The true artist experience is being fairly certain about a design, finishing it, and then spending hours splitting hairs about colour schemes before you can upload it. xD

It is fairly well known at this point that I have arachnophobia, but despite the irony of this design that fear typically does not extend to artistic depictions of spiders, especially one I made myself. Though that does make looking up reference…interesting to say the least. :’) I usually cannot go very long looking at pictures of real spiders, but peacock spiders seem to be a slight exception. They’re small, fluffy and I’d say on the “cuter” side of spider species, and I think that applies to Aranea here. Don’t know why I decided to do full line art rather than my usual pencil lines for a first concept, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯

At this point in development I’m figuring out what spirits/rescue missions will appear in the main story for Starglass Zodiac, and what ones might appear in side stories and supplementary content. With so many constellations and idea potential, having too many would grind the plot to a halt, so I’m beginning to establish a hierarchy of what constellations are more “important” plot wise. In this case I came up with a scene idea and made the design to go with it, but I’ll decide what to do with it later. Like most spider species, Aranea cannot see or hear very well, so when her spirit is lost on Earth and in need of rescue, how Cassie finds her is a bit different than the others.

(Also I am aware that only male peacock spiders have colouration like this, but when adapting creatures with this kind of dimorphism into characters, I usually go with whatever works best for the design itself rather than strictly adhering to these gender differences)