SO because i’m a huge nerd and i made several posts about this last night, i decided to make one big masterpost analysis about the Pines Family’s character designs

first i’m gonna compare Stan and Ford’s designs, then Mabel and Dipper’s, and finally the family as a whole

Stan and Ford

Visually, Stan and Ford have a lot of similarities and differences. one major similarity they have are their color scheme.



(Stan has two shades for his 5 o’ clock shadow; the first is season 1 and the second is season 2)

(the rest is under a readmore due to length)

aside from some variations in shade, and Ford having a few more colors thanks to his slightly more complicated design, their colors are almost exactly the same. This is interesting because Stan and Ford didn’t wear the same colors before Ford came out of the portal. Stan always wore maroon/yellow colors, while Ford tended more towards blues, oranges, yellows, and browns. this is particularly interesting because Stan’s color scheme is from their mom, while Ford’s is from their dad.



As for why Ford is wearing the same colors as Stan now, I have a theory about that detailed here, but the basic idea is that Ford is borrowing a sweater and a pair of pants from Stan because his old clothes don’t fit anymore, or are too old to wear.



expanding on that theory, I believe that the hat Stan wore in the finale came with the sweater. i think Stan bought the combo mostly for the hat, because he’s shown a preference for this kind of hat during A Tale of Two Stans, but it came with the sweater, so he got both and kept the sweater in his closet until Ford came.



going back to the similar color schemes, both Stan and Ford’s zodiac symbols, aka Stan’s fez and Ford’s Journal, have the same colors.



Both are a golden symbol on top of a maroon background. again, they’re almost exactly the same color.

now onto the designs themselves. Stan and Ford have the same basic build, however, Stan slouches and wears shoulder pads, so his shoulders start a little past his ears. Ford has good posture, so his shoulders are almost at where his chin is. however, whenever the two characters are standing next to each other, the animators deliberately make sure that their heads, hands, and crotches are at about the same place. due to Stan’s shoulders starting far above Ford’s, this causes Ford’s proportions to look slightly off in comparison to Stan’s.

(this is the most obvious example of Ford’s awkward proportions compared to Stan’s. more examples of this can be found here)



due to this deliberate positioning of limbs, Ford’s arms often look much shorter than Stan’s, due to Stan’s higher shoulders/slouching and shoulder pads. Stan looks like he has regular length arms with the extra shoulder length/padding, while Ford’s look awkward.



another major difference between them is that Stan’s consistently drawn with a slightly wider chin, bigger nose (with some sort of bumps), and bigger ears. Ford’s head is distinctly squarer, while Stan’s has a slight tilt on the sides that usually match up with the sides of his fez.



Stan is also much more top heavy while Ford has a very lean upper body. this could be accounted for the fact that Stan regularly punches things, and has let himself go over the years due to years of homelessness, poverty, and the resulting poor eating/self care habits, so he’s far more chubby than Ford is.



Ford, on the other hand, has far thicker legs than Stan does. Stan’s legs are very thin under his pants, and while we haven’t seen Ford’s legs without his boots and pants on, his boots are shaped to his leg, unlike Wendy’s, indicating that his legs fill the whole of the bootleg.

Ford’s legs could be thicker because he kicks things instead of punches. he mentions in at least two journal entries (specifically, the Leprecorn and the Gnomes entry) that he drop kicks away creatures that annoy him or bug him too much.

also, another parallel in Stan and Ford’s design (thanks @aroford for pointing this out to me!!) is that Stan’s design is more of an upside down triangle thanks to his top heavy design, while Ford’s is like a regular triangle when his coat flairs out at the bottom.



other small details about Stan and Ford’s designs:



-Stan’s has more straight lines/edges, while Ford’s is rounder (examples being: Stan’s square glasses, Ford’s curved glasses, Stan’s flatter/pointier hair, Ford’s fluffy/rounder hair)

-Ford’s cowlick is half-frayed. I’ll get more into this detail when I talk about the whole family’s designs.

Mabel and Dipper

Mabel and Dipper’s designs actually have a lot of similarities to them, beyond the fact that they have the same face/body types

Both wear a type of clothing that shows off their legs (shorts, skirt), both wear white ankle socks, both wear flat black shoes, both wear a similar style of t-shirt, both wear something over that shirt (vest, sweater), and both wear headgear (pine tree hat, headband).

now, to compare their colors. This is a little hard since Mabel wears so many different outfits, but i’m gonna use both of their main designs.

aside from the shooting star on Mabel’s sweater, both designs’ colors are actually more similar than one would realize. both wear a bright red color, with a more neutral tone for their shorts/skirt. and again, both wear white socks and black shoes, which help offset the bright red colors. Dipper’s pine tree hat and vest, and Mabel’s shooting star, help to add variety to their outfits and to differentiate between the two character’s designs more

side note: the fact that Mabel wears so many different outfits helps to visually show her colorful personality and creativity, and it contrasts with Dipper’s outfit, which only changes a few times over the course of the series (which also tells us that Dipper rarely, if ever, changes his clothes).



The Pines Family

there are a few things that the Pines family all have in common. First is the family cowlick, which i mentioned earlier.

every member of the Pines family has this little cowlick at the back of their heads, which consists of two parts. Ford’s, as i mentioned earlier, is slightly different from the rests. it’s half frayed on one side. i believe this is visual symbolism to show his and Stan’s frayed relationship before the finale.

another similarity that the family shares (also pictured above) are stress lines around the eyes. Mabel is the one exception to this. Stan has lines around his eyes thanks to his harsh life, Ford has them thanks to his time in the portal, and Dipper has them thanks to his naturally anxious and stressed personality. They could also just be genetic, because both Stan and Ford are shown to have them in their late 20′s (before Ford first meets Bill).



similar to the stress lines, each member of the family has some reddish mark on their face. Dipper, Stan, and Ford all have a red nose, while Mabel has red cheeks instead.

and finally, all four members of the Pines family wear some shade of red as their main color.

Stan and Ford wear a dark maroon shade, while Dipper and Mabel wear very light shades of salmon and hot pink. the fact that the elder twins wear such dark shades could be because they’re both much older and both have dark pasts, histories and regrets. Mabel and Dipper however, are very young and innocent, and they don’t have the kinds of pasts and regrets that Stan and Ford do.

the choice of red as a color theme for the family is interesting too, because red is often depicted as a “heroic” color, or the color of the main character in a story. (this is especially common in Japan, but it occurs in America as well, with Wreck it Ralph, The Little Mermaid, Spider-man, Superman, ect. there’s even a TV Tropes page for this trope)

