Dakshita Dehalwar - Environment Concept Art Project 2024

Pictorial Project: The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi

Hi! I am Daki an emerging concept artist who is very enthusiastic, talking about anything video games!! This project was done for my Junior Thesis and it took me about a span of more than 6 months. The project was about selecting an already published book and illustrating it, in this case, I chose Adventures of Amina Al Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty.

Enjoy, I hope you like my process and the hard work that has gone into this project.

General Mood Board

Cover Page

I ended up doing this piece last because I wanted the cover to reflect the most updated set of my skills as it is the first artwork that any viewer would be viewing. It took a lot of time to render the ship, It took a lot of research to figure out what kind of ship I would want to make as the setting is middle eastern. I really enjoy coloring things in the sunset colors of day.

My intention for the cover page was that "the adventure is starting", something thrilling and exciting!

Amina's House

This piece was actually done twice I did not like how it turned out the first time so I re-did the whole thing and the improvement definitely shows!

The one that failed (image directly below)(process shown) - I feel that it failed to deliver because the environment itself was not interesting enough to hold one's attention, I feel that the atmosphere was there,  but the whole image was too saturated and you could not figure out where to exactly look!! Using blender materials turned out to be a time saver however it did not end up fitting my semi-realistic and goucahe rendering style and instead stood out unevenly.

The painting that succeeded!

Ksar Desert Fort

This concept is based on a Ksar Desert Fort, and I wanted to give it the atmosphere of it being hot but also whimsical. All of the revisions that took place with this piece paid off in the final version, especially because I was not too fond of the 3d Model but I tried my hardest to make it work. 

I started by collecting references and doing some very messy sketches and thumbnails to figure out what kind of perspective I wanted to go with. That followed my colored Sketch, 3D Model, paint over, and finally my Rendering Layer. The major changes I made were made during the paint over process.

The City of Aden 

This was surprisingly my first piece in the series, I faced a lot of challenges when creating it as I was still figuring out my way around Blender which was soon to be incorporated into my workflow. It took about 2-3 months of learning new software, figuring out how I wanted to paint, actually painting all of it, feedback, adding shading, and finally Finishing touches.

Please take your time when you look at all of the details I have incorporated into this piece of work!

House designs - My professor asked me to do about 40 house designs for this city, I thought that was a crazy number, but I still decided to do it. I did not end up using a lot of houses but I learned something about house design, placement and changing proportions of things. Here are a few house designs!

Making 3D - making assets and figuring out position and framing.

Salima's Courtyard

This piece did not require as many changes as some of the others in this series, I had a lot of fun doing it and playing with the colors. Truthfully I could not figure out how I wanted this piece to look like, just from the thumbnail - I was having a hard time with perspective so I pulled my 3d skills out and built a little set for this piece!

Shipwreck at Socotra

This piece was definitely one of the hardest to do as I went through a lot of compositional changes, trying to figure out what it was that I actually wanted in focus. At first, my ship was small because I wanted it off into the distance, yet I still wanted it to be in focus - my professor said that to put it into focus I would have to make it bigger as another part of the piece (the ship's mast) was currently in focus. I tried to make the ship bigger and bigger until it took about 50% of the screen's real estate, however, I was still not successful.

At this point I was getting tired of looking at my piece so I decided to play around with the 3D model to see what would be better, even after having painted the whole piece, I came to accept that it was not working out and was ready to change it and repaint it. That is exactly what I did, I changed the position of the ship and I realized I  liked the new composition way better which sparked my interest in the piece again and I was excited to paint. 

Closer to the end I was having a hard time figuring out the colors of the scene as it was a nighttime scene. My professor suggested I get a reference of the same time of day I was trying to depict, and take the colors from there - he even helped me by adjusting values and painting over my piece loosely to show me how it was supposed to look like. Finally, I got it right and I decided to add waves splashing against this ship, to make it look even cooler! Definitely learned a lot from this piece.

Failed Piece below

The successful composition/piece below

Cavern of Dream

I finished this piece a lot closer to the deadline, so I was unable to get my professor's feedback on it, however, I made sure to keep in mind all of the things he had told me previously about my sketch for this piece. This was my time to put everything that I had learned throughout the year into practice. I had a hard time with this piece but I tried my best to do a good job with the lighting, one of the books I used as a reference was "Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter" by James Gurney.

That Concludes my Thesis with the Final Image!! 

Thank you for looking through my Junior Thesis, I am a concept artist and Illustrator, not a 3d Artist - I only use 3d to aid me in making concept art so according to my use of 3D I never make my models so detailed as I know I will always end up painting over it.

This Thesis was a period of growth for me and I learned a lot of things about art and myself, I am incredibly proud of all of the work I have done on this and will continue to do going forward.

Thank you for hosting Rookies 2024 and giving me this opportunity to showcase my work!

- Dakshita (Daki) Dehalwar, School of Visual Arts, BFA Illustration 2025

Here is a Link to my Website!

Here is a Link to my Instagram!

Here is my LinkedIn!