Sandro Girardi - creature and character art portfolio

The Hunting Grounds Project

 In this project I was in charge of making the concept ideas for 2 seperate organic modeleres (Hugo Courtel and Flore Argentieri) this specific concept was for Hugo to model and texture, the idea behind it was to have a humanoid tribal man that stalked the land in search of the eggs of a giant turtle which he would store for later use in his pouches.

At first I was unsure if I wanted more of a raptor-like creature that blended with its rocky surrounding of more of a lumbering giant that when resting could pass off as being a mountain, in the end while discussing with the other members of this project we decided for all involved it would be more fun to have a ridiculous scale difference between the tribal man and the creture, Lenape. 

Insect Mount

In this personal project I wanted to grab the idea of British and French horseback hunting and place it in a science fiction environment. To step away from the traditional 4 legged beast of burden, I decided to go for a more agile raptor-like creature. I thought an interesting touch to add could be for it to have wings to leap\glide with, further making it an ideal mount to chase pray over long distances with.

In these images I worked on trying to find a mid ground between traditonal saddles and more futuristic shapes; I also took reference from medieval armoured saddles since I felt it could give further storytelling into the type of world\culture it is and the level of technology present in it.

I am very proud of how this image turned out and am looking to push it even further down the line, the more i find myself thinking on it the more ideas come to mind on how to flesh out the story further.

Living Weapon

This was a small project that started from a prompt I gave myself called "living weapon", I was and still am fascinated by insects so I decided create this creature with the intention to see how far I could push my rendering on a painting and where i needed to work more on, I was enjoying the idea so I began to break it down further to illustrate how the mechanics of this creature's weaponized arms could work.

Achromatic Project

These itirations were the beginning of the concept art phase for a student movie I was working on throughout my graduation year at ArtFX, we wanted the main antagonist in this strictly bicolor world to be conniving, lanky and overall untrustworthy looking. In this world the characters were created through paint, which gave them the ability to morph at will into whatever shape they desired, the designs on the last image represent the ideation for this. Our main antagonist's goal was to frighten the other inhabitants of the world of Achromatic by turning its head into an abomination.

After testing the initial design in 3D of our antagonist Cerulean, we found that a lot of his traits did not translate too well in 3D space, which lead me to look for a simpler representation without loosing the feeling of him being a conniving feind! So we opted to go for a still lanky yet more robust build, in the end he became less conniving and more of an arrogant being that looked down on others he deemed inferior. I loved designing this character all the way through , its been one of my favourite projects since it also helped me step out of my comfort zone.

I also was lucky to get my hands on helping to design this character called Taffee. At first she was to be a large and imposing character that towered over the protagonist of the film, she was in some ways a representation of vanity as in the original script she would be followed by a flock of admirers, like birds flocking around an alpha. But we also found some issues regading this character in 3D so she too went through a simplicity pass, resulting in her becoming a rather stout and petite but feisty character. 

The main character in Achromatic was essentially a missfit that was trying to pave her own path in the world hoping to find her place; though I didn't design the original character I had a blast working on what was meant to be her transformation sequence within the student film as she would try and mimic (the antagonist) Cerulean's pranks and morph into something grotesque too. Designing this was both fun and tough since I needed to create something cartoony yet horrifying at the same time.  Sadly in the end her transformation was greatly simplified so this model was never made!

One of the main challenges of creating the world of Achromatic was to maintain an abstract visuals while keeping them recognizable as things which exist today. This tower was meant for another character that did not make it into the student film called the "town crier", his sole job was to warn the villages of incoming danger and to visually represent this i wanted even the building itself to feel unstable or precarious. 

These were some designs made for the town crier, a character whos only goal was to warn the villagers below of incoming danger, its a shame he was cut early from the script but it was incredibly funny to come up with ideas for him!

In the original script of Achromatic there was a shop selling representations that the inhabitants could read and turn themselves into, similar to how fashion magazines work nowadays, alongside that we wanted posters to give some background storytelling on the dangers these characters face. The idea was that water or rain was fatal to them since it could wash them away. These were also tremendous fun to do despite them never making it into the film itself.

Whale Creature

Last but not least; a small project which was done last year in collaboration with a student by the name of Daria Burdukovskaya, where-in I designed a marine creature similar to a killer whale which would become the host to a parasitic entity that would latch onto it, this project was later transfered into 3D as an organic model which was rigged and animated.