Building Hexed: On Metal, Ink & Process

Building Hexed: On Metal, Ink & Process

Four people. No office. No investors waiting on a quarterly report. Hexcraft Oy is a company on paper. In practice it's a project that started because a small group of people looked at an industry where everything looks the same and decided someone had to do something different.

This is the first piece about how and why we do what we do.

Black and White

I grew up in the nineties. Drew constantly — in notebooks, on the back of homework sheets, on desks I wasn't supposed to draw on. At the same time I was listening to metal. Black metal, death metal, doom. Album covers that existed entirely on their own terms.

There was something in those covers I couldn't articulate back then. Now I can: they didn't ask permission to be good. They just were. Sharp line weight. Hard contrast. A skull in the lower corner that doesn't explain itself.

Black and white forces decisions. Color forgives a weak composition. In monochrome there's nowhere to park a bad idea — it either works or it doesn't. Every illustration going into Hexed will be hand-drawn in ink. Not because it's a romantic notion. Because it's the only way the result is what I need it to be.

On AI, Honestly

We use artificial intelligence in our process. I'll say it plainly because hiding it would be stupid.

I know how it sounds: shortcuts, laziness, outsourcing authorship. I also know we hold environmental values that sit uncomfortably next to the energy footprint of AI infrastructure. That tension is real and I don't have a clean answer for it.

What I can say is this: in our process, AI functions the way rough sketches function before finished work. Test an idea fast. Check whether a composition holds before committing six hours to something that doesn't. It's a way of failing quickly so the actual work can be slow.

Every illustration going into a product will be made by hand. That's not a marketing promise. It's the only version of this I'm willing to make.

I made that call because I care about what the hand does to a line. The mistakes. The unevenness. The moment the ink spreads slightly too far and it's still better than it would have been without it.

Finding the Right Illustrator

It took a while. I reached out to people whose work was technically strong but wrong. Too clean. Too finished. I wanted something with friction in it.

When I came across Akwan Project's portfolio, I knew fairly quickly. There are details in there that don't explain themselves. Tension. Moments where a line decides to be rough and that's the right call.

The collaboration is straightforward: sketches, feedback, revisions, more sketches. Not glamorous. Work. It takes time, which is exactly why it's worth something.

Where We Are Now

Most of our time right now goes into the goddess characters. These are the Hexed universe: four figures, four elements, each tied to a product launching in August.

Character work usually starts with talking. What's this figure's element. What should she feel like. What is she not. We go to paper when there's nothing left to say.

Then we iterate. Strip things away. Add them back. Question everything. Sometimes we think we know exactly what we want and pivot completely. That's the process. It's not linear.

The result has to feel inevitable. Like it always existed and was found, not made.

Hexed is still in motion. We'll keep you in it.

If you want to look at Akwan Project's work: [link]