Here's a new promotional banner-type image for Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices! There's a story to go through here...
Let's see, going through the logs, it seems it was mid-2024 that our art director, Stacy, first became out of commission due to various life stresses, unable to continue designing characters for further installments of Keys & Kingdoms and Irregular Fantasy. Eventually I determined that I would have to test out some freelancers, hire some new people to do it. After a few false starts, I eventually found a Mexican artist called Yeray.
There's a saying: "cheap, fast, good: pick any two". Now, when it comes to the quality of these projects, good is not optional. Yeray's other attribute is that he's cheap, meanwhile it takes him a few months to do a small batch of characters. That works for me just fine, my mental health still tends to overwhelm and I'm pacing myself.
Now, what I realized was that the esoteric character-design system I had concocted with Stacy was simply too complex for anyone else to adapt to, so I re-concocted a simpler system and had Yeray start by re-creating the main characters of both projects. And that's where we are now. Here are the new official height charts for the teasers of both projects:
What I like about Yeray's work too is that it manages to capture the intended art styles to a much greater degree than they did before: Disney-esque for Keys & Kingdoms and 80s TV cartoon style for Irregular Fantasy. Stacy managed to capture it pretty well but it still bore her distinctive fingerprints - which totally would have worked out in the final product, but in her absence I'm happy to lean harder into what I was originally envisioning. Despite Yeray's slow pace, Stacy has remained unavailable to date, which is sad and concerning, I do hope she gets to feeling better soon.
This will probably be the last serious piece of work I put into Irregular Fantasy for a while. My mental health has strongly gotten in the way of my creativity for the past several years, and I'm trying to focus on just one thing at a time, and since the Irregular Fantasy teaser already exists, I'm going to start by focusing on Keys & Kingdoms, getting its teaser and pilot completed before then returning to work on the Irregular Fantasy shorts and pilot.
As for the banner image up top, that's the work of Overex Agency, who did all the character art for the Irregular Fantasy teaser. They're in Venezuela, which our stupid president is invading, so... I appreciate their commitment and I hope for their continued success and safety.
I have a lot of plans, still working on writing up the stories and putting them up on Archive of Our Own, a relatively short-term plan so we can at least get them out of our systems before going to the real trouble of animating them in the future - but I do still hope for those stories to have plenty of visual aids, at least a decent design for every major character. Makin' it happen.
