Rubber Hose
- rubberhose
- 1930s cartoon
- pie eye cartoon
Limbs drawn as bending tubes with no joints at all, and a body built from circles.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
A limb with no joint can do anything. The style exists because it lets a body stretch, coil and snap in ways a drawn skeleton cannot, and even in a still frame that freedom reads as energy.
How it works
Every limb is a tube of constant width that curves in a single smooth arc. The body is circles. The hands are gloves, which removes the problem of drawing four knuckles at speed. The eyes are circles with a wedge cut out, which is why they read as a direction rather than as a gaze.
When to use it
Use it for anything that should feel old, loose and a little unhinged. Avoid it when the character needs to carry weight or seriousness, because a body with no joints cannot hold a pose that means anything.
Told apart from its neighbours
Noodle Limb is the modern descendant: long bendy limbs, but with a shoulder and a wrist that still work. Funny Animal shares the round construction but keeps real joints. Bean Construction is about the torso, not the limbs.
Where it is used
It carries a mascot, a title card and a game character, and it is the fastest way to make something read as period without naming a decade in the picture.
- 1920s and 1930s theatrical shorts
- Modern games that borrow the period look
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own character, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
<character>, rubber hose cartoon style, arms and legs drawn as smooth curved tubes with no elbows and no knees, bending anywhere along their length, a body built from simple circles, white gloves on the hands, round pie cut eyes with a wedge missing, a line of one even weight all the way round, flat black and white with a few flat colours
What goes wrong
What comes back most often is a modern cartoon with slightly bendy arms. The fix is the pie cut eye and the white glove, which are the two details a model will not invent on its own.
Leave out
joints, elbows, knees, anatomy, muscle definition, gradients, modern proportions, a tapered line
Watch for
The tubes are the entry. Say no elbows and no knees in the same clause that asks for curved limbs, because a model knows how an arm is built and will put the joint back unless it is told twice.
Questions
Draw it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
