Alisen Gant: Character and Concept Art

Stitch-Craft: A Tale Between Threads

Stitch-Craft is a concept for a video game that served as my senior thesis project at Ringling College of Art and Design. Here are some scenes and character concepts from the project!

The Summoning

"The Summoning" is the first scene we see in Stitch-Craft and functions as an opening cutscene where we meet our player character, the Thread Golem, and the apprentice. I wanted this moment to show how chaotic magic can be when used by someone like an apprentice who isn't experienced and doesn't realize how in over their head they are!

Midnight Visitors

This scene takes place later in the game concept where that summoning spell we saw in the beginning has left some "loose threads". The purpose of this scene was to create that feeling of holding your breath before you  dive into a battle through an emphasis on strong lighting and color contrast. This illustration had some unique challenges because I needed to show enough of the environment so the viewer could see the level layout while still achieving the look of a workshop at night when no one is working.

Arcane realm

"The portal loosely resembled something like a mirage, threads of the veil between worlds swayed in the view of the chaotic realm that could only be described as pure magic."

In Stitch-Craft magic is not naturally occurring, requiring spell casters to access their power from another plane parallel to the one they exist on. I struggled to visualize what this realm of chaos and magic looked like and I settled on the idea of a constant cycle of building things up and then letting them dissolve back into nothing. I drew a lot of inspiration from the Surrealism movement and Roger Dean specifically, beginning with ink blotting on wet paper to see what abstract shapes I could make. From there I scanned it and worked digitally to sketch buildings and color the piece. 

The Thread Golem

This character was the main protagonist and "player character" for my senior thesis. I had never seen a game where sewing and spell casting were combined and I wanted to create a character that displayed a "tiny but mighty" attitude. Sewing and summoning spells are two ways we see things created so why not combine the two to create a character that although is very small, makes a big impact. I drew a lot of inspiration from my own sewing box and armor from medieval Europe.

The Apprentice

Say hello to the young, naive, and spunky enchanter-in-training that started it all! With the pressure to perform well in her apprenticeship and a need to prove herself to her peers she is the cause of most of the trouble in the workshop (albeit accidentally). In Stitch-Craft she serves as a guide to help the Thread Golem navigate the shop without being seen and cover up the mess she made in the first place. 

The Monsters of Stitch-Craft

Keeping up with the sewing theme it was really fun to make these enemies and think about how the player would battle these guys! The Manikin was a big challenge to think about and design how this serpentine creature would move. The balance of trying to make these creatures intimidating while made up of mostly sewing supplies was tricky but a really great experience.

The Hive Mistress

My monster creation process from my last year at Ringling College! 

Meeting the Hive Mistress

What would happen if you went up into the attic of an old Victorian home thinking you would find a small wasp infestation only to find there was something much bigger and much more dangerous than you were expecting? The main goal for this piece was to have the same effect you would in a horror movie when you see the monster in its full glory for the first time! This piece relied heavily on lighting and varying the level of detail around the painting to draw the eye into our main focus, the Hive Mistress. 

Architecture Gods: Goddess of Gaudi

Relying on the whimsical, almost surreal shapes that make Gaudi's work so iconic, my goal for this character was to display a very warm, welcoming and benevolent goddess that was part of a larger pantheon. You will see a design shift in the middle of my process work because although the original design functioned well alone, when placed in a lineup of other characters the silhouette was not as strong. I ended up combining sketches one and three from the second image to create the final design.