The Paw-Print of Kemonokaki

Kemonokaki is a 10,000 supply project of kemonomimi themed PFPs; featuring 18 different races, and a variety of special 1/1 kemonokakis. 🐾♡

✧ Initial ideas ✧

Kemonokaki was originally formed to be new fresh Oekaki Connect IP in a rough pixel (but not quite pixel art) inspired style (as seen with recent ‘puppets’ projects); made as a gift for Oekaki Maker holders.

We weren’t exactly sure what our plans were, or what we were going to do, but we knew we wanted to have kemonomimi inspired traits, very chibi and colourful, and a simple pixel art style. Kemonomimi has been on our minds for a while, and we wanted to do something with it.. so we decided to go for it!

There was even a possibility that we would use a similar process as Oekaki Maker and involve AI in our workflow, but that was ruled against to maintain the hand drawn pixel art textures.

Over time developing the ideas further and recruiting a few artists to help us.. Kemonokaki developed into its own very special thing that we have never done before, whilst still using all the techniques we’ve learned thus far to help us realize our vision.

✧ Influences & Dev ✧

The main artists of Kemonokaki comprise of Kira, Ina, Meow, Karat, GC, Kiv, Putrid with secondary art from Lean and Haiku. Tuby helped with marketing with Birdy assisting in promos. MRYT, Kvadra and, and Funky also made art contributions. Haiku, Lean, and Xan helped with the generation.

With many of the artists and the team already being interested in kemonomimi along with cute furry aesthetics- it was easy to develop a lot of concepts and ideas during development.

Kemonokaki traits are primarily inspired by kemonomimi chibi style art, kemono-furry fur suits primarily seen in j-fashion communities paired with full Lolita coords, and a variety of other ‘cute’ fashion centered subcultures such as Rokku and Hime Gyaru.

We also collected a plethora of inspiration from our personally beloved, and many popular anime and gaming franchises to allow for fun easter eggs to be found within the collection, similar to how we did with Oekaki Maker. Speaking of Oekaki, there is an entire sub-race in Kemonokaki dedicated to Oekaki Maker, featuring some recreations of popular and thoroughly enjoyed Oekaki traits.

With Kemonokaki, we branched out and had many races that provided very unique visuals such as the distinct Goblin race, which features kemonokaki’s with green skin.. as well as the Mermaid race which also features a variety of different fantastical skin colours for people to enjoy. During development we found it was important for us that each race had it’s own distinctive look, whether that be created from the distinct colour palettes, skin colour options, facial features… we decided that each race will have it’s own exclusive traits to further cement that sentiment.

‘lovely’ kemonokaki

✧ Inner workings notes ✧

For this project we had a lot of people on the team helping with brainstorming traits, making art, creating social media posts, trait organization, and generation.

Having a multi-artist team

A struggle that can arise when having multiple artists on a team, all with extremely varying styles is lack of cohesion, luckily all of the artists managed to compromise on our plan for the base Kemonokaki and the soft pixel art style. Although, artists sometimes still manage to bring parts of their own personal style which gets discretely displayed in the traits that they worked on, however the small differences in the traits of each artist allowed each race to truly feel a bit more special on their own, without taking away the key ‘Kemonokaki’ feel we wanted to have. Additionally, after a while of working on the art, you could really see how the artists began picking up techniques from each other to use in their own traits they were working on, such as; different ways and shapes with adding highlights to the hair, or things like different colouring techniques for clothing.. this ultimately had traits looking even more cohesive by the end of the process.

Social media & Marketing

A lot of time and effort goes into maintaining the social media presence of a collection, there are over 50 media posts on the official Kemonokaki twitter account. Tuby is one of our main social media managers, and assists with majority of the memes for Oekaki Connect related media accounts. He is frequently trying different meme captions and templates that often shock us, and we have to say ‘oh we cannot post that’.. However, we go through his many creations and find the best and most appropriate ones to post, which has provided us with a good amount of success, and sparked joy in the hearts of many viewing our respective profiles.

Trait organization & Generation

Due to the fact there are 18 different races in kemonokaki, ALL with their own unique traits.. that meant there would be a huge amount of traits to export, name, and organize. Since we would be generating each of the races with their respect traits, we decided to have a special generator for this process.

Kemonokaki races

This process took way more time than expected due to some road blockages, but we ended up working out the kinks and will be more prepared for next time we use this work flow.

✧ Conclusion ✧

Kemonokaki is now Oekaki Connect’s biggest project so far, with the largest team, largest amount of traits, and the largest supply. All of our past work has built up our need to constantly keep trying new things, and thinking bigger. We thank you all for coming along with us on our journey thus far, and hope you will be proud to see Kemonokaki as we are very proud of it. With that said, we first wanted to reward our current community for their support by having free mints for all Oekaki Connect collections. Second, we also wanted to have available the ability to receive a small airdrop of some Base ETH, so people can claim their free mints if they do not have any Base ETH already in their wallet yet. Lastly, we have developed a gift for our ‘royalty’ tier members by having 1/1 drawn Kemonokaki’s for them to be featured within the collection!

We also thank you all for your understanding and excitement with our decision to put Kemonokaki on Base, (an L2 Ethereum chain). This way, we can much easier grant rewards to our current community base whilst still trying out new avenues which will allow us to do all the fun things we want to do! There are currently some Oekaki-themed mini games that we are working on, and hope to get out soon for you all to play around with, but we also want to develop on-chain games which will be possible with a low-gas chain.

Thank you all so much for reading, and being excited for Kemonokaki. Thank you for all of your support thus far, and we hope you will stick around to see everything to come in the future!

Assorted Selection of Rare Kemonokaki 1/1s 🐾♡

♡ Oekaki Connect Luvs You! ♡