2021 Grad Show

Jennah Heshmat

VCD – Character Design & Illustration

I'm an illustrator, and I love stories about people who care too much. The dark, the gothic, and the romantic have given me comfort since I was definitely too young for it. I try to make work that resonates with people like me, to tell them they're not alone.

Cover The cover.

Interior Cover

Cover Mockup

Board Game Packaging The mockups for the packaging of the board game.

Board Mockup A mockup of the board, with all the cards in place and some tokens already in play.

Custom dice Custom dice that would come with the board game :)

Carmilla

Carmilla is one of my favourite vampire stories, but it is so hard to find a book cover for it that I like -- it's simply not as prominent like Dracula is. I decided to do a revamp of the book cover and create a concept for a potential board game to be sold alongside it.

The Ifrit's Bride - Comic

Here are the first six pages of an eight-page comic I made for The Ifrit's Bride, my gothic Islamic narrative about a girl who marries a man with a secret. This is an opening scene, but it depicts the aftermath of the events between Leila and her husband, Emran.

The Discovery

Colour Script And of course, the colour script :)

The Ifrit's Bride - Storyboards

I storyboarded a scene from my story for an animation class. In this scene, Leila comes across a room she's not meant to enter, after taking some time to explore the palace. This is where she learns a strange secret that her husband had been trying to keep from her.

The Temple This image represents the city players would originate from.

The Wilds Characters would traverse the strange ruins in the Wilds, keeping each other alive as long as possible...

The Mountain And the mountain atop which the players must find themselves is where the Divine calls to the Prophet.

The Calling The Prophet learns that the voice she has been hearing belongs to the Divine. But she knows this is a death sentence, not just for her, but for her closest friends...

Trials The Prophet takes her Disciple with her through the uncharted Wilds. She knows the way, but this is a cold and hostile realm, and she can't afford to die so early on.

Meeting the Divine Unfortunately, she lost her Disciple along the way... and had to meet him again at the top of the mountain.

The Smothering

The Smothering is a concept for a tabletop roleplaying game with the premise that all the player characters are doomed to die -- so how do you find the fun in it? It follows a Prophet who must make a pilgrimage to a mountain to extinguish a torch that will never go out, accompanied by Disciples who must maintain their sanity along the way. There are three major environments I drew and three spot illustrations depicting a possible story, all meant to evoke the imagination and give the players something to think about.