Congratulations to Alicia Figueiredo Amaral from the University of Huddersfield, our winner of the Character Art category in Rising Star 2023!

Our Rising Star challenges work the same as Search For A Star, though are for students who are not yet in their final year of university or are at a college level. With 250 students signing up for Character Art this year, it’s one of our largest and most competitive categories so even reaching the finals is a huge achievement. Students were given a studio brief to develop an original character based around one of four themes. Each had 4 weeks to research, create, document and present their projects to our assessment teams.

Alicia chose the theme of “Ethereal Grace” and created the beautifully haunting Marola: Goddess of Flesh and Fertility, a creative and uniquely styled character that propelled Alicia into the finals (you can check out part of Alicia’s project below and in full here). At the final interview, Alicia won over our judges with her broad range of creative and artistic skills, fine attention to detail, and strong future potential!

“I’m honestly super proud of myself – really happy! It’s just a great achievement to have at 20!“

This year’s Search For A Star Character Art challenge was created alongside our studio partners as a way of helping game art students to create a portfolio piece that showed exactly the type of skills that studios want to see from graduates starting a games career. Thank you also to our judging panel for the Rising Star Character Art challenge, Louis Clegg from XR Games, Matthew Aitchison from Airship, and Margaret Smith from Aardvark Swift.

After Alicia’s interview, the judges shared with us the reasons behind their decision:

“Alicia made a brave decision to work with a very original aesthetic. Her art direction was well communicated with no detail missed. She stayed true to her original brief and created an amazing project showing her strong potential for a career in art direction.”

Congratulations once again to Alicia, and we look forward to seeing a whole lot more from her in future 💚