Through sci-fi and fantasy art and design, MLL ATELIER crafts evocative, story-driven creatures for film — each born from deep worldbuilding, emotion, and symbolic meaning. The process blends anatomy, narrative, and atmosphere to create beings that feel alive, cinematic, and essential to their universe. These are not simple caricatures — they're mythic forces that shape story and stir imagination.
Alloy is a nocturnal "Pathfinder", a creature that flies and flutters at low air levels over ocean waves so he can communicate with bioluminescent Lanternfish that help him navigate at night with their blue glow emitted from the deepest depths of the sea.
In the abyssal realm of Thaloré, where skies blur into ocean mists and stars reflect like portals upon the waves, lives Alloy — a rare nocturnal Pathfinder known to glide inches above the sea’s surface. With soft, flexible, fluttering wings that shimmer with with blue, Alloy senses the magnetic tremors of the Earth and follows moon-silvered tides as if tracing forgotten constellations. His flight is not random; it’s a precise choreography of flutter and dive, syncing with pulses of bioluminescent Lanternfish that rise from the deep to form living maps. These glowing sentinels speak in flashes — soft blue codes that only Alloy understands, revealing safe passages, submerged ruins, and shifts in the underwater currents that threaten the delicate balance of their shared world.
In this unique biome where sky and sea merge into a single living entity, Alloy serves as both messenger and guardian. The inhabitants of the floating archipelagos depend on him — unaware of the creature’s silent interventions that keep their seaborne settlements from drifting into peril. But as the Lanternfish begin to disappear and strange lights stir in trenches untouched by life for millennia, Alloy must journey further than ever before — beyond the horizon’s edge and into the stormglass veil of ancient oceans, where even light is swallowed whole. Alloy is a story-adventure about connection beyond language, a creature caught between elements, and the unraveling of a world whose maps are written in glowing flickers and remembered only by the last Pathfinder of the tides.
The creature sketching process begins with loose, intuitive marks — exploring shape language, gesture, and silhouette to uncover a creature’s essence before refining its anatomy or details. Creature sketches evolve in dialogue with the world they inhabit. Sketching is vital because it’s where discovery happens — it’s how emotion, function, and narrative fuse into a living, believable design. Each line is a question: What if this creature didn’t just exist — but mattered?
The 3D sculpting process begins after sketching, when a creature’s form, purpose, and emotion are clear. Using digital modeling tools, sculpting happens from the inside out — blocking primary forms, then layering anatomical structure, texture, and gesture to give the creature weight and presence. 3D modeling is crucial because it allows exploration into how a creature moves, interacts with light, and occupies space — ensuring it feels cinematic, functional, and real within its world. It transforms concept into embodiment.
Once a service automaton designed to maintain Earth's teleportation hubs, AXIOS-9 was lost in a failed jump and now exists within District 25, evolved beyond its original programming. Reconfigured by the timeless environment, AXIOS-9 has become more aware through stillness, developing its own metaphysical understanding of time. Its form is robotic, but its metallic "skin" now contains crystalline time-networks that pulse faintly in sync with the eternal red flower.
Describe the underground creature for Stitch City.
Cantera is a radiant, ethereal creature of the Wind World — its nearly transparent form refracting sunlight into shifting hues that ripple like auroras as it soars. Carried by high-altitude currents, Cantera sings in harmony with the wind, its voice a haunting, melodic resonance that echoes across skies like a living instrument of the air. Witnessing a Cantera is rare and deeply moving — like glimpsing a living spirit woven from light, air, and song. In Wind World culture, Canterras are sacred symbols of harmony and grace, their flight seen as a blessing, their song believed to stir the soul awake.
Maria Lorena Lehman has received the above awards and has been seen in the following publications: