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Florence Harrison (1877–1955) was an Art Nouveau and Pre-Raphaelite illustrator of poetry and children’s books. Many of her books were published by Blackie and Sons. She illustrated books by notable Pre-Raphaelite circle poets Christina Rossetti, William Morris and Sir Alfred Tennyson.

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Some stuff from last summer : I did these images for the latest artstation challenge, whose theme was “Dragon’s rise”. A good occasion to do some fantasy environment ! It’s a mix between line arts, photoshop and blender work.

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Igrin - a personal project

To change from all the doom and gloom in my TL, I may share a big presentation of my personal project I did at Ubisoft last month :

So, what is my project ? It's called "Igrin", and as the subtitle said, it's supposed to end as a lovecraftian/dark fantasy illustrated novel. In 2018 my former AD challenged me to do something personal :

As said on the card, a trip to Prague and various games (especially Bloodborne) inspired me this universe, and I quickly started filling a big google doc. A first image was produced :

It's about a city on the verge of falling in the hands of an empire (that may ressemble a lot to the first French Empire blended with Friedrich II's Prussia), of course, and a spy that will find there that not all cities are worth visiting. There's shades of cosmic horror, mixed with a fantasy story inspired from 18th/19th century European history.

I have fleshed the story over the following year, using the inktober as a pretext to produce 31 "story beats".

Once I had the base of the story, I started sketching the characters. I'm not a very good character designer so my first version of J, the main protagonist, was kinda derivative of a certain adoptive daughter of a famous witcher...

Nonetheless, I started doing more detailled illustrations, sometimes based on the inktober sketches, other times just on descriptions I had already written.

Around the end of 2019, I left my job at Pretty Simple games, to focus on freelance work, and I found myself with more time on my hands. That's where something "clicked" visually, and I found the right "visual language" (working on Vampire the Masquerade helped too).

Once I had this, the roadblock was sorta removed, and I could finally create the character I had in mind. At the same time, I was doing a lot of characters on Syberia 4, so my chara design improved seriously. Of course influences are still showing, but at least my character is a blend of ideas instead of a direct transposition of an existing design.

Then Covid hit, and suddenly I had a lot of time to think about this project. I started teaching concept art and it became a great source of ideas (I'll come back to this). Then next autumn, instead of the inktober, I challenged myself to write the whole story for the Nanowrimo:

Around 60 pages of story after this, I had a base for a lot of illustrations, that I could use as a source for demos, experiments and generally to build my portfolio.

It was also an endless source for school assignments, and I have tortured my students over the last few years with baroque props and material studies because of this :D

Obviously, I started having something pretty solid, and this image in particular made a great impression in my portfolio, opening me the doors of Ubisoft and a certain licence where weird people in hoods run around historical cities...

That's where I did my most successful series of images, where I fully embraced the "cosmic horror" aspect of the story. This is where we are at the moment.

And clearly, there's more to come.

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Pierce-the-sky Manor, isolated on the top of a hill, deep within the forests of Boromea, is said to shelter a witch, or an even worse evil at the top of its towers... On the red moon nights, dark creatures gather around, beckoned by whatever hides there.

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There’s a protest going on against AI art over on artstation, so I feel like now is the time for me to make a statement on this issue! 

I wholeheartedly support the ongoing protest against AI art. Why? Because my artwork is included in the datasets used to train these image generators without my consent. I get zero compensation for the use of my art, even though these image generators cost money to use, and are a commercial product. 

Musicians are not being treated the same way. Stability has a music generator that only uses royalty free music in their dataset. Their words: “Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues.” Why is the work of visual artists being treated differently?

Many have compared image generators to human artists seeking out inspiration. Those two are not the same. My art is literally being fed into these generators through the datasets, and spat back out of a program that has no inherent sense of what is respectful to artists. As long as my art is literally integrated into the system used to create the images, it is commercial use of my art without my consent.

Until there is an ethically sourced database that compensates artists for the use of their images, I am against AI art. I also think platforms should do everything they can to prevent scraping of their content for these databases. 

Artists, speak out against this predatory practice! Our art should not be exploited without our consent, and we deserve to be compensated when our art is exploited for commercial use. 

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It's that time of the year!

Featuring my tired face, and most of my year's art (that is not under NDA) !

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✨ Preston, the Vanisher  ✨ Painted for Magic: The Gathering - Jumpstart 2022 AD: Kieran Yanner

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I realize I have not done any presentation post since I came back ! So I am Edouard, a concept artist based in Bordeaux, France, currently working at ubisoft as a senior concept artist on Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Here’s some older stuff based on my IP Igrin, a dark fantasy illustrated novel inspired from Bloodborne, lovecraftian lore and XIXth century Europe. You can find some more recent art on my artstation : https://www.artstation.com/silber And for a more “curated” version there’s my website : https://www.edouard-noisette.com/

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J. Ritter was one of the finest, and deadliest spies of the Halburgian empire. Some say she gained her rank by killing a whole bunch of corrupted nobles, but maybe there was just a hunting accident epidemic this year...

Wherever she travels, the empire follows, and the cities she visits are quickly falling to Halburgian troops. Now she’s on her way to the mysterious and remote city of Igrin...

Jena Ritter is the main character of my book project "Igrin". The inspirations are quite obvious, but I wanted someone with an easy to spot silhouette for my illustrations. These two illustrations were based on pictures from a Dolce and Gabanna fashion show, which featured exactly the kind of fashion I was aiming for. Both were painted on procreate, so there's timelapses for both !

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after eight years, I finally updated my huge Historical Fashion Reference & Resources Doc! Now in the form of a MUCH more easily updated Google Doc with better organization, refreshed links, and five more pages of books and online resources.

I know tumblr hates links, but it’s worth it for a doc that I can now update with far more regularity going forward! RIP to the original, you did your duty for far longer than you should have. 😔🙏🏼

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Igrin - Night hunt

"Finding a good shooting position is always important. Getting on top of these parts of the cathedral was challenging, but from there I could see everything... And shoot anything !" A fun thing done with blender, inspired from my IP "Igrin" and of course from Bloodborne

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- BEYOND THE VEIL - As they walked through the catacombs, Jena and Alma crossed into a different place. The cinders of an unseen fire were falling on the ground, and remains of giants beings dominated the underground landscape. Or was it idols to unseen gods ? While progressing through the eldritch landscape, the spies witnessed structures mirroring Igrin's buildings, but crumbling, with doors opening on nothing, as if it was another version of the city swallowed by the veil. It could have been a grotesque parody, but the bones at the feet of the architectures seemed very real. Finally, after passing through another giant skull, the two spies reached a cliff. The darkness below was deep, and it felt like it was opening to the center of the earth. A chill went through Jena's spine, she felt like something there was watching. Or was it where they came from ? A series of illustrations based on my illustrated novel "Igrin", delving more into the cosmic horror side of it. It's been done mostly on blender, except for the character that were posed with Daz, and the skull on the third image that I partially sculpted in 3dcoat. There is also a bit of megascans, and some kitbash for the architectural elements.

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Moonlit Abbey

A demo I did for my students at New3dge school in Paris. I wanted to show my process using a 3d base then photobashing on top of it ! Of course I used my IP Igrin as a base, I love baroque abbeys, and I did a sketch of one as a demo a few month ago, so I already had all the references I needed. Rendered on blender cycles, the trees are megascans assets but all the rest is my own.

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Igrin - The Treasury

At the very end of the "high town" of Igrin, a bit under the Basilicas lies the most recent building of the religious district of the city : the Treasury. Built to contain the relics of the bishops of the Ludovician Church, it ended up hosting most of the riches of the said Church. Enough to attract a greedy conqueror like the Halburgian Empire... But those relics aren't just gold... Some even may still be alive ! A new illustration for my IP Igrin, that I had in mind for a while now. I really like this kind of topdown view, and I really wanted to explore the more Baroque side of Igrin, so the Treasury (modeled after Dresden's Hofkirche) seemed the perfect candidate. I painted a rough sketch on procreate (that way I already had an idea of the scope, the colors and the perspective, though those things changed a bit in the final) before building and kitbashing the whole thing in Blender, then overpainting in photoshop.