ELLANA - Ellana Caldin
First batch and main character of my graduation project: "ELLANA: The pact of the mist-riders". The goal was to create a video-game loosely based on the book "Ellana" by Pierre Bottero.
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The story takes place in a fantasy world heavily fragmented into guilds, clans and casts, where magic is common place. We follow Ellana, a member of a secret guild called "The Marchombres" who are - rumor says - able to ride the mist. As elusive and furtive as she is sassy, she roams the dangerous streets of Al-Jeit, the capital city of the empire, looking for her next challenge.
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Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it !
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Huge thanks to all my classmates, all the teachers and art consultants that gave me feedback during my two years at New3dge concept art school (Especially Simon Tosovsky, Choro Choi and Nils Carsten who helped me push this particular project) and Aurélien Fournier for supervising the whole concept art program and the feedback he gave me all throughout the course !
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Finally thank you Pierre Bottero for writting the serie of books my project is based off. I absolutely devoured these books when I was younger and they always had a very special place to my heart. Ellana especially was an inspiration to me at a time when I didn't know who I was and reading those books definitely helped shape who I am now.
These were early exploration. The overall look of Ellana wasn't defined yet and I was also still exploring around the type of magical weapon she would yield.
More explorations. I explored different shapes and level of organicness for the main blade weapon. At this point, I knew I wanted to dig deeper into the "mist" visual theme
Head explorations. The body mark exploration was quite important as I wanted to have a visual hint that her body went through some kind of transformation (When she acquired her mist-riding abilities).
Mist abilities and mist blade explorations. I was trying to explore what mist-riding would look like. I wanted it to be visually close to the mist blade (as they have the same origin) so I explored both at the same time
Color explorations