Albany Hartley Case is an Idaho-born, Portland-based character designer, visual development artist, and illustrator. He specializes in character work and design and prides himself on creating "works of heart" every time he sits down at his desk. Albany leads with passion in everything he does and pours his all into his artwork. Emotions and sentiment are key to producing artwork he feels can resonate with viewers. A piece of his heart lives in every work he produces, even if it never sees the light of day.Growing up autistic and anxious, with a busy mind that never quit, Albany found comfort in fiction, particularly video games and the vast worlds he could create in his imagination. Art quickly became important to him when he realized he could turn all his ideas into reality with just a pencil and a page. And though art was an incredible struggle to learn, especially on his own before he attended PNCA, Albany pursued it tirelessly, because he'd never wanted something more.

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Created by roommates Mya Katz, Sean Semick, and Albany "LoverboyHartley" Case for Brackey's Game Jam 2024.2 (an event centered around producing a game in a week's time), A Wish Over Eventide is a short visual novel which takes roughly 15 minutes to complete. The game centers around the protagonist, a burnt-out young adult, having a wish they made on a star granted to become the hero of their own magical adventure. The only problem? They made that wish when they were five and their sensibilities have changed a lot since then.The object of the game is to travel around the mostly-evacuated Eventide Town and persuade three colorful dragon residents to leave their homes behind before their town is wiped off the map by a coastal storm. The game has a charming, lighthearted and often comedic tone, punctuated with heartfelt character moments and lively, cartoonish visuals.

click the image to visit the game's page!

Through the PNCA Center for Design headed by Kristen Rogers Brown, Albany "LoverboyHartley" Case was part of a team of six working to collaborate with local nonprofit Stone Soup PDX to create logos and merchandise for Stone Soup's monthly donor program. The team collaborated on a bi-weekly basis and occasionally met with representatives from Stone Soup to create a welcoming and warm logo and merch while being mindful of trauma-informed design and conveying the nonprofit's core values of community and learning united by cooking.Albany's role in the project was one of the illustrators and designers. Each of the illustrators/designers were to design their own version of the logo and merchandise to put together in a pitch deck and show to the clients, to give them a variety of well-developed options. He was efficient in producing ideas for the team's art directors, and while his concepts would go unused, he contributed heavily to the overall final color palette, assisted in final logo revisions. and group discussions regarding creative decision-making. After the logo was decided on, Albany spent time working on stickers and merchandise ideas for the rest of the project's duration.

Created in PNCA's Picture Book 1 course, taught by David Hohn, "Twinkle, Twinkle" was an experimental exploration by Albany "LoverboyHartley" Case into the world of picture book illustration. Adapted from the famous nursery song "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", this 28 page book tells the quiet story of a lonely individual setting out at night to contemplate taking their own life, when the personification of a twinkling star comes down from the sky to guide them back home. Albany wrote from a personal perspective when it came to his own experience with self-destructive intrusive thoughts and finding the hope it takes to keep living.Creating the book dummy was a hard lesson to learn for Albany, who was struggling managing a heavy school load at the time from other classes, but the project became a point of pride later on, for creating something entirely out of his wheelhouse from the ground up and managing stressors and the feedback of his instructor. Though the book itself had a fraught production, Albany finds it taught him a lot about being an illustrator, not just for picture books, and exists as an example of the rapid growth he experienced between his last two years at PNCA.

Following a stressful semester of a character design class, Albany "LoverboyHartley" Case enrolled in another class from the same professor, Yer Za Yue and experienced a true evolution of what he was capable of producing as an artist with Za's support. The resulting project of this period of growth is Little Brothers' Society, a pitch bible for a potential television show targeted to a 3-12 year old male demographic.After transitioning, Albany had to reflect on masculinity and what it meant to him now that he identified with the label. He distinctly remembers, shortly after accepting that he was trans, his father told him "don't learn anything from the men around you, don't become like them". With plenty of time to reflect on his own definition of masculinity, Albany found himself saddened young boys are never encouraged to explore what being a man means and are instead given a free pass for bad behavior because of their gender, bringing more and more bad men into a world that caters to them. So, he created a pitch for a potential cartoon dedicated to showing young boys positive role models and teaching positive masculinity, emotional intelligence, self-love and empathy, which was Little Brothers' Society.

As the first time Albany "LoverboyHartley" Case attempted character design for a fully fleshed out cast through all steps of ideation, The Clockkeeper's Heart was a stressful work to produce. Consisting of seven character designs. a story concept, and two posters, Albany finds this project represented one of his sharpest learning curves, but with the guidance of his professor, Yer Za Yue, Albany found himself learning a lot about his limits, how to push them, and how to work both with an art director and peers while discovering the things that contribute to making character designs whole. Albany was instructed to create character designs for a man, woman, child, villain, monster and pet, educating himself on the various design theories that define each category and create a readable design.Inspired by Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Howl's Moving Castle, The Clockkeeper's Heart is set in 1899 France, in an alternate version of the past inspired by steampunk fiction. In it, the protagonist, a young tailor named Petrus Sylvain, discovers a conspiracy around his city's clock tower which has supposedly never stopped ticking. The story focuses on romance, relationships, and what defines humanity. As Petrus meets the mysterious clockkeeper who is bound to the tower and more machine than man, their relationship deepens into close friendship and love, while uncovering the conspiracy of France's shadowy Monarch quietly creating an entirely different industrial revolution, one where human souls power tireless machines and keep the wheels of the world ever turning without thought. Along the way, Petrus also meets Maximus, the robotic pet of the clockkeeper, local inventor Susanna Rachelle, her daughter Eve, and even the inevitable ticking of time itself.

When it came to his thesis year at PNCA, Albany "LoverboyHartley" Case had to demonstrate everything he'd learned and had too many ideas and messages to do it with. In the latter part of his third year, though, he became very interested in horses, and chose to use that new interest as inspiration for his thesis, which he had already wanted to be an authentic queer narrative. This would take the form of a pitch bible for a hypothetical animated film which aimed to tell a positive queer story with a happy ending, directed at a general audience. This queer story would be accessible to all ages and had the goal of trying to remove queer stories from a label of being "adult content". With this, the foundation was laid, and Albany would combine his newfound appreciation for horses, his desire to tell unapologetic stories of men who love men, and his background living in the country to create Off the Bit.Albany mentored under illustrator Zach Meyer and proposed a pitch bible containing three character designs and reference sheets, the script for one scene, three backgrounds, a logo, sticker merchandise, an illustrated scene, miscellaneous illustrations and all the concept art that came with the project. The project was presented in its finished form in the spring of 2025 after almost two years of production and Albany considers it one of if not the strongest example of his capabilities as an artist and designer.

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