Sara Hermellin - Concept art 2023

For my graduation project, I wanted to create a video game freely based off the french fantasy book "Ellana" by Pierre Bottero. The goal was to create three characters inspired from the book

Ellana Caldin

Ellana Caldin is a master Marchombre, she is the main protagonist of the game. As skillful and furtive  as she is sassy, she wanders the streets of Al-Jeit searching for her next challenge. Taking advantage of her stealth and mist-riding abilities, you will be able to explore and unravel the dark secrets of the capital.

The explorations for Ellana were rather organic and I went through countless back and forths before settling on an overall appearance. One of my main question was: what the graft/her magical weapon should look like (I went through many sketches and type of weapons before eventually settling for the mist blade design in the final image). Defining what her mist abilities would look like and harmonizing it with her appearance was also quite challenging

She is the main character and so I really tried to put a lot of energy to find a good overall appearance for her as it would then be a foundation to base my other characters off.

Ewilan Gil' Sayan

Ewilan is a young apprentice within the rich and powerful Imaginer's cast. Although coming from radically different worlds, she befriended the main protagonist and will help her in her endeavors using her imagination-projecting abilities.

Ewilan's exploration was quite linear as I feel like I switched from one idea to the other with much more of a clear connection than Ellana.

My main question early on was about what her imagination projector should look like. I tried different tools until settling on a ring, which slowly became the sort of glove-ring mix that you can see in the final image.

I explored also a lot also around her head and particularly her ornaments, but after figuring out the outfit, and realizing how complex it was going to be, I opted to have a simpler face so it creates some rest areas to the overall design.

Siam Till' Illan

Siam is part of Al-Jeit elite guard and is a seasoned fighter despite her young age. She is tightly related to the Imaginer's cast as the primary goal of the guard was to ensure the protection of the Imaginers.

Siam's exploration was easier than the two other characters. Since she was a secondary character, it was more about making her fit the designs that I already created with Ellana and Ewilan.

The "lot of harness" theme present in this character actually influenced the design of the other characters. I really liked the idea and so I then adapted the design of the others to fit together with Siam.

Huge thanks to Simon Tosovsky, Choro Choi and Nils Carstens for their amazing feedbacks during the project !

Group project

Tower 42

Those are concepts for "Tower 42", a project about firefighters in an faraway exoplanet that's naturally on fire. The entire fauna and flora has evolved around this constraint. The firefighters live in huge tower-spaceships sent from space.

I was tasked with creating a few characters from a team of firefighters based off classes (cartographer, lancer, refiller) along with a key-art illustration to showcase the universe of the game.

The concepts I made for Tower 42 were part of a collaborative effort (Everyone in the team was tasked with a different part of the world of Tower 42). The concepts were then taken by a Game art and VFX team to create gameplay and actual in-game assets and cinematics.

Concept art team: Samuel Lauro, Axel Roux, Unai Loidi, Baptiste Guerin

Big thank you to Jens Claessens, Timo Peters, and Mike Azevedo for their feedbacks during the project !

Portfolio

Papeebr' Hossar

As part of a longer course, I was tasked to create a sort of a shaman-like character and then decline them into different skinlines. The theme was quite open and I chose to revisit the aesthetics of 70s scifi and fantasy (I drew a lot of inspiration from Moebius for this character).

Monster High School

Students, teachers, janitors.. Everyone has a monster form in Monster High School ! Some just hide it better than other..

Project 1N53K7

A project about a team of scientist-explorers stranded on an alien planet made of volcanic rocks

Alphonse Mecha

This project was about designing mech and mech weapons for a battle game. The brief was rather open and I chose to add an art nouveau twist to the universe !

These were my first iterations, they were purely shape-based, I actually decided to add the Art nouveau twist after these iterations

To finish, here are a few of the works that I've been able to do during my two years at New3dge Concept art !

Thanks

Many thanks to all the teachers and professionals that gave me feedback during those two great years at New3dge concept art: Wouter Gort, Boell Oyino, Jason Horley, Paul Riebe to only name a few that helped me make the images above !

Huge thanks to all my classmates from who I also learnt a ton through the year ! Definitely wouldn't have improved that much without being around them.

Thanks Aurélien Fournier for supervising the program and his feedbacks through the year !

All the New3dge team

Special thanks to Pilar and the gremlin gang for being a constant emotionnal support through the hardships