Hollowframe 49, June 2022

This was the very first public version of Hollowframe; a composition of all 49 warframes at the time in the styles and themes of Hollow Knight! This project started in June 2021 and was finally posted online in June 2022, nearly exactly a year later.

It really just started as a fun idea to get me out of an art slump after a quite depressing first year of college in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, designing a simple but effective prompt that could last me a while: what if warframes were drawn like Hollow Knight? I had just finished Hollow Knight and I was captivated by how simple yet effective the hand-drawn character designs were throughout. At the same time, I was a big fan of Warframe and I noticed that although the designs of warframes are very detailed, they still possess very recognizable silhouettes; particularly in their head designs, something shared with the focus on head/mask designs in Hollow Knight. And on top of all this, Hollow Knight's simple sprite style made it much easier for me to study and attempt to replicate.

I started with just the original six warframes with the plan to go chronologically, designing them more or less like Vessels. This then soon changed to the more theme-based designs more familiar today, allowing more and more color in as I slowly advanced the development of both the project and my own skills. In all honesty, I doubt my art skills would be nearly as good as they are now if I hadn't committed to practice through this project for so long!

By chance, I neared catching up with the warframe release schedule as I finished up the design for the newest frame, Gyre, just as the deadline for the TennoCon 2022 Community Showcase got close. This gave me the drive to create a new full group composition and a redesign for Wisp last minute, finishing just a minute before what I thought was the deadline. Unfortunately, I had failed to account for time zones and was nearly exactly an hour too late to submit my project. This of course did not stop me from finally posting the project online, garnering much more attention on places like Twitter and Reddit than I had anticipated! It was this support that further convinced me to continue the project, adding new designs alongside the release of new warframes.

Today, as of writing this, Hollowframe has grown so much, finally making it into the Community Showcase at TennoCon 2024. I'm actually now glad that I had missed that deadline in 2022, as seeing the project in a much more fully realized and reworked form in person truly was a much better outcome.

If you would like to check out the original Twitter post and thread you can find it here: https://x.com/UpsideDownSmore/status/1537690063999488000