Inspiration from where and to what?

I find I get a lot of inspiration from songs (DERP I feel like I'm trying to be ~artsy~ saying that xD)
Not even what the songs are about themselves, but music tends to make (sometimes completely unrelated) images pop into my head. Music inspires a lot of my clothes and drawings as well as doll concepts. It's a little weird because I take VERY little interest in music itself... I don't care how it's made when it comes down to it, or who made it, or what genre it is, and I almost never look up new bands, but I always have *something* playing in the background when I'm working on a project and it always helps inspire me. Piano-heavy music in particular often gives me a lot of inspiration, I've noticed xD

 

My inspiration comes from strange places. I had the coolest idea for a female SD when I was shopping for my incoming Apollo. I had seen this skirt/suspenders combo, where the suspenders had bat wings on them, and I fell in love! For a second, I sort of wished he was a cross-dresser, but he's not, and I didn't feel like buying something for him that he'd never wear, nor look good in (I would've done it for the skirt, and not him).

My inspiration for Emma came from her company pic. Since I was trying to get everything from her company pics, I was trying to see what kind of character she could be - of course, all my ideas went out the window when I saw her IRL. Even now, I think I have to give her character a huge (or even total) overhaul because her character doesn't jive with her doll form. I'm kind of wondering if her character has a mental issue, or is just very quiet all the time.

Inspiration for Emma's brother came from...somewhere? I don't remember. He just kind of wormed his way into one of my earliest photo stories, and just stuck there. He developed into a very preppy, but very rotten teen...then I decided to make him 18... then I rethought his preppy look for one more along the lines of punk/grunge. All of his clothes are black and white, or grey/some dark color, and I changed his main hair color to silver rather than blond.

 

Frogg: I've had that happen to me with drawing, too! I feel bad for others in the house because I'll keep the song on repeat until I'm done with the project. XP For the dolls, I usually have my earphones on, but I'm listening to stuff like D, Sinatra, or other random music. None of my current dolls reflect the images yet, but a part of the idea I have for an Iplehouse Lee comes from D's singer, Asagi.

 

I don't watch tv either, except for documentaries on netflix really. I get my inspiration from music, from my own original characters/stories/etc, from the doll itself, and from color. I love putting together a doll based on a color scheme, even if it doesn't stay that way. I like what silverholly says about the doll sometimes triggering a memory or a dream, and most of my original characters come from dreams I've had, so I'll second what she said.

 

My dolls are the results of my fascination with the Japanese culture on Yanki and Yakuza-- I've always loved the traditional moral on never backing down and the way of talking-- its sort of romantic to me... and as how scary and mysterious of the underground black market society is. I'm also a huge fan on high school delinquents and their purpose of life, which is a little simple and pretty dumb-- but it gives me a sense of what a real man should be. Their personality comes from their own personal story and childhood experiences. I find rebels who object to authorities and putting on a farce to show how tough they are to hide their insecurities are adorable-- and mainly because my younger brother is sort of those high school Asian delinquents I like to read about, it sort of inspired me in many ways... despite his obnoxious and violent personality, he can quiet immature and understanding when you actually sit down with him and talk.

 

My brain is like flypaper. Shit just sticks to it. My short-term memory has been replaced largely by Post-Its, so I jot everything down, whether it's from TV or internet or magazine or anecdote. It's just I can never predict when something will really serve as a bolt of inspiration later. Usually I just hang onto something cool when I see it. (My apartment is starting to look a little like decoupage.)

For some of the dolls that came with 'backstories' from their fullsets, I might retain a kernel of the company's story and build the doll's own original character around it. A good many of them are collages of people I know or have known throughout life, mixed with bits of self here and there; many of them have had some of the same adventures/misadventures I've had. Some of them moved into characters that I had written long ago in my teens & twenties; characters can be kicking around in your head for decades until you give them something to do! And some of their characters are still being developed as I go, layers of personality details accumulating slowly.

So the inspirations are rarely specific enough to just name one artist, musician, style, literary being, etc. Except I can safely say that Hassan was a sort of multiculti spinoff of Frank from Clive Barker's Hellraiser. ^^ That's about it for the specificity.

 

I also like hearing about other people's characters, and see if something sparks from that. I think part of why I wanted my BBB Apollo to dress the way he will is because I just LOVE the look of a casually dressed doll that is dressed in very realistic clothes. I really didn't know if a doll in a uniform would look natural in many places. A doll in regular dress clothes could fit in just about everywhere.

 

Inspiration comes from everywhere for me. From music videos to manga. But a large part comes from my addiction to anime/manga. In fact, the names of my crew are all taken from names of various anime characters.

 

Mine comes from a story I tried to write, then tried to turn into an RPG world when I realized I didn't have the talent to do it justice in writing, then realized 'you know, this just keeps growing on me exponentially and unless I won the lottery to support myself and devoted myself to it full time I will never get this done in my lifetime'. (I say this after 19 years of working on it at this point, and 99% of it still being exclusively in my head.) They come from either the true characters of the story, or the types of characters that compose the world itself.

It doesn't help answer the question so much, unfortunately, as that setting is already a huge melting pot. Even I don't know where some of the ideas come from directly, and I've been collecting them for a long time. I've had instances in which I only later look at them and think, "Ah, the standard mindset of this culture is much like my late Aunt Livia's view of the world... " and I sometimes see something in a documentary that instantly sparks a variety of ideas.

Edit: Oh mercy. I just realized it's been 23 years, not 19. That's even more depressing! I got so accustomed to saying the latter the last time it was discussed frequently that I forgot, hey, time has passed. (Oh, the pre-coffee brain gets worse and worse... )

 

That passage of time can be scary, especially if you entertained the notion of world conquest through art when you were younger. (I intended to have conquered the world by 25; now I'm 50. Dot dot dot.) But I think the work is still worth doing, if you have the desire to do it.

Don't you reckon most fiction is a melting pot, or a collage, or metamorphic rock? If it's good, if it feels true, it's because we've pulled from our lives and the people we have met (rather than from other people's work, which results in something like what you get when you run water through used coffee grounds).

* * *
My two SD girls represent a couple of characters from a story cycle I've been working on since 1997. Buying the dolls was my way of bribing myself to write again. The characters informed my choice of dolls, but now I find that the dolls are also subtly influencing the characters. I didn't expect that.

 

Most of my inspiration comes from organized crime, film noir, and various interpretations of the afterlife. My dolls are based directly off of my characters in my writing, most of which tend to explore various taboos and moralities with existentialist themes (taken from film noir). I've always been fascinated as to what makes right and wrong, what makes the "correct" way of living, what perception has to do with reality, but most of all I've always been enamored with the concept of a good person wrapped up in a bad situation. So half of my collection represents characters who have been caught up in a life of crime despite being regular good-hearted people. Lots of humanist themes around here. Difficult to pinpoint exactly.

 

I take a lot of my inspiration from other doll owners, at least for photos. I like to try, replicate and practice editing techniques, compositions and light play that I've seen in some of the stunning pictures people take here. Music is great for inspiring my photoshoots and the dolls' stories. As for clothing, I get inspired by everything from visual kei to hipsters. Then there's times where I get a random bout of inspiration from something random like a music video or even just shapes. It all depends on my mood, really.

 

Movies, music, and graphic novels are the three big ones for me.
More specifically anything sci fi, especially retro sci fi. The Thunderbirds, Project Blue Earth SOS, Summer Wars, Firefly, and The Compleat Moonshadow (if you haven't heard of it look it up, it's so underrated, the only graphic novel that has made me cry)
those are my current favorites, but even things as random as the Absolut Vodka: Cosmo ad makes the wheels start turning.

Music tends to be less the inital insperation for a character and more the evolution of them. I usually start out with an intial idea from somewhere (movie, or graphic novel, or whatever) and attach a couple songs to the character. For instance, when I decided my Zaoll girl needed a new character I knew I was going to have her be a cop from my story, but I had no idea what kind, good cop, bad cop... it wasn't until I found the band Goldfish and their song Fort Knox that she got a name and personality.

 

My inspiration for my dolls ranges all over the place, from 16th Century Spanish Conquistadors to Carl Sagan. Lately, a lot of my tinies have been inspired by my second great geek love, Star Trek.

(My first great geek love is Homer's Illiad, but I haven't felt motivated to make an Achilles BJD yet.)

 

My inspiration has actually come from the creation of my original characters. Since I'm also fairly new to the BJD community, I never really thought about bringing them to life until now! So basically, the main parts of my inspiration come from my already completed creations of drawn OCs and descriptive personalities. From there I just imagine how I would want them to look in real life, and have gone from there!

 

A lot of inspiration comes from nature itself as far as I'm concerned. Forests, mountains, the town in which I'm staying at for university is perfect for that kind of thing. It's rural, surrounded by fields, hills and forested areas, somewhat cold, rather misty... exactly what I need to get my imagination moving. I also get inspired by animals a lot even though not all of my characters show their "roots" as such Eal and Nineliya are deer in a very technical sense of the word but Shuusuke has been inspired by fish in a rather indirect manner. Fish, jellyfish, birds and small woodland critters are favorites of mine.

Due to the fantasy nature of a lot of the stories in the structured multiverse of "hellgate" some dolls also get influenced by mythological themes, demons, angels, fairies... anything goes as long as it fits. I just love researching origins of myths and stories and including as much "legitimate" information in the way the characters are interpreted rather than what tends to be glamorized instead. A simple example would be Terra Orbis' vampires that are generally born that way rather than "turn undead" and are more blood mages rather than blood sucking monsters -after Balkan lore rather than the Hollywood version-.

Other than that.. I guess all of my characters belong to their own universe so I get a lot of inspiration from the original story and RP with my partner a lot?

 

This is really interesting! It's so cool to hear what inspires people.
I am also greatly inspired by nature and mythology and I love old fairy and folk tales. I make cloth faerie dolls so I have a particularily big faerie weakness! I am also be inspired by media I enjoy like books, games, comics and music. I'm not a writer, but I do love to overthink things so I try to do a lot of reserch when I decide on a project no matter where the inspiration comes from

 

Hmm...I have to say the biggest inspirations for me are: music, anime/manga, and seeing other characters.

Music is definitely a big one; quite a few characters have stemmed from specific songs. Music just speaks to me and I love it, especially when a song or even full album seems to tell a story. I often find myself using the feeling of a song as inspiration for a character's personality.
Being an anime/manga fan, it is no surprise it is a main source of inspiration. I cannot pinpoint exact ideas that I have used/changed/been inspired by because there are so many to name!
As for other people's characters, I DO NOT steal a character. What happens is I will see another doll/other character and if I happen to find something really cool, say a specific style of face-up or clothing type and such, that will be my inspiration. I never use something exactly the way I saw it.

Other inspirations come from just about anything. I am inspired by anything and everything!