Saumya
Oberoi

A 6-month-long project where I pretended to be a member of the 'art department' of a hypothetical, feature-length animated adaptation of the novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), by the inimitable Ursula K. Le Guin. Ultimately, the project resulted in the creation of a 100 page 'Art-Of' book for the fake production: scroll to the bottom to see it!

The first step of the project was annotating and indexing the book. In the software 'Obsidian' I manually documented the location of each passage containing any information useful for development, throughout the 300+ page novel.

A moodboard was created for the project, later sequenced to match the order of the events of the book. Images include artwork and photographs from other artists, book covers of different editions and other officially recognized art, as well as a few of my own sketches.

Below are snippets from the character design process...

...resulting in the final designs, shown below.

Character designs were contextualized in the world of the novel, a vibrant and painstakingly crafted setting - developed in enough detail to be an entire character of its own. By experimenting with a variety of visual styles for these 'key beat' illustrations, keeping in mind animateability yet avoiding excess restraint, a large set of 'options' for the production were eventually obtained. Some styles, more successful than others, would be effective across multiple scenes of the film; others, more specific to their rendered shot, would be replaced in production.

Below are some, but not all, of the rendered illustrations created for the project. To see them all, check out the 'Art Of' book linked here, as well as embedded at the bottom of this page!

All of the artwork made for the project is compiled into 'The Art of the Left Hand of Darkness'. The book features passages from the original novel as well as my own mock production notes, and you can flip through the whole thing below!