Before Wildwood became a world of puppets and miniature sets, its artists had to decide what that world would look like on paper. These concepts make those decisions visible.
A silhouette can establish the story
Thibault Leclercq identifies himself as Wildwood’s principal character designer and describes overseeing character development from initial sketches to the screen. In his portfolio, he credits the press-release concept to himself and the colour version to Santiago Montiel. See the artist’s original project ↗
Look at the image above before examining its textures. Two figures occupy the brightest opening, while the surrounding forest forms a much larger dark mass. Their difference in height makes the relationship immediately legible. Branches lean into the opening, and the winged shape above creates a second point of tension. The blue-green light separates the figures without requiring their faces to be visible.
This is our reading of the composition. A concept like this can communicate scale, tone and a narrative relationship in one image. It is identified as press-release artwork, however, so we should not assume it was the first exploration—or that every detail was a locked production decision.
Character design is more than one polished pose
These studies offer something a single finished pose cannot: a chance to compare the same character across expressions and angles. Watch the relationship between the eyes, nose and jaw as the head turns. The braid and clothing provide additional landmarks. The design needs enough consistency to remain recognisable, while leaving room for a performance.
For a Photoshop study, draw a small set of heads with different expressions before rendering one of them. Keep the major proportions consistent, then compare what changes around the brows and mouth. That is our practice suggestion, rather than a claim about Leclercq’s exact working method.
From drawing to colour to a physical set
The house comparison is particularly useful because it shows different kinds of information together. The drawings describe the roof and porch arrangement. Colour introduces the blue siding, surrounding greenery and warmer window accents. The photograph on the right adds a human-scale reference for the miniature. These are related stages, not interchangeable types of concept art.
Notice how the porch roof creates a strong diagonal and how the path gives the eye a way into the scene. Comparing the drawings with the built set is a way to ask what remained essential through production. This comparison is our visual analysis of the published preview, not a reconstruction of unreported revisions.
Environment paintings guide the eye
These paintings make a useful companion to the house designs above. On the left, red foliage surrounds a small platform; its railings and straight edges stand out against the branching organic shapes. The smaller images revisit a related tree-platform motif with different colour and value arrangements. We can compare those arrangements without assuming a particular order of revisions.
On the right, the woodland clearing uses dark foreground trees to frame a band of warm light. The lake view opens the space instead: overlapping trees, shoreline and distant hills establish depth. For illustrators, the comparison poses a practical question: should the environment enclose the subject or let the eye travel beyond it? This is our visual reading of the selected paintings, not a statement of the artists’ original brief.
Follow the artwork into production
Rizzoli’s The Art of Wildwood, written by Drew Taylor, covers character design, fabrication and the film’s locations. The Artbook Collector’s review provides the book examples discussed here and identifies their artists. For the next stage, LAIKA’s official featurette shows the physical craft. Watch Where Rebels Gather ↗
Original visual commentary on credited, publicly shared artwork. The first image is press-release concept art; the character image is a cropped book-preview detail; the house spread includes both development art and a set photograph. These selected examples are not the complete design history. No generated imagery is used.
