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Finally, some more art! This time it’s a complete redesign for Aranea; a new concept, personality, story role, colour scheme, the works! She was originally a minor character, and while that’s still somewhat true here, I’ve specifically tied her role to the main plot via her new concept, and the reason she’s nicknamed “The Star Weaver”. Using her magic needle, she’s able to “weave” remnants of dead constellations and create glass portraits of them, which are then placed in the astral mausoleum to preserve their memory. Conceptually speaking, I wanted to combine the idea of lines connecting stars in a constellation, the connecting lines in a spider’s web, and the lines between pieces of stained glass to create Aranea’s core idea here.
The constellation for Aranea is based on the yellow sac spider, labelled as the “long-legged spider” by its original mapper, though I’ve incorporated a bit of orb weavers to match the theming too. I did leave a few hints at her previous peacock spider inspiration, primarily in her glasses and head stripes. Her glasses are meant to be like large, dark voids that conceal her expression, you never quite know what she’s thinking. This matches with her overall aloof and quiet personality, usually only speaking when absolutely necessary.
The first two months of the year are always odd ones for me, usually a lot of aimless sketching and WIPs until something gets finished (outside of commission work, of course), but I really like how this came out! It took the usual amount of workshopping and I’ve had it as a WIP for a while, but luckily it didn’t fight me as much as I thought it might.
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Thanks Bartan! ^_^ And no worries haha, I do discuss some of the lore in the descriptions of my art but it's by no means complete, and I don't expect anyone to read all of them either! Starglass Zodiac is my current active project that I'm planning to make into a comic, so I don't want to spoil everything. That said though, I'm still working out the lore as I go, so not all of it will be accurate depending on the time of posting anyway.
The general idea is that the constellation characters are spirits made out of stars/light magic, and thus the Astral Plane that they inhabit is a spirit world. Technically speaking they're already dead, but they all have a set amount of that light energy before burning out and disappearing entirely. Each constellation spirit has their "time" of indeterminate length before they burn out naturally, or their light magic can be expended in ways that accelerate the process, like injury or overexertion, so there's still stakes to their afterlives. When they do die, they leave behind what are called Star Fragments, glass-like remnants of their spirits that must be collected to stop them from falling into the void of space. These fragments are what Aranea uses to make her portraits, in an effort to preserve their memory.
And yeah it's wild to me that January is meant to be the "get it together" month because of New Year's when it's the middle of winter where I live, and I don't think most of us really feel "recovered" until sometime in the spring. Some effort is better than none though, and I try to make at least one piece per month so I can add them to my art summary each year. It's a fun incentive and lets me see it all come together at the end of the year :)
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Bartan
Interesting concept, that's one big needle though :x
"Using her magic needle, she’s able to “weave” remnants of dead constellations and create glass portraits of them"
Wait, so is the universe/all the stars dying off in this world, which is why she wants to preserve their memory? Is it actually happening that often as well? Wowzers, that's neat but also creepy ^^;
Though I could be mistaken, since I feel like I've been dropped into the middle of this series and likely missed some critical lore somewheres x3
Still, a wonderful design~
And I definitely hear you about January and February; they almost feel like "slow down & recover" months where so little really seems to get done. All we can really do is chip away at things when we can ^^;