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Gravity Falls had been a show of which I was dimly aware as a cultural artifact of my own time. Because I tend to watch one thing obsessively and repetitively rather than exploring television more broadly, many many shows "everyone has seen" are assigned to this bin and that's usually fine. I can understand memes from context clues.
["This is worthless" meme]
I have a dim awareness of Bill Cipher as one entry in a long list of Tumblr Sexymen and thus have little doubt that I am as susceptible to this character's charms as anyone else who has been on and off the platform for about a decade. Even when I am not actually in the daily habit of reading Tumblr, I will always think like a tumblr native.
Anyway it's the end of 2024 and I agree to watch this show at last because my partner recommends it to me and she hasn't yet been wrong about shows I might like. I laugh gently at some of the jokes and I'm charmed by the seemingly unaffected sense of quirkiness, the mostly warm and human character moments. (There are some jokes that don't age super well, that feel a little cruel as I've aged into more sensitivity to certain things.) That said, I'm not, like, INTO it until Bill Cipher arrives on screen, which is exactly what anyone would've naively predicted. He arrives heralded by a sharp increase in the Weirdness, not just the chanting backwards or the ... to the extent that one can be frightened by a decade-old cartoon for children, Bill Cipher does his best to immediately and actually threaten. His voice is disruptive, grating: a half-nasal whine that is also somehow a shout, impossible to do an impression of without speaking at a volume inappropriate in almost any space.
His bit is not that sympathetic; he's not charming, he's not attractive, he seems reasonably clever but only functionally, not as a character trait. He seems mostly... desperate and weird. An outsider clawing for purchase somewhere. A sympathetic humanizing impulse makes me assume this is an overwrought projection of loneliness, but the framing of the story makes it equally likely he's an eldritch and unknowable god who doesn't have goals I would understand; the leviathan crushing lesser beasts underfoot without looking down. But he does, also, seem desperately petty, demonstrably susceptible to human emotions (primarily haughtiness and fury).
I have, after no-spoilers statute expires, consumed a bunch of fanart immediately, firing every image possible into my eyeballs. So I didn't so much have to do research as just unfocus my eyes slightly and allow the default screensaver of my brain to come up and form a composite image of a human bill design. But for the purposes of process discussion let's say I did a bunch of internet searches on purpose. A couple of specific influences are worth noting, not just for their direct influence on me but for being foundational to the design language of every other human!Bill design forever: [tumblr design refs tk]
With such a simple character design to start with I wanted to make sure I capture the key elements to make my own design distinctively and clearly Bill: triangles, yellow and black, top hat, bow tie, one eye, eyelashes, brick pattern. I decided on tumblr-esque top hat and tails look but with a vest so that I could replicate the yellow body and black arms. I liked the sweeping bangs covering the eye, and the mini top hat. I decided to focus most of my efforts on creating the custom vest, with a relatively simple (bought not sewn) base yellow/black outfit. I wanted to include blue or iridescent or rainbow/neon elements as well, for the Weirdmaggedon/alternate dimension imagery he's associated with even if these are not directly included in his design. To that end I looked for photoreflective fabric to try out for certain elements. I found a great melty rainbow swirl fabric as well, that looked JUST like the Weirdmageddon rift. Once I got those and a nice color of plain yellow cotton, I had my design and my main materials ready to go!
In planning the vest I created a custom pattern based on the one I had modified for Alastor, adding tails, lapels, and the brick pattern around the waist. I used pattern paper to rough out the pattern with the new elements, then sewed a mock to try on and make sure everything fit together properly.