Concept Art – Warp Elves

Happy Halloween everyone!  We’ve been planning today’s posts for a while, and we managed to rope Paul Davies into a great job helping us bring our Halloween tale to life.  If you haven’t yet, go ahead over to the Halloween Short Story post for Searchlight and dive into our tale that introduces the first truly frightening monsters into the Tellest universe.  I’m going to try and introduce scary new horrors every year so that Tellest can feel that much more robust, but the warp elves are our first big push in that direction.

If you’ve read the story, and you want to learn more about the warp elves, and see how we designed them, come along and see Paul’s fantastic work!

Everything started with a sketch (and a robust one at that).  The concept of warp elves was kind of a mix of vampires and a bunch of ancient folklore.  We wanted these creatures to be manic and frightening, but we wanted them to have their own world to withdraw to—one that would be horrifying to us, but which became home to them over countless centuries.

The warp elves use portals to move from their pocket dimension to ours, and those portals remain open long enough for them to capture a victim and bring them back to their homes.  As you can see from Paul’s art though, the portal isn’t a complacent thing either.  The portal itself is almost vampiric all on its own, sappign the life force out of the area where it comes into shape on Tellest.

Paul cleaned our awful looking warp elf up here a little bit.  When we were putting him together, we knew that the world that they’ve called home for millennia wasn’t an easy one to adjust to.  The warp elves are far more primal than the civilizations you might find on Tellest.  There isn’t any sunlight in their pocket dimension, and the landscape is harsh and unforgiving.  The land isn’t suitable for farming, so they’ve spent their time scavenging for the animals they can find.

Here you can see a little more details about the world the warp elves come from.  They have floating islands (reminiscent of The Fall’s Shandranar), but they can’t reach them.  They also have a substance that’s like corrupted lava—a molten, green liquid that almost looks like foul slime.

Here you have the full piece, with all the extra detail that Paul put into it.  He did a wonderful job, as always, and we’re so happy with what he delivered.

We hope you like what you saw of this year’s Halloween project.  It was definitely fun to explore a darker project.  And who knows, maybe this isn’t the last you’ve seen of the frightening warp elves!

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Michael DeAngelo

Michael is the creator of the Tellest brand of fantasy novels and stories. He is actively seeking to expand the world of Tellest to be accessible to everyone.