Hotwire Insolve BTS: A Brief History of Kyrie (Patreon)

Ah, Kyrie, the squirrely dirtbag woman from Hotel Trouble that captured the hearts of the internet (or Instagram at least). She's a surgeon with a pistol, she's always open to money-making schemes, and she's got a thing for chromatic women.

Kyrie's first appearance is actually much older than Hotel Trouble, even. What I consider her first appearance is actually just a random drawing I posted to Twitter on March 6th, 2020. I guess that makes her a pandemic baby, eh? Does it count if it's just before lockdown?

Anyway, I remember I just wanted to draw something cool that day.

Cool lady ✅

Cool gun ✅

Cool jacket ✅

Money everywhere ✅

There's a lot that's the same. The face and hair are mostly the same, sunglasses, even the little eye symbol on the gloves.

Then she was on ice for a couple years. If I remember correctly, I was browsing some old files, came across that original drawing of Kyrie and wanted to revisit the character. Used the same palette, the hair is taking its final shape a bit more, simplified the outfit, and she's got her earrings with the little X on them now.

When I made this one was about when Juno started begin developed, which I'll get into in a similar post about her later. For now, here's this drawing of the two of them. Kyrie is really starting to look like herself here, Juno...not so much.

She's got the hair, the glasses, the shoes, the gloves, the suit. That's freakin' Kyrie by all accounts. At this point they got their names. Both come from the Juno Reactor song "Mona Lisa Overdrive." Juno's namesake is probably pretty obvious here. The album version of the song (so, not from The Matrix: Reloaded) has a moment of vocals chanting Kyrie Eleison. Thus, Kyrie & Juno.

They started developing as characters together, and eventually I got the bright idea to revive my cyberpunk world from "Blood Machine," and older comic of mine I'd like to revisit eventually. So now Kyrie's a cyborg living in Silver City. About then is when I started drafting up Hotel Trouble as a little animation vignette that could beef up my portfolio, but that's a different post down the line, eh?

She lost some of her height and curves at this point too. Some direct character influences would be Heinkel Wulf from Hellsing, Lupin the 3rd, Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop, Sonic the Hedgehog (mainly for the gloves and shoes), and throw in a little Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell for good measure. Drawing her in the suit that first time really influenced her transformation into a butchy-femme little dirtbag guy, haha.

In her original model sheet she had much larger shoulderpads, smaller sneakers, smaller glasses too. If you watch Hotel Trouble, you can see in the first few shots she looks slightly different because I was going off of this. I quickly learned to start using a monoline brush, simplify the design, and exaggerate some features to make the animation look more consistent, so the latter shots are a little more like this:

That's all for now!