I was going to have a story ready for this year, but the work on the big novels and novellas have kind of worn me down.  So, in an 11th hour bid, we came up with a cute secondary idea that has completely taken over my life.

There’s got to be plenty of people who know the show Muppet Babies.  Well, we just took that concept and applied it to Tellest.

We teamed with Hozure to turn six of our already established characters into miniaturized, adorable versions of themselves. Here’s the sketches we started with.

We fell in love with this style, and Rhianna is even working on a sculpy clay version of at least one of the characters.

Here is a gallery of the six individual characters:

And here is how our finished piece came together:

I would absolutely love to have Hozure do more of these.  In fact, I’ve already got the next sets of heroes all lined up.  If we get some positive feedback, we’ll definitely do more!

Also, Rhianna came up with a jingle:

♪ Tellest Babies, big adventures for little people /
Tellest Babies, waking up from naptime and fighting evil. ♫

*   *   *

Today’s post was sponsored by L.E.Parr and her incredible Fariidinus series.  If you haven’t had the chance to check it out yet, why not catch a preview of it right now?  Check out Wings of the Exile on Amazon today!

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We’re going to look at our last mech pilot of the group, which in this case happens to be Holklund Crescentshire.

We opted to go with the hooded version of our pseudo-ninja character.  Holklund plays a thief in the Tellest Legends timeline, but in the Tellest 3000 timeline, we kind of envisioned him as a little bit of Raiden from Metal Gear Solid.

Even with that splash of color, he still looks like he’s utilizing a lot of robot / mechanical tech.

But once we have all the bells and whistles, you can see he still somewhat embraces his past life as well.  Holklund wields two handguns for close combat, but he also has two swords on his back in case he wants to get even more personal.  And he still does that crazy thing with his eyes here too!

Sepulcher’s Claw was meant to be the natural evolution of Holklund. With two massive extending wristblades, this mech is agile and quick, and will get right up on top of you and cut you to pieces.

Just like with Steel Tip and the Spectrum, we opted for similar coloring between mech and pilot here.

We really dig what Sepulcher’s Claw became.  It’s definitely a formidable mech, and something that Holklund would surely enjoy driving about to save the world he loves.

And then of course you have mech and pilot together.  Ai did a great job with this set, and we’re so happy for that collaboration.

We’ve got one more pair of characters to show you, and then we’ll start thinking about next year’s April Fools’ joke!

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So, last week, our big reveal from Tellest 3000 focused on Kaos and his mech, Wildfire.  This week, we’re giving you a look at his best friend Steel Tip, and the mech that he uses, Spectrum.

Just like with Kaos, we started with a few sketches.  Steel Tip was going to be a bit of a sniper in this one, so we had a few ideas of how we wanted him to look, outfit-wise.  We opted to use the variant on the right.

Another look at the character.

After that, our artist threw on some coats of paint.  You’ll be familiar with this color scheme if you’ve seen Steel Tip in our other media. Here you can tell he uses a pretty extensive sniper rifle.

Here there’s a layer of shine on the marksman.  He’s got a secondary sidearm in case he needs it, but he definitely prefers to use his trusty sniper rifle.

Moving over to the mechs, we had a few designs to choose from. They were both pretty similar, and featured a ginormous railgun that essentially serves as the mechs sniper rifle.

The closer look at this one shows that the Spectrum is not something you want to mess with.

Just as before, a little color made this mech stand out—though not too much, since we wanted it to camouflage fairly well.

Just like with the man who pilots it, here you can see the Spectrum in all its glory.  Bells and whistles galore, with a lot of energy doohickeys all over the place.

Finally, you can see Ai Marwan’s look at the two together.  He did a great job, and we’re excited to show you the third and final mech next week!

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So, I know Tellest is still pretty much a fledgling little company thus far, but there’s certain things we take very seriously.  April Fools’ Day is at the top of this list.  While we can’t do something as impressive as say, Blizzard or IGN, we’re committing to always doing something a little funny with our property.

This year, we had two gags that we wanted to share.  One of them actually took a very real step toward reality on Tuesday (sometimes jokes become reality here at Tellest), but we also took a trip into the future with Tellest 3000.  We did a bit of a secret collaboration with an artist on DeviantArt, Marwan Islami / Ai Marwan, who is great at these futuristic designs, especially when it comes to mechs, which we knew was going to be a staple of this April Fools’ joke.

Throughout April, we’re going to give you a taste of the characters and mechs he designed for us.  Today, we’re starting with Kaos and his mech, Wildfire.

Let’s start off with Kaos, shall we?  So, first and foremost, we knew that this project was going to involve time travel.  The characters wouldn’t necessarily change who they were, so Kaos had to be true to himself.  As such, we kind of made him a bit of a marine.

Because technology is prevalent, we really decided it was in our characters’ best interests to utilize weaponry of this time.  So you’ll see that Kaos Kreegan, our quintessential Tellest warrior, is utilizing an assault rifle.

We settled on this one to really give us a good look at what Kaos would look like.  This carries his attitude over into the future pretty well.

After that, we had to decide on a coat of paint!

We decided to stick to colors he would have preferred.

Finally, our artist gave us a better look at him with some nice detailing.  Kaos has the assault rifle, sure… but he also has a blade in case of emergencies.  And you can’t tell here, because it’s a static image, but his left arm hides the evolution of the Sky Talon.  There’s a built in grappling hook in that piece of armor.  One thing is certain: we put a lot of work into this joke!

Now let’s move onto Wildfire:

Marwan gave us a couple of different options for how we wanted to proceed with our mech.  We wanted it to feel powerful and sturdy, but we also wanted it to be agile.  The mechs in this world are typically piloted directly (there are some exceptions), so Kaos needed to be able to feel like he could move around a bit, and perform all the necessary actions he could.

We opted for the more slender of the two models.  Here, you can see a bit more details of the Wildfire mech.  True to its name, it has an arm-mounted, industrial strength flamethrower.  It’ll scorch the faces off of any alien menace, that’s for sure.

Now, here we decided to go with the coat of red paint.  It seemed a little more pertinent here, and we didn’t need to make our mech and our pilot look so similar that they used the same palette.

Here, you can see Wildfire with a bit more shine and polish.  But, you don’t really get a good sense for the size until you see pilot and mech together:

So there you have it.  Kaos and his trusty mech, ready to wreck some alien face (or whatever other evils lurk in the future… I’m getting my info directly from Rhys).

We’ll be spending a little bit more time in this offshoot of Tellest for the rest of April.  There’s still a bunch more to show off!

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