The Lost Finchy Fest

An illustration 3 years in the making

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

This week I’ll tell you about one of my favorite gigs ever: The Lost Finchy Fest. I’ve alluded to this thing a few times in previous newsletters and it is a pleasure to finally be able to showcase it. A massive illustration that started all the way back in late 2020 and finally saw the light of day on March 14, 2023.

What is The Lost Finchy Fest all about?

In a few words, The Lost Finchy Fest is an illustration based on all the Soulsborne games for the YouTube company RKG (consider their channel this week’s recommendation).

Here’s the full piece, with colors by the brilliant Chris O’Halloran:

For those that don’t know, Soulsborne is a name given to the games produced by the company FromSoftware and which includes Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro or Elden Ring (here is a good article listing them all). Games that are notoriously hard to beat.

And RKG is a company created by Rory Powers, Daniel Krupa and Gav Murphy, known as The Boys. They create videos, usually based on playing certain types of very hard videogame series which puts them against incredible odds to beat them. Their videos are quite fantastic and a huge step above than your usual let’s play series. They’re very genuine, edited to perfection and much closer to something you’d see on Netflix than on Twitch. You can check them out here.

Through the years, their series with the Soulsborne games have gathered them a large and faithful audience, so this illustration was planned to be used as a celebration of their 5th anniversary as The Boys (they started it all while still working on IGN UK in 2016 and eventually left to create RKG).

The Process

I had been following the lads from RKG for a while and they started following my work as well. Seeing I was a slug (an endearing term used for their audience members), they reached out to see if I’d be interested in doing this celebration of their work so far. The idea would be collecting all the main characters from the Soulsborne games plus their original playable characters (in these games, you fully customize your character), which they always call Finchy (hence the name of the piece).

With that as a basis, the next step was personalizing every one of them. So all the characters are doing something which alludes to a moment of one of their series. A joke they said, a stupid thing they did, an unexpected moment. For this to be exact, they worked on a list that was sent to me. The list contained the characters and the idea about what they’d be doing or alluding to. It looked quite daunting at first:

If you look close enough, you can see red and green dots next to each name. I did a green dot when I had gathered the reference for that character and a red one once I had drawn it.

With this in hand, it was all about imagining a picture that could contain all of this information. I needed an high angle and an iconic location, so I chose Firelink Shrine, one of the main places of the first Dark Souls game. It was also green and pleasant to the eye (which is not always the case in these series). With the image in my head, I went on to work on the thumbnail and find the best way to include every detail.

I drew all the names on every character to make sure I’d know which one is which. It was an easier way to assure nothing would get lost once I got to work on the final piece because I didn’t have to lose time adding details at this stage.

Above all, it was all about positioning them correctly so everyone could understand what they were doing/referencing. One particular challenge was that some characters needed to be close to others, who in turn needed to be close to yet different ones. So there was some shuffling around until everything clicked.

Once the thumbnail was done, the hard part was behind us. From this point onwards, it was all a question of chipping away and draw one character at a time. I drew everything on the iPad Pro, regularly zooming out to make sure I was keeping the scale correctly as one of the main concerns.

This is what my work space looked like for most of the time (see below): 1/3 for the reference of the character I was drawing and 2/3 for the drawing itself. In this specific case I was drawing a character called Ebrietas, who is only visible partially behind the walls. That’s because it’s so big that I had to place it carefully to avoid obstructing other characters.

And here you can see some of work in progress, where I’m drawing the final line art over my pencils and the original thumbnail:

This is a version of the pencils partially finished (I either erased the complete one by mistake or I was simply inking over the thumbnail directly, I can’t remember for sure):

I kept the background in red and the characters in blue to help me with the complexity of the piece.

The inking was a maddening amount of work but it was extremely satisfying to bring to life all these amazing FromSoftware characters mixed with the mythology of the RKG series.

When I sent the file to Chris for him to color I added a layer with all the characters’ names and sent it all with my reference folder so he wouldn’t get lost. Here it is for curiosity’s sake:

Why 3 years in the making

This is more an expression than reality. Yes, it is a complex, complicated and heavily detailed piece. But no, it did not take 3 years to make. However, because it was a side gig and we were in the middle of the pandemic, it was worked in bursts rather than in one go.

At first it was supposed to be out in 2021, on the 5th anniversary of RKG. But it was delayed because the boys didn’t want to sell anything right in the middle of a pandemic that was creating a tough economy for a lot of people. So asking their audience for money felt wrong for them and they took the honorable decision of pushing it. Once things calmed in 2022 and we were laying the final touches on it, they looked for the best moment, which looked to be the 7th anniversary (March 14 of this year).

A few weeks ago we did some tweaks, perfect the trimming and dimensions of the piece according to the printer, and everything fell in place.

RKG is now selling the image as a high quality print until the end of March. I’ve also recorded a podcast with them detailing the whole process in a very nice chat with Daniel that you can access through their Patreon.

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Having gig’s that remain hidden for a long time like this is always frustrating, but it’s the nature of the beast in many cases (I’ve done some things for movies and TV shows that you’ll probably never see). But when they have their reveal it’s a massive relief, as in this case. The RKG community is embracing and loving to find every detail and reference, which is amusing and rewarding to all of us.

I’ll see you again next week, with lots of Phenomena inks and something special.

André