Hi, I’m Jay Hippolyte! I’m a senior IMGD student, coming from a few different places! I’ve lived in Virginia for a decent bit of my life, but much of my time has also been spent in Connecticut, where I was born! Art and storytelling has been a big part of my life since I was barely a teenager. I’ve loved every storytelling medium I’ve run into throughout the years, especially social ones like DnD or other types of tabletop, and it’s lead to a very collaborative style of writing that I just think is really fun! Art became a way to show off these stories as they happened, and develop these skills as more complex scenes happened in stories.

This scene below, for example, was a recreation of a scene between my partner and a friend of mine, where his character threatened the God of Death within our story, and nearly lost his life for it!

I’ve had a lot of fun over the years focusing on improving both 2D and 3D skills. I love 3D Animation especially, and there’s a certain joy in character modeling when it comes to some slightly freaky looking characters. I love little gremlin guys and I’ve always had the most fun when it came down to designing someone who looks super out of the norm. I have some of them included below! Background art has also been a joy, I love doing it for personal projects, or adjusting the scene to fit one as needed.

Most of my game making experience comes from some small projects that will never see the light of day, and some projects for school that I’ve felt pretty happy with. IMGD 4500 has been a big class for understanding the work pipeline involved, and I felt pretty happy with the main character that came out of it!

A lot of my big personal inspirations are all over the place- games like Hollow Knight, Portal, Undertale, and SOMA gave me a very strong understanding of how style, worldbuilding, and the characters themselves play into the identity of the game. None of them would be the same if you swapped their big characters out for any ol’ generic guy. Books like Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children were and inspiration of their own when it came to depth of worldbuilding, and same for Wings of Fire, which swiftly replaced whatever was left of Warrior Cats in my head. The Owl House was also a massive 2D series for me, another focus on storytelling yes, but it was also unapologetically weird! It was a really good push into just continuing to make weird ol’ designs and esoteric worldbuilding because it was fun!

Anyways, these are just snippets of things that have influenced me, there’s a whole massive laundry list of games and series that have influenced me as a person (Honorable Mention of Homestuck), and I could go on and on about how every one got me to where I am. Below are some pieces I’m particularly proud of, ranging from 2D to 3D, and I hope you enjoy them too!

2D Art – Character Design

Here’s a gallery of a few characters I’ve designed for varying stories!

2D Art – Backgrounds

Not as many here, because I’ve also included the project these were for below! I really have adored doing backgrounds for animation, though!

2D Animation Projects

Here’s some 2D Projects I’ve been a part of over the years! The first is the one I mentioned doing backgrounds for, and the second was one where I managed every part of it!

3D – Animation + Modeling

I modeled and animated both of the characters in this video!

As well as this piece from Environment Modeling that I did over the summer!

Anyways! Thank you for reading!