Hey there everyone, welcome to Halo Spotlight. The place where Halo community creations are put front and centre. In Fanart Features, we highlight artists and their creations.
In this week’s feature, we have the pleasure of showing off some artwork by Hartwell_Design. Artwork by Hartwell_Design is known for an insane level of detail and environmental storytelling, in addition to many other elements. A huge thank you to Hartwell_Design for sharing details with us for all the below pieces.
Discovery
So if you know my work, I really like designing environments, and often times in all of my 3D art pieces, it’s what I design and think about first before deciding what the center foreground will hold in terms of characters. I started out as an environment artist and this shows in most of my work, that hobby of painting landscapes really does come in handy for when I became a 3D artist.
In my art I try to give it an almost liminal feeling, I’m very inspired by the sense of untouched mystery the original Halo portrayed and try to encapsulate that feeling in my 3D worlds. My scenes are often times not crowded with characters but detailed and large, hopefully making the viewer wonder what lies beyond the camera.
In this 3D piece, I had big green himself; the Chief, standing in an ancient ruin, joined by a pre crashout Guilty Spark in this Halo 2 inspired piece. The overgrown chamber streams light in, revealing the mossy floor and flowing waterfall that I’ve made in 3D.
Pelican Assembly Line
I try to vary my work between industrial urban and overgrown nature environments, I’ve heard friends say this offers a healthy mix of a lot of different landscapes and is often asked for in the commissions I make, so I always try to push the boundary even more with the locations I design.
Recently I was watching the Halo short movie ‘Landfall’ and was inspired by a specific scene that shows the UNSC war machine gearing up and preparing for combat, and found myself being very inspired to make something similar in 3D.
This piece was all about scale: using architecture and lighting to dwarf the characters and give the viewer a sense of entering a world that operates far beyond human size. I leaned heavily into dense set dressing: cables, scaffolding, sparks, and layered lighting to give the hangar a lived in feeling and make it feel like an active military manufacturing hub that my personal Spartans (Fox and Rigel) look out on to.
Falcon Extract
In all of my work, I love to imagine if I was really there, would this environment feel cozy, warm, offputting, wild, or tense. This one I made was all about capturing the mood of a moment: ODSTs being dropped into the unknown, with Falcons above as both lifeline and reminder that once you’re dropped, you’re on your own.
I do this with near all my art, make the character large in the foreground but still dwarf in size to the expansive world. This 3D piece was really all about the environment even though the characters appear in their heroic stances, I focused on building the dense thick jungle floor where rocks and branches scatter the entirety of the underbrush and distant rocky tree lines give way to low hanging clouds.
I focused on building the feeling of relief mixed with tension in 3D here with how I position everything in the world: using the Falcon descending through the canyon while red smoke marks the landing zone and the ODSTs holding their perimeter.
Ambush
I grew up in a pretty foresty area, and usually like to translate that into the worlds I build since I love going out into nature for hikes. For this piece I was trying to create a tense, cinematic encounter between my Spartan: Fox, and a brute Chieftain who waits for combat in the distance, framed in a quiet winter forest, that I myself would like to walk in if it were real.
The snowy environment is calm and almost peaceful, and I even learned quite a lot in the making of these procedural snow textures. But the I wanted to design this scene to show that the moment itself is dangerous, with the Spartan using the tree for cover while lining up a shot, as the unsuspecting Brute stands in the clearing.
I used the cold lighting (not something I usually use too much in my 3D scenes) with long tree silhouettes, and drifting mist to heighten the sense of isolation and suspense, making the viewer feel like they are witnessing the split second before the fight erupts.
Abandoned
In this final 3D piece, I was focused on urban environment building, and would easily say (at least to date) this is my most detailed modeled urban piece. I wanted to be sure to draw inspiration from real life in the development of this ruined city.
Most times I’ll do moodboard and drawing studies of the environments I want to portray before even diving into world building and scene framing. So for this 3D art, I’ve made a squad of Marines accompanied by my other Spartan: Rigel, as they traipse through a recently abandoned city, something happened here and it is their job to find out what. It feels almost liminal, familiar but not, and I like framing that feeling in a lot of my pieces.
A huge thank you to Hartwell_Design for taking the time to talk with us over on Instagram and wanting to take part in this piece. We really appreciate your contributions and willingness to provide such detailed information for each piece. If you’d like to see more from Jackie Hernández Art, you can do so on their X Account or Instagram Account.
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