New Brave World
Social Platform Avatar Figures
(Unreleased)
Genesis
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I was contacted by Rohan Knuckey, an Art Director with a strong eye for character-driven projects, who was involved in the development of a new crypto-based social platform by New Brave World in Miami. He had found my work on Instagram and told me he felt a strong connection with my style. I felt the same when he explained how he understood the characters I create. So we arranged our first online meeting.
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In that meeting he introduced me to the project and we agreed on how to move forward. Later, in a second call, an illustrator joined the team, and we all discussed the initial moodboard: a mix of tribal energy and urban attitude, something halfway between an Oceanic tribe and streetwear culture.
These are the initial concepts created by the project's illustrator.
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My role was to bring those concepts into physical characters that could later be 3D-scanned and turned into avatars for the platform
Process
I started by building the bodies and clothing from the illustrator’s concepts, keeping the volumes clean and well-defined so we could add the details later.
At that point they informed me that they had stopped working with the illustrator, and asked me to redesign the characters completely in my own style.
The original direction leaned heavily toward the ethnic side, but once I was given full creative freedom I took the designs to a more urban-tribal territory, which felt much more natural for me. I prepared new concepts based on that direction and sent them over. They loved them and gave me the green light to continue.
From there the process was very fluid. I adapted the bodies I had already sculpted to fit the new designs, refining proportions, shapes and clothing.
Technically, these pieces are some of the strongest I’ve made because they have that balance between very polished surfaces (almost like 3D renders) and the organic plasticity of polymer clay.
That duality is something we had specifically mentioned in our first meeting, and I put a lot of attention into keeping those subtle transitions that a 3D program can’t reproduce.
The result was a set of characters with presence, clean silhouettes and a tactile quality that made them work both as physical pieces and as digital avatars.
After the modeling I made some digital colour tests to explore possible palettes, since the pieces were never painted.
Outcome
The launch was planned for Art Basel Miami, but the project stopped after the crypto crash in November 2022, just a month before the show.
Even so, the figures remain an important part of my body of work. They represent a moment where I was trusted with both the modelling and the visual direction in a high-pipeline project.
