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On KISS and the state of myself as an artist
4 years ago
General
I figure I may as well start using this site as something of a journalling platform, it may be run by unsavory people but frankly, all social media sites are at this point (and the scale of harm that facebook and twitter have done is probably greater than FA is ever capable of). Truth is, I miss forums and slower-paced posting sites where you can post collected thoughts rather than whatever impulses come to mind while the layout blasts strangers’ dirty laundry all over your feed. Deviantart completely botched its new layout so I won’t be returning there, but as maligned as FA’s often is, I actually like it functionality-wise.
Anyways, one of my biggest new interests in 2020 and my light in the early days of quarantine was KISS, something I could have never imagined. Having been force-fed a constant stream of dad rock radio since early childhood on car rides, I’ve hated most classic rock most of my life (and still find a lot of it overhyped). KISS is responsible for one of the biggest banes of those rides, Rock and Roll All Nite, which is honestly not a bad song when played on better speakers, but so hauntingly overplayed I still never listen to it.
I had a long, strange journey into the clown abyss through some very unconventional pathways but that’s not relevant here. Long story short, I still hate most dad rock but they have much more appealing vocals/production than most and I like their more metal or dance-y songs and the weirder trend-chasing albums they’ve done, Music from the Elder being the most entertaining. But here I’m more focused on the themes and design choices of KISS that have stuck with me.
Covered faces- Funny enough, I was gung ho to wear a mask early on because of the pictures of KISS hiding their makeup-free faces in the 70s. Gene Simmons in particular has some cool shots pf him strategically shielding himself with a hand or napkin and even just peeping his eyes out from behind Cher when they were an item. I’m wildly different from him in background and personality, but there’s a lot of weird small things about him I really relate to, including not wanting to be know for my human face and what I was born with vs characters and works I’ve created for myself. I like not being known for the face I go to bed as and being able to take off the fursuit and be largely visible. For how iconic his makeup is, most people don’t know what he looks like underneath now, let alone 40+ years ago when he basically looked like a skinnier Andre the Giant. Which brings me to another point.
The power of facial markings- imo the original KISS facepaint designs are sorely underrated for how GOOD they made a group of notoriously weird-looking/ugly guys look. When you look at tribute bands, anybody can pass as Gene in the face because the dark eye area eats everything around there, the white flattens the nose and cheeks from the front, and the lips are often highly underlined. When you look at old pictures of him without makeup, he’s actually very distinctive looking, with his features being pretty uniformly big and heavy but the makeup just eats them. It also makes an interesting look when he turns his head because he has a much stronger profile that comes from nowhere and he can look like completely different people from different angles. And Asterisk’s head was actually designed to be that way! I went with a long muzzle so head motions would be more directional and the overly silhouette would be more dramatic and expressions would look wildly different from various angles despite being static.
The Ace makeup is also just a really gorgeous design, he’s pretty eurgh as a person as well but it’s beautifully androgynous and alien. He has very prominent hooded eyes and early versions of the makeup didn’t have eyeshadow so they’re very visible, while later ones do and they give him a false double eyelid look that make seeing him unmasked more surprising. His later replacement, Tommy Thayer, looks good in it too despite his wildly different face (cartoonishly chadly) and the star points down his nose are a very nice effect (also present on Gene).
I don’t have as much to say on Paul and Peter’s makeups. Paul’s is simple but the unintentionally Phantom of the Opera resemblance really fits how he took that role in the future. I actually saw a clown at the state fair shortly before the big lockdown with a similar makeup design and I really dug his performance as a “steal your man with clown antics” romantic and wish I could find any pictures of him. Peters…. is a cat, nice and bold and distinct and makes his eyes look a lot more sweet and sad vs just…. like a depressed rat in backstage shots.
Silent movies and nonverbal communication- Something Gene totally lost between the original makeup run and the reunion was the German Expressionist and general old horror movie influence his character had in the earlier days, and I’m gonna run with that with a vengeance because I had a Rudolph Valentino celebrity crush phase a couple years ago and did my IB extended essay on Picasso and anime and sensual abstract monster is a sorely neglected niche. Anyways, I absolutely love the old photos of him because he has some very fun poses and god-tier expressions being both a vampire/dragon is a great combo. His active attempts at being sexy are usually cringeworthy but the surprisingly rare few songs he actually does about being a gothic monster are fun (and a lot of the fanbase shares this sentiment tbh).
It’s actually really funny in hindsight that Asterisk is more or less a perfect hybrid of what I like about him and Ace visually despite being made years before. It’s got that long noodly androgynous alien look (with zigzag arrows like Ace’s short-lived Elder-era costume) but also has a fantastic nose, the points down towards the tip, the constant AAAAAAA expression, and well yeah the tongue thing but imo that’s a very generic trait. Doing the sideways headbang/bob thing he does is also a staple of my character because it’s easier with the head’s balance and resembles the motion people make when flopped around on rides with shoulder harnesses. Even my walk for Asterisk is a sort of drunk/underwater Godzilla thing due to how floppy and heavy the costume is and somehow a perfect hybrid of their drunk low-gravity alien and Godzilla character walks.
There’s more I could go into but those are the ones more applicable to my fursuit characters and why I suit.
But the tragic thing is, despite coming to understand Asterisk’s appeal to me more than ever in quarantine, I didn’t have a great Megaplex partly because it made me realize how distant I’ve grown from the suit and the character. I’ve just been too broken as a person and changed my outlook on life so much since 2019 that being a surreal alien based on what was a magical new world to me seven years ago felt impossible. There’s too much disconnect and resentment between the brooding, depressed shell I am now vs the serious but imaginative and fulfilled person I was in high school and wish I could be again but fall further from year by year to the point I’ve barely done any art or really anything creative in 2021. The weight and annoying impracticalities of the suit really ground on me and wore me down that con, especially dancing-wise. I found myself wearing Rainbow Randall, my old secondary partial suit, more and more because he’s feather light and very comfortable to wear vs constantly adjusting Asterisk’s head and pulling pants up and checking if any padding fell out or is misaligned.
I’ve had a WIP suit untouched for over a year now that I’ve been unsure about even completing at this point as the character has come to represent the sort of industrial Moloch slave I felt like in my defense industry job and I realize how much I enjoy wearing partial vs full suits and it’s shaped up to be even bulkier than Asterisk, basically the antithesis of what I need.
Basically, I don’t know what, if anything is next costuming-wise. My first con after quarantine was really underwhelming in the parts I was looking forward to most and it makes me question if I should explore other things like haunting or even LARP instead.
I have been doing a lot of writing since it’s something I can do lying in bed sad with myself. A lot of it is too fetishy or personal for me to comfortably show publicly but maybe I’ll post some in the future. There’s several 70s-80s era fire/supernatural stories I’ve done that I really like since I have a fear/fascination with building fires and how they start and they personify well.
Anyways, one of my biggest new interests in 2020 and my light in the early days of quarantine was KISS, something I could have never imagined. Having been force-fed a constant stream of dad rock radio since early childhood on car rides, I’ve hated most classic rock most of my life (and still find a lot of it overhyped). KISS is responsible for one of the biggest banes of those rides, Rock and Roll All Nite, which is honestly not a bad song when played on better speakers, but so hauntingly overplayed I still never listen to it.
I had a long, strange journey into the clown abyss through some very unconventional pathways but that’s not relevant here. Long story short, I still hate most dad rock but they have much more appealing vocals/production than most and I like their more metal or dance-y songs and the weirder trend-chasing albums they’ve done, Music from the Elder being the most entertaining. But here I’m more focused on the themes and design choices of KISS that have stuck with me.
Covered faces- Funny enough, I was gung ho to wear a mask early on because of the pictures of KISS hiding their makeup-free faces in the 70s. Gene Simmons in particular has some cool shots pf him strategically shielding himself with a hand or napkin and even just peeping his eyes out from behind Cher when they were an item. I’m wildly different from him in background and personality, but there’s a lot of weird small things about him I really relate to, including not wanting to be know for my human face and what I was born with vs characters and works I’ve created for myself. I like not being known for the face I go to bed as and being able to take off the fursuit and be largely visible. For how iconic his makeup is, most people don’t know what he looks like underneath now, let alone 40+ years ago when he basically looked like a skinnier Andre the Giant. Which brings me to another point.
The power of facial markings- imo the original KISS facepaint designs are sorely underrated for how GOOD they made a group of notoriously weird-looking/ugly guys look. When you look at tribute bands, anybody can pass as Gene in the face because the dark eye area eats everything around there, the white flattens the nose and cheeks from the front, and the lips are often highly underlined. When you look at old pictures of him without makeup, he’s actually very distinctive looking, with his features being pretty uniformly big and heavy but the makeup just eats them. It also makes an interesting look when he turns his head because he has a much stronger profile that comes from nowhere and he can look like completely different people from different angles. And Asterisk’s head was actually designed to be that way! I went with a long muzzle so head motions would be more directional and the overly silhouette would be more dramatic and expressions would look wildly different from various angles despite being static.
The Ace makeup is also just a really gorgeous design, he’s pretty eurgh as a person as well but it’s beautifully androgynous and alien. He has very prominent hooded eyes and early versions of the makeup didn’t have eyeshadow so they’re very visible, while later ones do and they give him a false double eyelid look that make seeing him unmasked more surprising. His later replacement, Tommy Thayer, looks good in it too despite his wildly different face (cartoonishly chadly) and the star points down his nose are a very nice effect (also present on Gene).
I don’t have as much to say on Paul and Peter’s makeups. Paul’s is simple but the unintentionally Phantom of the Opera resemblance really fits how he took that role in the future. I actually saw a clown at the state fair shortly before the big lockdown with a similar makeup design and I really dug his performance as a “steal your man with clown antics” romantic and wish I could find any pictures of him. Peters…. is a cat, nice and bold and distinct and makes his eyes look a lot more sweet and sad vs just…. like a depressed rat in backstage shots.
Silent movies and nonverbal communication- Something Gene totally lost between the original makeup run and the reunion was the German Expressionist and general old horror movie influence his character had in the earlier days, and I’m gonna run with that with a vengeance because I had a Rudolph Valentino celebrity crush phase a couple years ago and did my IB extended essay on Picasso and anime and sensual abstract monster is a sorely neglected niche. Anyways, I absolutely love the old photos of him because he has some very fun poses and god-tier expressions being both a vampire/dragon is a great combo. His active attempts at being sexy are usually cringeworthy but the surprisingly rare few songs he actually does about being a gothic monster are fun (and a lot of the fanbase shares this sentiment tbh).
It’s actually really funny in hindsight that Asterisk is more or less a perfect hybrid of what I like about him and Ace visually despite being made years before. It’s got that long noodly androgynous alien look (with zigzag arrows like Ace’s short-lived Elder-era costume) but also has a fantastic nose, the points down towards the tip, the constant AAAAAAA expression, and well yeah the tongue thing but imo that’s a very generic trait. Doing the sideways headbang/bob thing he does is also a staple of my character because it’s easier with the head’s balance and resembles the motion people make when flopped around on rides with shoulder harnesses. Even my walk for Asterisk is a sort of drunk/underwater Godzilla thing due to how floppy and heavy the costume is and somehow a perfect hybrid of their drunk low-gravity alien and Godzilla character walks.
There’s more I could go into but those are the ones more applicable to my fursuit characters and why I suit.
But the tragic thing is, despite coming to understand Asterisk’s appeal to me more than ever in quarantine, I didn’t have a great Megaplex partly because it made me realize how distant I’ve grown from the suit and the character. I’ve just been too broken as a person and changed my outlook on life so much since 2019 that being a surreal alien based on what was a magical new world to me seven years ago felt impossible. There’s too much disconnect and resentment between the brooding, depressed shell I am now vs the serious but imaginative and fulfilled person I was in high school and wish I could be again but fall further from year by year to the point I’ve barely done any art or really anything creative in 2021. The weight and annoying impracticalities of the suit really ground on me and wore me down that con, especially dancing-wise. I found myself wearing Rainbow Randall, my old secondary partial suit, more and more because he’s feather light and very comfortable to wear vs constantly adjusting Asterisk’s head and pulling pants up and checking if any padding fell out or is misaligned.
I’ve had a WIP suit untouched for over a year now that I’ve been unsure about even completing at this point as the character has come to represent the sort of industrial Moloch slave I felt like in my defense industry job and I realize how much I enjoy wearing partial vs full suits and it’s shaped up to be even bulkier than Asterisk, basically the antithesis of what I need.
Basically, I don’t know what, if anything is next costuming-wise. My first con after quarantine was really underwhelming in the parts I was looking forward to most and it makes me question if I should explore other things like haunting or even LARP instead.
I have been doing a lot of writing since it’s something I can do lying in bed sad with myself. A lot of it is too fetishy or personal for me to comfortably show publicly but maybe I’ll post some in the future. There’s several 70s-80s era fire/supernatural stories I’ve done that I really like since I have a fear/fascination with building fires and how they start and they personify well.
I’d love another halfsuit or partial though and I’ve bounced around a lot of ideas in my head (Rite of Spring maiden dino, Obstagoon)