New character designs!

Several years ago, our art director Stacy fell ill. As I understand it, she's still suffering chronic fatigue that inhibits her ability to do any sort of work, which is very tragic. We're all wishing her the best.

The last thing I had her work on was... adding more mathematical precision to the existing character designs. Why did I think that was a good idea? That was dumb. I regret putting her through that.

To move forward with designing new characters, well... I found that the design system Stacy and I had concocted was rather impenetrable to anyone else, so... what I needed to do was start over, concoct a slightly simpler system that anyone else could jump into. This involved starting by redoing the main characters.

So I found Yeray on Fiverr, and he's been great, I definitely have a lot more plans with Yeray to fully fill out the details of the new process so, hopefully, other artists can jump in and design some characters as well. Here's the height chart of his designs for Irregular Fantasy!

There's some bitterness in having to overwrite Stacy's work. But progress pushes ever forward and I'm confident this is the final and ultimate version of the character design. In addition to the 3/4 view making things a little simpler than the straight front, back, and side of Stacy's designs, this also allows us to lean a bit harder into the intended look of the two stories, Irregular Fantasy! being based upon television cartoons of the 80s such as He-Man, Thundercats, Jem, and of course the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. The distinct fingerprints of Stacy's art style were something I was definitely perfectly okay with, but having to go without her, the opportunity to lean more into the original intent was too tempting to resist.

And with a new art style, I decided it was time to also redo the promotional poses. Keeping them simpler, no longer with extra shading, textures, and details that the model sheets lacked, just purely on-model.

I made a great find here in another Fiverr artist, Nyx. In addition to being faithful to the new art style, I decided that these new images should now be posed precisely like the gaming miniatures that represent the characters in the original Irregular Webcomic!

And I also finally had this group shot made that I've always been wanting! I call it the "drinks promo". The characters enjoy drinking in the comic, and I decided to assign each of them a signature drink, taken mostly from what they usually order in the comic, each drinking from a signature container they presumably carry around with them, and these will be seen in the story every time they get some drinks.

Alvissa has a goblet of fine elven wine, Dwalin has a flask of whisky, Kyros has a bottle of cider, Mordekai a tankard of mead, Draak has a great big mug of stout, and Lambert has ale served in a gallon jug.

I believe this is the first thing I had Yeray work on, the characters of Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices. Always trying to keep every setting artistically distinct, with the Keys & Kingdoms world looking like classic Disney, so we can get a little more wild and cartoony than Irregular Fantasy! -- but just a little, I don't like just how cartoony supporting characters get in Disney films, I prefer to stick to a consistent art style that best matches the attractive main characters. Ultimately any face can serve as an inspiration for a K&K character's face, as long as we smooth out its features to this one consistent art style.

And once again I had Nyx pose them! By now you're likely familiar with these poses, here they are in a new style. Notice little Jax in the lower left; her model sheet is not shown here, as she's not on the height chart, she's our main antagonist, so doesn't usually accompany the heroes in most settings, but she appears in the pilot so I've always included her among the design process of the leads.

And there are new poses as well, and I put them on this background to be the header image of our big pilot fundraiser, once we finish the teaser. Here's another one you've seen already... Overex is a team on Fiverr I've worked with for a long time, being responsible for most of the imagery in the Irregular Fantasy! teaser... but they just weren't as good at matching the Keys & Kingdoms look.

They happen to be in Venezuela, and were in the middle of making this promo when some stupid country invaded their city... their commitment to pulling through and finishing the promo anyway was admirable enough that I just couldn't bring myself to correct any of their mistakes. So for a while that was the official promo, but in the end, I was like, quality and consistency is gonna be very important here, so I asked Nyx to redo Overex's work on these K&K poses, including this promo. Again, it stings a little to have to do that. I really appreciate everybody's contributions, but sometimes those have to be sacrificed to get the material out that's really needed.

While I was at that, I thought, hey, what if I had Nyx redo this Pride Month 2022 image in the new style as well? That was fun.

Let's talk about this one a bit: it only features five of the seven main characters. Maer's out because she's in fact a cishet woman and, at the beginning of the story, a bit too abrasive to want to hang around at Pride waving an ally flag or some such.

Airi, meanwhile, identifies as asexual, but I try to downplay that. Airi knows nothing of the culture or biology of her species, so she's unaware that the reason she's not keen on the idea of sex is that she's actually prepubescent despite being in her early twenties, that's just how gargoyle aging works. She's likely to discover as she matures that she's not asexual. So, you know, worst asexual representation ever, I'll be the first to say it. It made sense that she'd be identifying that way right now given her extremely unique and fantastical circumstances. But she's not actually ace, so I'm going to heavily downplay the fact that she currently elects to fly that flag.

For the record, this is also not one of those anime scenarios where she looks ten but she's actually much older, so you can depict her in sexual situations. No you can't. She's ten. Period.

And most recently, we've gotten back onto the intended track: designing new characters! I had Yeray make full model sheets for this set.

Saison and Gregorio were conceptualized in early stages by myself, Naty, and Casey, but we didn't give them final designs because while they're major characters on par with Jax, they don't appear in the pilot, so we left them out to save time and effort. Now was the time to fill in some gaps, make sure we really have the procedure down, before moving on to additional minor characters who do appear in the pilot.

I sketched them for the story summary earlier, but didn't give away that the large horned fairy was actually Saison. I'm inconsistent about spoilers. Right now I'm thinking it doesn't matter, it'll be so far in the future that this is given away that surely anyone reading this will have forgotten: Saison and Gregorio start out as very important allies and mentors before it's sadly revealed that they're both evil, both getting a major design change at that moment.

The two officers and their captain have very small roles in the pilot. The pilot is no longer canon, so I think they'll have significantly bigger roles in the real first episode. And the pilot also features a flashback to Cristela's early life, so I made her up a leafy outfit for that scene. These designs were largely improvised in storyboards -- the guards in a scene Sadie did, flashback Cristela in a scene Michelle did -- before being refined in concept art by Naty and myself.

Michelle's storyboards for Cristela's flashback also included some great background character work we've also developed into characters who really will appear in the pilot. And beyond! We're gonna reuse background characters a whole lot, just to be whimsical.