Hello!  My name is Erin Estep, and I hope you enjoyed my senior capstone project, part of the ATEC department at the University of Texas at Dallas.

 

This project revisits an old fictional universe I came up with as a preteen and continued working on up until I was 16 or 17.  Within said universe, there are certain divinely powerful beings that represent fundamental aspects of reality: the two "Arke'tha" are the sun and the moon, and the origin of all existence.  Their nine children are known as the "Deike'tha" - incarnate forms of various elements of the natural world, such as the wind, the ocean, life, and death, with each also possessing a special relationship to an ideological concept such as love, memory, or responsibility.  The Deike'tha were given physical form by their parents in order to guard the newborn world from evil that threatened it - and while not gods in the true sense, they nevertheless tend to take on a deific tint when viewed through the eyes of their wards.

 

Taking a leaf out of the book of works like the Dragonology series I loved as a kid, "Folio on the Two Opposing" is told through the lens of a fictional scholar, who was the process of making his own senior thesis centered around those nine legendary figures he would've grown up revering (and in the case of Sansellior, possibly idolizing!).  Unfortunately, a lot of his hard work researching the Deike'tha seems to have been lost...but a few of his notes on Sansellior and Sersilador managed to find their way back into the light!

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My goal with this project was to demonstrate via two Deike'tha - characters that already have a history of changing a lot - some of the new skills I've gained, and how my old skills have been shaped and evolved by my experience here at UTD...as well as how my perspective and approach to creating has changed during my transition into adulthood.

My biggest creative inspirations (for the universe depicted here, but also in general) include The Lord of the Rings, the Monster Hunter series, How to Train Your Dragon, and Avatar: the Last Airbender, as well as the works of many other individual artists like Natsuko Ishikawa and Johane Matte.​

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If you like what you saw here, you can see more of my work at the link below!

• Artstation