ADZE - 2025

Open-Source Design Project, Blender

Modeler, Surface Artist, and Assistant Designer

As a project rooted in black African representation in digital media, we sought to further explore this dynamic as it pertained to the genre of fantasy. Through both my collaborators' research and my own, we landed on the Ewe people’s myth of the Adze as a decent parallel to Western depictions of the vampire. This provided an interesting design opportunity rooted in the comparison of the two’s similarities in aesthetic and differences in subtext. We then worked to develop this into a working design, which used another pre-existing model from the Open-Source Afro Hair Library as a base model. I then took these character sketches and adapted them into a full model with original hair, jewelry, and texturing created to adapt the Adze myth and incorporate the Ewe people's aesthetic and textile practices.

This model was created with the intent of adding it to the Open-Source Afro Hair Library, a space with the goal of creating 3D assets that represent the textures, styles, and traditions of black and brown peoples in a way that studio animation and games have thus far failed to achieve. Working alongside the creator of the platform, Professor A.M. Darke, my team attempted to identify a gap in the existing library, pinpointing fantasy as a thematic hole in the current collection. It then became rather obvious that we didn’t want to simply take black African aesthetics and overlay them on the overwhelmingly white historical backdrop of Tolkien or Gygax, so we instead chose to research comparable myths from the African continent. Specifically, we looked for a mythos that would have been prevalent at a similar point in history as those from medieval Europe, eventually selecting a West African myth not entirely dissimilar in description to vampires, but still fundamentally unique in its depiction, themes, and visual language. This project has been submitted to the library and is currently in the process of being added.