Tetsuya Nomura

Tetsuya Nomura is a japanese character designer, I remember him for his work in Kingdom Hearts. His distinctive style appeals to me with it being a mixture of anime and realism with a touch of disproportional body parts. Tetsuya started as a character designer for Square Enix, he then moved up the line to be lead designer and eventually he became the director of the company.

The main characters in Kingdom Hearts have a really cartoonistic style partly because the game involved Disney characters and places.

Tetsuya's characters all follow a pattern in their style, such as: spiky hair, big feet, clean faces and thin limbs.

The characters seemed to carry large weapons but because of the thin limbs it looks like they cannot possibly hold it.
They also have a large quantity of zips and straps. 

Todd Mcfarlane

Todd Mcfarlane is an artist more remembered for his character 'Spawn'. Todd also worked with various video game companies with games such as Lord of Vermilion and Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning.


Todd worked for several comic books including The Incredible Hulk and various Spiderman comics. He also worked on many Spawn comics due to him creating it.


With the characters Todd has created, it seems he likes having a sense of mystery to the character's identity by adding a mask of some kind. He seems to lean towards the theme of evil and chaos which is often considered 'cool' and personally better than goodness and heroic.

"Edge tone"

I have been studying this piece of work to understand how the artist made the clouds go from a dark tone to a light tone in a very short space.

The artist blended a slight mid-tone with the darker tone and turned straight to the light tone to indicate some form of "edge tone".

"Edge tone" is what I call the change in tone to suit the behind of the object. If there is a light source behind the object, then there is a bright edge tone. If it's a shadow, then there's a dark edge tone. This technique is sometimes used in movie posters where the character is shown as a silhouette.