Eregyrn Falls

Again, I can’t speak for other artists. But for myself, it’s because physically he has that rounded, soft belly (along with the strong arms).  And because metaphorically, he’s softer than he lets on.

Well, in many of the versions he’s not, he’s excited.  And it could be that he looks worried because of Stan’s driving, rather than about breaking the rules.

But really, you would have to ask the artists who drew him that way, what they intended.  I can’t speak for them.

I haven’t watched it.  I know this will sound like a weird sticking-point, but the art style puts me off too much.  The nose-less style of the faces kind of freak me out, so I avoid it. 

(I can deal with seeing a nose-less style in like, occasional storyboard pieces. But I can’t deal with looking at it all the time.  Sorry, Chris Houghton!)

Thank you!  And to you as well!

(This is in reference to these two art pieces: Stan and Ford fighting the Krampus, and fight aftermath.) Okay so like... the explanation is probably kind of dumb.  And it’s me making stuff up, rather than relying completely on the actual folklore.

So the Krampus figure is actually a collection of figures from Central Europe, particularly in the Alps, and the specific traditions associated with the Krampus can vary from region to region and town to town.  Thus, while a set of the Krampus tropes have kind of been exported and caught on in popular culture, that pop culture figure now only resembles *some* Krampus traditions.  I don’t think it’s accurate to talk about “a” Krampus or “the” Krampus, exactly, because of that regional variation.  It’s also worth noting that Krampus celebrations are very much alive in various towns in the Alps.

Generally speaking, though, Krampus is a “wild man” figure, often with a demonic face (mask), a furry body, and goat-like features (especially horns). There are some theories that the basic figure itself is pre-Christian (like a lot of the wild-man traditions of Central and Northern Europe).  (I personally think that’s pretty plausible, given the range of costumes we see.)

After the advent of Christianity, though, the Krampus became associated with “the devil” or demonic figures.  And eventually, in a lot of traditions within the Central European mountain area, Krampus got paired with St. Nicholas, as a kind of tag-team.  St. Nicholas in those traditions is almost certainly one of the origins of Santa Claus, in that he rewards well-behaved children with presents.  (But, traditionally he dresses like a bishop, and not in the outfit that a lot of Americans are familiar with.)  The 6th of December is the Feast of St. Nicholas, so Krampusnacht (”Krampus night”) is the 5th of December.  And Krampus acts as the opposite of St. Nicholas -- if presents are a means of encouraging good behavior, then Krampus is the threat used to discourage bad behavior.

So, some of the accreted trappings of the Krampus are a whip and a bundle of birch branches, for beating children / people, and a basket that he carries on his back, into which he puts the naughty children he finds, to carry them off for punishment.  (Obviously, the message there is: don’t be naughty or the Krampus will get you.)  A number of the Krampusnacht traditions involve men costumed as Krampus running wild through the streets, threatening people with their birch branches or whips and so on, making noise (thus all of the bells worn around the neck) and kind of terrorizing people (not just kids), as a set-up for St. Nicholas to come in the next day and reassert order.  (Sometimes it’s only “terrorizing” in an “all in good fun” sense, similar to Halloween scariness; but apparently in some towns, it can get kind of rough.)

So with all of that background... I was originally just looking for a sort of “crytpid” or monster for Stan and Ford to be fighting, with a December theme, for that 2017 calendar piece.  They are encountering more of a magical, “real monster” version (rather than the folkloric ritual version), and therefore I took some liberties with the idea, even though I incorporated a lot of design elements from a variety of real Krampus costumes.

I didn’t want to put any actual children into Krampus’s basket for Ford and Stan to rescue, though (in the original calendar piece, they wouldn’t have been that visible).  But when I did the second piece, I included the doll versions of the four Pines, hanging from Krampus’s basket, as a sort of... symbolic magical threat, an expression of the idea that the Pines are its supernatural targets.  The dolls act as kind of representations of Krampus’s targets, and I also thought of them, in that sense, as a darker reflection of the St. Nicholas gift-giving tradition (still toys, but toys with a sinister meaning). If Krampus was a “real” supernatural being that goes around punishing the “naughty” or “wicked”... then what is its definition of “wicked”, and would it be a fair one, or unfair? 

In this scenario, Stan and Ford are not in the mood to debate with it over whether it is fair to take them to task for being “naughty”, but they are DEFINITELY not going to stand for the idea that the Krampus might go after Dipper and Mabel, so -- time to take it down!

Anyway, for more about the actual Krampus, I recommend taking a look at the Krampus article on Wikipedia, or listening to this excellent podcast (which I was listening to as I finished the piece the other day; am very interested in getting that guy’s book!).

It’s definitely Kīlauea.

For one thing, the last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984.  (The assumption is that the movie Lilo & Stitch is set around when it came out, in 2002.)  Kīlauea first started erupting in 1983, and kept erupting continuously through 2018.  Mauna Loa is also a much more conventional volcanic mountain, while the lava fields of Kīlauea are a lot more flat and spread out, and you could drive a tanker out onto them and into a pool of lava.

Fortunately there’s a clip of this scene online!

Compare the shots above to the map of Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, and you can see that while the park does encompass both Mauna Loa and Kīlauea, Mauna Loa is well inland.  Kīlauea is the one where the eruption flowed out to the coast.

I haven’t actually seen any of the tv series, I’m afraid!  I know they did a lot of really creative designs for that, but I don’t really know anything about the characters, or have an attachment to them.

I do have notes jotted down for wanting to do more of Ford and Stan interacting with the movie folks, though!  Someday, someday.

(This is referring to this piece.  I drew Stitch a bit too big.)

Thank you!  I do appreciate it.  It’s a very nerve-wracking day here.  (I expect it to be a pretty nerve-wracking week; if not a nerve-wracking next 3 months.)

So, I’m trying to figure out where you saw Stan and Lazy Susan together, and he looked a lot smaller than her?

Because after double-checking, it looks like in most of his appearances, he’s a little bit taller.  Probably not a lot, but definitely taller.  I couldn’t find an image in which they’re standing side by side (for a good comparison) and he was a lot shorter than her.

He doesn’t stand next to her all that often, but:

From “Dipper vs. Manliness”, Stan is slouching, but his eyes and his chin are both above the level of Susan’s.  (Don’t pay attention to her hair, obviously; or to Stan’s fez.)

In this sequence from “Dreamscaperers” (one of Stan’s memories), while seated, his eyes and chin are still above hers.

And while older Stan habitually slouches, here’s a comparison with younger Stan next to younger Susan, where he’s standing upright.

Otherwise, though... the thing is, the show really wasn’t super concerned with accurate heights, or even consistency.  I think Alex said something somewhere in the commentaries about being asked about heights, and his answer was basically that they’re muppet-like cartoon characters, realistic heights weren’t really something the crew paid attention to.

Probably one of the best examples of this is Stan’s height in comparison with Bud Gleeful.   Now, Bud Gleeful is basically depicted as a really big guy -- bulky, but also really tall.

And in “The Hand that Rocks the Mabel”, Stan really is SMOL in comparison with Bud.

But don’t expect consistency from the Gravity Falls crew!

In “The Stanchurian Candidate”, he’s a lot taller in comparison with Bud.  (While I don’t have other comparison images to hand, and this post is long enough already, I think that Stan in that final image is also taller than he usually is in relation to Soos.)

So how tall is Stan?  (And Ford?)  Or Lazy Susan?  Or Bud Gleeful, for that matter? We’ll never really know!  Everybody’s headcanons for heights are equally valid.

I think that if Toph had been in that situation, she wouldn’t have NEEDED the rest of the Chinese army and the Huns would have been toast.

Oh, that would be fun, actually!

In fact, I’m going to open this up as a bit of a suggestion challenge!

Everybody, feel free to send me suggestions of background characters (or third-tier characters) from Gravity Falls to draw. 

I’ll choose some to do (depending on how many I get), and collect ‘em up and post them all at once.  (So, max of 10.)  Probably busts or simple figures.  It’ll be a fun thing to do as a warm-up and will also help be a refresher to vary the types of faces/figures I’m drawing.

(Man, I was most of the way through a long reply, and the power went out in my entire neighborhood!  Thankfully not for too long... but I lost the post.  Let’s see if I can reconstruct.)

First, I assume this relates to the post about the hyper-realistic Stan bust from the other day.

Okay the first part of my answer was that although that bust is using realistic finishes, it’s not “real life”. It’s still an artist’s interpretation.  I’m super curious to know whether the artist got info from Alex Hirsch (for whom the bust was made) about how to interpret Stan’s nose, which has been interpreted in various ways in the fandom.  But we don’t know if Alex told him the thinking behind it, or not.  Fans have variously interpreted the marks on Stan’s nose (and the red color) to be warts/moles, or rosacea.  (And, rosacea was once thought to be something that could show up in older people as a result of a lifetime of drinking/smoking; but maybe not, see below.)

I also noted that although it’s only my guess, the artist may have chosen the very realistic finishes to go along with the cartoony proportions of the bust, as perhaps an artistic challenge, and perhaps to set up a sort of uncanny-valley effect in the final product. A lot of people reacting to that post had comments in the tags along the lines of “terrifying but really cool”.  Our brains look at the very cartoony proportions of the head, and then the very realistic skin and hair and so on, and it creates a kind of dissonance for us.  It wouldn’t surprise me if that was part of the artist’s purpose.

Anyway, so I was struck by the artist choosing to do NEITHER the bumps of warts/moles, nor the fine veins of rosacea / drinker’s nose.  Instead he did these very prominent pores / pits.  I took a chance and did some Googling, and found this:

HMMM!

That’s really interesting to me, as it seems to match up with Stan pretty well in some senses.  While I’d heard of rosacea before, I’d never heard of this. It makes me wonder if the artist knows someone with the condition; or perhaps he merely researched it. 

It would also make me wonder whether Alex suggested it.  But I think we can be pretty sure that his Grandpa Stan did NOT have it, because the pic we have of him doesn’t REALLY show all of the characteristics:

Granted, it’s a low-res picture.  But while Grandpa Stan clearly has a big nose (and it’s shape isn’t that different from Grunkle Stan’s, if you wanted to do a “realistic” version), it doesn’t look to me like it has the symptoms described above. 

On the other hand... Grunkle Stan is NOT just a cartooned version of Grandpa Stan.  I think we know this in part because of all of the other concept art for Stan that experimented with some wildly different looks.  And also because the Stan design used in the original pilot is very different from the final design, and also doesn’t look that much like Grandpa Stan.

The other thing that kind of interests me about this choice for the Stan bust is that while it works as an interpretation of older Stan, I’m not sure it works given what we’ve seen of the other Pines men, or even of Stan at different ages.  You could say, “well, if rosacea is hereditary, then maybe Filbrick had this rhinophyma, and so does Ford”.  But... both Ford and Stan have that same reddish bulbous nose as little kids.  And what I’m reading about rosacea is that it tends not to develop until after age 25; and rhinophyma doesn’t develop until after 50. (Generally.)

So, all of that means that, personally, while I think the bust’s artist deciding on that as a way to interpret a “realistic” Stan is valid -- I don’t think it’s the last word on what Stan’s nose would look like “in real life”.  I think other artists are still very much free to come up with their own interpretations.

(I’m personally still going with the idea that the little symbols on older Stan’s nose are broken capillaries brought on by drinking and too much sun exposure.  And one thing we do know about Stan, and Ford, is that they both got too much sun from an early age, what with being on the beach all the time.)

(Following on from this post here.)

Off the top of my head, I can’t compare the art styles in those episodes. As I said, it’s a project that would take a lot of work and cross-referencing.  And I’m in the middle of a big project right now, and don’t have time to devote to something like this.

I do want to note, though, that i really don’t like to make subjective judgements like saying the art is “better” in some episodes than others.  That’s down to personal preferences, not an objective valuation.  All of the art in the show, obviously, was good enough to make it into a professional show. 

To be honest, aside from a degree of refinement of style between S1 and S2 - most notably, I think, in how Stan was depicted - which I think may be because a few folks left after S1, and some new board artists came on in S2 (which would cause a shift in style) - I think that Gravity Falls was really consistent at staying on-model.  The differences are there, and particularly in the boards you can pick them out.  But there’s nobody’s boarding style that I didn’t like.

The other thing you have to keep in mind is that while the storyboard artists (sometimes multiple artists to an episode) would have had an influence on the final animation, the show sent the animation overseas to a different studio to actually animate it.  By the time the show team got the animation back, they often couldn’t fix certain problems, although on some notable occasions, they insisted on doing that.  So sometimes there are legit animation errors introduced that have nothing to do with who the storyboardist was for an episode.  And that’s why we heard about particular sequences that they had animated in-house by Dana Terrace -- like Ford’s arrival in NWHS/ATOTS, and Bill’s death throes. 

That would be really cool!  I think fans are able to tell this kind of thing for some Steven Universe artists, too, right?

I think it could be done.  It would take a lot of work, research, and cross-referencing, between the show, the various storyboards we’ve seen, and promo art done by the artists.  (I know we have a bunch of promo “posters” for S2 episodes, done by individual artists. I’m not sure if we have the same thing for S1 artists?)  The DVD extras and commentaries would help with that, too.

It just needs someone -- or a small team of people -- who have the time for that kind of project. 

Thanks for that!  (I'm not sure if I knew that -- I’ve never watched “Between the Pines” -- and I can’t remember if they mentioned it in the DVD commentaries, although it would be weird if they hadn’t.  I always wondered if Trigger was a reference to some other TV character.  Like, a parody of Dean from SPN.)

(Referring to this post.)

Ahh, thank you!  :)  That’s quite the deep cut!  (It’s from my Mystery Quartet Ghostbusters piece from 2016.)

So yeah, the thing is -- I definitely think that’s sometimes true in canon as well.  Not that Stan can’t make reckless and unreasonable decisions too sometimes!  But I tend to see him as the one with more common sense (I mean, compared with Ford? no contest!), even if he doesn’t ALWAYS listen to it. 

I think it’s a little harder to find good evidence for this in the actual show, because the show’s writing focus is on what’s funny, and Stan undercutting his decision-making process with poor choices, recklessness, self-promotion and pursuit of victory IS funnier than him being reasonable. But I think there are a few instances where you can see his pragmatism and ability to make the adult decision come through. 

Off the top of my head: finally admitting that he has to send the kids home in “Gideon Rises” and getting bus tickets home for them; initially wanting to protect the kids from the danger that he thinks Ford represents (and as much as I love Ford, that isn’t such an unreasonable call on Stan’s part IMO, especially at that moment); admitting after the DD&MD game that he was wrong to tease Dipper and it’s okay for the kids to hang out more with Ford (I kind of wonder if part of that wasn’t just because he realized Ford and Dipper were kindred spirits, but because he saw Ford being protective towards Dipper within the game); and of course, noticing that Mabel is feeling down, and giving her a good pep talk in DAMVTF.

In terms of the post-show future: I don’t mean to say that I think Stan would constantly be a stick in the mud -- I want to think that he would be carried away by excitement on their Sea Grunk adventures, too!  But just as we know that Stan will always be better at detecting a scam, I tend to think that he’d be a little more cautious and have more of a sense of self-preservation than Ford in a lot of situations.  That’s kind of what I meant in that post -- that if Ford is the one rushing in to try to photograph/catch/draw/prod/study the dangerous monster/phenomenon, Stan would be more likely to say, “Yeah, let’s think this through” or “Let’s have a plan”.

:)  Let us assume either that Mabel has created a flap in the bottom or something like that; or, that Waddles is -- OF COURSE! -- the best, most house-trained pig ever, and he won’t feel the need to go in it for the few hours he is wearing it.  ;-)

(I probably should have noted that Mabel put non-toxic make-up on his back legs so they would blend in with the tail.)

(This is in reference to my Summerween 2019 post.)