Concept Design Mini Portfolio

The Masque of the Red Death

What if... The Masque of the Red Death (E.A. Poe - 1842) was set in a futuristic world?

This is my first academic project for the class of Concept Design, and the goal was to redesign the aesthetic of a story, a novel or a fable. My choice was to represent the dark novel of Poe in a futuristic world detailed with gothic elements. The main character is Death, a wanderer android who finds his guilty victims, like Prince Prospero, a selfish man locked safely in his castle.

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

What if... The Nutcracker anche the Mouse King (E.T.A. Hoffmann - 1816) was set in the medieval age?

For this project, my goal was to draw historically accurate armors and then modify them to reflect different traits of the character, like the long helmet point to evoke a mouse's snout.

The Mouse King

The character is described as a rat with seven heads, so I decided to divide them into seven brothers, united under one house. Each brother has his own personality and his own unique way of fighting.

I took inspiration from what we think it is a "rat king" in real life: in the colonies it often happens that the tails of the rats are tied into a single knot, so they are bound together until their death. I wanted to emphasize this "knot" symbol as the eternal bond that links the seven brothers.

The Nutcracker & Marie

For the Nutcracker, I drew a large armor, with big pauldrons and a Stechhelm, to evoke a massive and grand presence.
The particularity I thought for this character is that his right arm would be missing, hidden by the presence of a cape (as in the original story, the wooden toy has a broken arm).
I wanted to represent Marie as a knight too, inspired by the icon of Jeanne d'Arc. I designed her armor to evoke the shape of a skirt, and the plumes on her helmet to represent a ponytail.