Tyson Tan


Tyson Tan is a Chinese concept artist and character designer. He is noted for re-designing KDE's mascot Konqi, as well as designing a few other mascots for free and open source software projects.

Language

Tyson speaks three languages: Chinese, English, and Japanese.

Art style

In general, Tyson has an art style that draws inspirations from both anime and western cartoons. He draws mostly anthropomorphic animal characters. He is also known for his ability of designing robotic characters with organic shapes while keeping a level of convincing mechanical details.

Works

FLOSS Mascots

Tyson designed Kiki the Cyber Squirrel as the mascot for Digital painting software Krita in 2012, and has been Krita's startup artwork artist since. In 2013, his re-design concept of KDE's mascot Konqi was chosen from a contest and has been used since KDE version 5.x. He also designed Kate the woodpecker as the mascot for advanced text editor Kate in 2014. Tyson submitted a mascot for LibreOffice during a contest run by The Document Foundation in late 2017 however his entry was unsuccessful.

Video games

Tyson drew several pieces of fan-art for the indie platform game Freedom Planet after its release. His fan-art was later adopted by the game's developer and publisher, GalaxyTrail, for promotional purposes. He later became the concept artist and character designer of the game's sequel, Freedom Planet 2.

Books

Tyson's works have been included in the following books:
Tyson is observed to have been using only free and open source software to work since 2012. He has been supporting several FOSS projects in various ways. He has a permissive attitude for others to use his works, and licenses most of his artworks under free licenses like Creative Commons.