Kez's Art Blog

Hi, I'm Kez and this is my general art blog. Multifandom, but I'm currently obsessed with Gravity Falls! [He/Him pronouns] [Main blog: @kezisme | https://kezisme.tumblr.com/]

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Here is my one and only entry for this year's @forduary! I had an idea for week 4 too, but this took much longer than I anticipated. I guess I'm still recovering my creative energy. Still, after dipping my toes back into drawing for Stanuary, this is a big improvement! (This is also the first time I've drawn Old Man McGucket, so that was fun!)

For the background, I blew up a screenshot from Northwest Mansion Mystery and traced over it. I thought it would save time, but I wound up having to reconstruct a fair bit of it due to how blurry the image was. I ultimately like how it came out, and maybe I'll make a standalone piece with more of the adjustments I'd imagine Fiddleford would make. I do think he would use the main hall as a lab space for convenience's sake since it's likely the biggest room in the mansion.

Either way, just as I thanked Stanuary, I want to thank the Forduary mods for running such a cool community event! I'm a little sad I didn't rejoin the fandom earlier and missed the previous years, but I'm grateful I got to take part in what I could! And as a bonus, here's one of my practice Ford sketches back from 2022:

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As excited as I was for it, I almost skipped posting anything for Stanuary this year. I have had no energy for drawing for several months, and I haven’t even set up Clip Studio for my current computer. But considering that this is the final Stanuary, I can’t just do nothing when this event has had such an impact on me these past three years. So here’s a quick sketch to say thank you @stanuary! It's not a prompt fill, but it felt nice to finally shake the rust off and draw something! As a bonus, I figured I’d also share some of the sketches I drew while I was preparing for my first Stanuary in 2023. One of the main ways I learned to draw in Gravity Falls' style was by eyeballing screenshots, before moving on to drawing with references and from scratch. (Not pictured are the many pages of Stan heads I drew when transitioning from eyeballing to complete scratch ^^;)

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I know submissions close today so I may be too late, but here’s my one entry for @forduary! I was originally planning on doing a second panel so we get to see what anomaly Ford’s looking at (the weremaid from journal 1), but I ran out of time and energy. All my deeper thoughts about this piece went into brainstorming how weremaids would even work, so I don’t really have anything to add here. If I finish the second image, I’ll add it in a reblog with those insights! As a bonus, I’ve included my initial sketch because I fell in love with it. His face makes me laugh every time, and I tried to preserve it as best I could in the final image.

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I may be cutting this one too close (I think the deadline is the 15th?), but here’s my one and only drawing for this year’s @stanuary! My idea for this prompt was to explore how Stan could recover some of his memories from the time between him getting kicked out and Ford calling for his help. Assuming he was about 18 at the start, that’s at least 12 years worth of memories lost that Ford and the kids can’t really help him with. (Granted, he has a collection of old passports stashed in his office, but that’s just a drop in the bucket.) So here we see Stan and Ford stopping at some port town in their sea adventures and stumbling across a wall of old wanted posters. I planned to draw something for all four weeks in Stanuary and Forduary, but this year has veered so far off the rails for me; for better and for worse. I’ve got a lot of creative projects in the works though, so hopefully I’ll have some things to post throughout the rest of the year! (And hopefully something for Forduary too!)

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And finally, here’s my entry for @forduary week 4: Gravity Falls and Beyond. I decided to be a little self-indulgent and chose my favorite bird for this last prompt, the chickadee! So here’s Ford relaxing post-series with a Chestnut-Backed Chickadee, which is a Chickadee species native to the Pacific Northwest. I like to think that during the summers when he’s not sailing with Stan, Ford takes the time to go on solo hikes and relax in nature. He deserves to take things slow for once in his life. I will admit, this is my backup idea for week 4. The original plan was to draw Stan and Ford out at sea with an Albatross, since that bird has a lot of significance to sailors. However I definitely did not have enough time to learn how to draw the ocean AND ships, so I went with a much simpler concept instead. Maybe I’ll get around to drawing my original idea when I have more time. All that said, I’m really proud of myself for finishing all four weeks of Forduary this year, and I had a lot of fun drawing birds for each prompt. My ornithology class has been really interesting so far, so it’s been nice to play around creatively with what I’ve been learning.

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Here's @forduary week 3: Portal Years! It's no longer February, but I'm so grateful for that March 11 end date. It's going to be close, but I'm determined to work my butt off to finish Week 4 as well!

Whenever I think about alien birds, the first thing that comes to mind is the Snagret from Pikmin. So when I was trying to come up with an inter-dimensional bird for Ford to encounter, I couldn't help taking some inspiration from the Snagret's design! In the end I wound up creating a bird with a much smaller beak, however.

Ford is in his early 40's here. I based him off of his portal era design in Journal 3, where his features are just starting to shift towards old age. (I also accidentally gave him Indiana Jones' color scheme, whoops!)

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Here is my drawing for week two of @forduary: Researcher Years. Continuing the bird theme from my last entry, I decided to portray my favorite bird from Journal 3: the Cowl! And while I think it’s one of the most adorable critters in the book, Ford’s written entry on it is deeply unsettling the more I think about it. So here I drew Ford mentally coming to terms with the fact that this thing has udders and lays milk-filled eggs. How does it reproduce? I don’t really like thinking about it! (But I assume it births live young and lays the eggs from its… udders? Eugh.) Credit for Ford’s handwriting goes to @tsunamiholmes and their incredible downloadable font! I originally planned to just scan and paste that section of the journal, but the phrase is awkwardly written across two separate lines. So the font was a lifesaver!

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This is my @forduary entry for week one’s theme: Childhood. Since I’m taking an ornithology course this semester, I decided that it’d be neat to have all my entries include birds. So here we have kid Ford trying to identify the bird we see at the beginning of A Tale of Two Stans. Except it turns out that the bird doesn’t fit any known species! (I went a little nuts trying to identify it for this drawing and the closest I could get was some kind of weird mix of a Least Sandpiper and a Curlew Sandpiper. It genuinely never occurred to me that the Gravity Falls artists wouldn’t model a cartoon bird with complete scientific accuracy xD) Either way, this is proving to be a fun self-imposed challenge and I’m aiming to get the next entry out by this weekend!

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This is my @stanuary drawing for the week 3 prompts Fantasy and Memories! The second I read the Fantasy prompt, I just knew I had to do something with Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons (DDaMD?). I absolutely believe that Stan would be a great dungeon master; he’s good at making stuff up on the fly and can tell engaging stories, among other things. Plus, I think it might make for a healthy way to process some of his more negative memories as he regains them. This particular picture takes place sometime during Mabel and Dipper’s second summer in Gravity Falls. As for Stan’s DMing style, I imagine he’d prefer theater of the mind (no grids/maps, figures, etc) since it makes for a looser, more casual game. He’d also put all his focus on storytelling instead of math. I figured that if DDaMD is anything like real Dungeons and Dragons, then the game would support a lot of different settings, including something more modern and up Stan’s alley. And what’s more up his alley than a good old fashioned prison break?

I wound up having a pretty bad art block for most of Stanuary, so I threw all my energy into this drawing instead of forcing out entries for weeks 2 and 4. Hopefully, Forduary will go a bit smoother since I have a specific connecting theme for it in mind already.

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This is my entry for week one of @stanuary, Lost! Here we have Stan getting lost while putting up advertisements in the woods, and unknowingly attracting some attention in the process. This takes place shortly after he rebrands from Murder Hut to Mystery Shack, so about a year or two after the portal accident. I’ve always wondered about Stan’s relationship with Gravity Falls’ cryptids in his early years. I’m assuming he must have been at least tangentially aware of them because he read Journal One, but beyond that it’s unclear. Anyway, I can’t believe it’s January already. It’s good to be back making art again!

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Long time no see! I've been playing around with a simplified chibi style lately (one that's easier to doodle during the school day) and I think I'm close to nailing down Ford's design! I might wind up doing some kind of interactive project with him over the summer; we'll see.

Oh, and here are my initial sketches (accumulated over the semester):

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With only hours to spare, here's my drawing for @forduary week 3! I imagine this takes place about a few months after the portal accident. Assuming Bill lost track of Ford after he fell into the portal, I still think sleep would be really hard for Ford. Especially in the beginning, when he's still getting his bearings. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do week 4. College started back up again and really sapped my energy, but I'm glad I could at least do 3/4 of the weekly prompts!

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After working on this for way too long, here is my drawing for @forduary week 2! The Hawktopus is one of my favorite anomalies in the real life Journal 3, in large part due to Ford's note: "Too stupid to study." This man did a two page spread on the Leprecorn, but somehow this is where he draws the line? I like to think there's more to the story than that, and that maybe the Hawktopus is really just too much of a hassle to research. So this is my interpretation of Ford's first encounter with one!

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Here's my drawing for @forduary week 1! When trying to think of a bonding activity for Ford and Mabel, it didn't take me long to settle on science experiments. In the opening montages of the Mabel's Guide shorts, we see her doing a few experiments of her own, so I figured this would be a good subject for them to bond over.

It took me a lot longer to think of an experiment for them to do, but I eventually decided on exploring phase changes. So here they are discovering the triple point of Mabel Juice!

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The last prompt of Stanuary got me thinking about Stan's relationship with the concept of worth, both materially and emotionally. I think Stan has issues with self-worth, and a good portion of that is tied up in how his dad kicked him out of the house. Stan spent years trying to become successful enough to prove his worth to his family, and it's only after the portal accident that he actually starts making a profit. Thirty years later, and Stan is a successful business man on par with (or possibly greater than) his dad. I just wonder how Stan feels about that.

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So my drawing for week 3's prompt spiraled out of control and turned into a mini comic. The ending is kind of abrupt, but after working on this all week I'm just ready to be done with it. ^^; I'm pretty happy with how it came out!

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After having trouble coming up with an idea for week 2, I decided to flip through Journal 3 for inspiration and rediscovered the entries about the dinosaur egg Stan swiped during Land Before Swine. So here's a picture of Stan and Compy! After their falling out, I like to think Stan still visited Compy at the farm every now and then.