The Prismatic Art Collection Kickstarter

The Prismatic Art Collection is a Kickstarter aiming to create several pieces of high quality fantasy artwork. These pieces will be released as Creative Commons Share-Alike, so that they can be used by anyone in any product. This, by itself, is a very laudable goal. But the Prismatic Art Collection is more ambitious than this – they’re also aiming to recruit a diverse variety of artists to create this artwork featuring a diverse array of characters, male, female and of varying ethnicity. So you’ll likely see many new faces, both the artists and the characters alike – always a worthy goal to me.

I am a person with diverse interests in people, and most fantasy stuff doesn’t meet them. Hell, I’m a bisexual Puertorican male whose parents are Puertorican devotees of Hinduism – I generally don’t exist in fantasy at all! When I take on projects I try to represent people who are often made invisible in these fantasy stories and fantasy games. In the World of Adel I’ve made all kinds of characters, and in their stories and descriptions in my articles I try to include all kinds of physical characteristics, sexuality, sexes and genders. Because I’m interested and inspired by all kinds of people, and also because I want readers of all kinds to find people with whom they can connect on some level, or to believe that in my world they could exist as characters without barriers. I’ve consumed nothing but “ordinary” works for so long that I wish for more diversity.

I think that the inclusion of more people, ethnicity, sexuality and so on is a very reasonable and achievable goal, especially in fantasy, where there’s such a variety of ways to make that not only justified but interesting and inexorable in the history and culture of the fictional milieu. I feel very excited and happy with what I’ve done with Adel on that order, and I wish more people would try their hand at such projects as well. Thankfully though, I’m far from alone in these endeavors. As usual with Kickstarter, there’s various tiers of involvement. The more funding it gets, the more ambitious the project can become. I’d like to see some alchemists, myself! So head on over to the kickstarter site, look up some of the contributing artists and see what you think.

Maybe at some point someone will draw a couple of fox-eared villagers!