The EXTRA/NORMAL “You Decide!” Initiative

How would you like to decide on the next awesome piece of artwork for EXTRA/NORMAL? Well, I’m setting something up to let you do exactly that!

I’ve been working on a fun little project that I think could be really cool for EXTRA/NORMAL, and possibly other projects in the future! That would be one where you guys get to choose the character featured in the official artwork for the series! Based on the nature of it, there are a lot of characters. And as much as I’d love for all of them to get some artwork within the pages of the story, itself, that’s just not likely to happen. But who says I have to limit myself to just artwork within the story, itself? So, something I’m going to start doing is a new series of artwork made exclusively for an out-of-story gallery, featuring characters that appeared in the previous month’s uploaded chapters.

THIS is where you all come in. I’m going to let you all decide on the characters you want to appear next. So at the end of each month, I’ll open a poll to let you guys choose from the named characters that appeared in any of the chapters to come out that month! Then the artwork of the selected character will be revealed in the following month and the process repeats! I’ll likely implement a rule or something that prevents the same character from getting into the pool twice in a row (because I suspect I know who’d dominate this thing, otherwise). Attached to this artwork will be a little trivia blurb about that character that you wouldn’t see within the pages of the story, itself! It’s the perfect opportunity for you guys to learn a little more about a character that has you curious and maybe wasn’t around that long! I could even include a separate poll for Keywords like “School” or “Park” or “Beach” (obviously this city has no beach. It’s purely an example) so you guys can even somewhat influence what type of scene is being depicted, if you like that idea. Either way, I hope you guys have fun with this!

For further details on the subject, I’ll mostly be sticking to one artist if I can help it, but I’ll occasionally bounce around to others. EUDETENIS has been fantastic help with the series so far and I wanna keep supporting them. That said, it’d be fun to have other artists also pop in, from time to time. After all, the original concepts for Mio, Ragyou, Diana, and Charlotte were drawn by the always-wonderful madiblitz.

As for what this artwork will be used for, I can already confirm that one of my plans is to make this project the basis for our gallery when we finally get our Original Content website built. It’ll feature this artwork, as well as other out-of-series artwork for other projects we’re working on! But that isn’t all. It’ll probably go up on our Pinterest and Instagram, since I really have nothing else to post there. I also would really love to do some more fun stuff with this. So if I can figure out the particulars, some of this artwork (if not all of it) will end up on merch like Bookmarks, Stickers, maybe even a Calendar, just to be cute. You guys dig that idea? I think it has the potential to be pretty cool. For EXTRA/NORMAL, Burning Sky, maybe even Bulletoon or some of our comic/manga projects.

I want to try to start this thing as early as February, if I can. I do plan to have the first piece of new character artwork done sometime in January. Would be a lovely birthday present, if nothing else. Would you guys be up for something like this? Let me know, down below! Thanks for reading, as always, folks! Be sure to keep liking, commenting, and sharing with as many people as you can! And I’ll see ya later!

Stay safe, Stay healthy, Stay Awesome!
Voyager