essay on maison ikkoku for one of my classes. the thing that inspires me most really is her art and her illustrations. it's just so nice to look at, and it's unique and easily identifiable as her handiwork.

those are probably my biggest inspirations! they're definitely not the only ones, i'm inspired by lots and lots of things. different video games, the other artists around me, my own day to day life, et cetera... but yeaaaaagh !! that's my little list of artistic inspirations :-)