cartoonfanorwhatever asked:

Hey, I'm obviously not asking for spoilers or whatever, because i know that'd be dumb. But I would like to know where you got the inspiration for the steward's design from? I've never seen anything quite like it before and i'd love to learn more about your (character design) process.

I was listening to the song “My Friend Dario” by Vitalic while driving around alone in Yosemite. I hadn’t seen the music video, and the image of the steward bobbing her head while rising out of a metal grate in the ground is what I thought the singer might look like. Then, when the fast guitar riffs come in on that song, that’s when I imagined those guns sprouting from her eyes and shooting everything.





At the time, I had just discovered Lucian Stanculescu’s artwork and was really really into it. Lucian Stanculescu is one of my absolute favorite artists:

I even own a couple of his pieces and have them hanging in our hallway:

I’ve also always been a big fan of interesting masks. I used to like making and designing them as a kid. A highly influential mask for me was the Couple’s Mask from Zelda: Majora’s Mask. I’ve always found it to be very striking because of its unexpectedly simple design. I love it:

These are the things I was thinking about that combined to create the Steward.

When I first imagined her, I didn’t think of her in context of Infinity Train as it is now. She was just some random being that I thought someone should have to run from. I really imagined her in no other context than calmly rising out of a metal grate to a song, then wildly shooting at someone who had to go dodge behind pipes and boxes and things. I also had a generally different, smaller vision of how the cars worked then. Eventually when I thought of the corgi car, I realized that she would be a very unexpected foil to all of the cute stuff we’d seen up to that point.



And that’s how she came into being!