Princess Starshine is ecstatic to finally attend the Royal Academy of Rock, a school in the sky that specializes in teaching the magically dangerous art of rock music. She'll be placed in a band with four other girls, and together they'll have adven...
Ah geez, I've been real busy but I finally did the flat colors on Sky and Star!
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This'll be the new cover for a bit. I think I'll throw together a background so it's not the transparency checkerboard, not crazy about how that looks.
My girls, on the other hand, turned out great! It took longer than I had anticipated to decide on the exact skin tone for Star (I knew she'd be "melanin-blessed" as she described herself but I got real picky about what would work best with her hair and eyes). Her outfit looks a bit plain here, but that's because I haven't added her SPARKLESSSS (please read that in London Tipton's voice).
And Sky was difficult to color all around thanks to her white-on-white hair and skin combo, not to mention her outfit containing multiple shades of gray AND every color of the rainbow! (if you replace red with pink)
I also did some internal debating regarding her skin tone, since people with albinism are rarely literally white but vampires are often drawn that way, so there was a struggle between wanting her to look sufficiently vampiric and not wanting to overly cariacaturize a real life condition. Not to mention I've already established that vampires have "ashen" complexions, which means they come in a wide range of colors but all have some gray mixed in. I played around with some peach/pinkish whites but felt she looked too alive and ultimately decided to go with a very very light gray to make her look undead in a way that jived with the cartoonish art style.
While I think she looks good from an aesthetic perspective, I'm concerned about her design in terms of representation and am welcome to constructive criticism, especially if you or someone you're close with has albinism. This extends to the condition's depiction in the text, and really any depiction of real-life subjects (e.g. Gossamer being an amputee, Star being adopted, etc). I may be an amateur but that's no excuse to spread harmful or insensitive depictions of people's experiences.
These are the outfits they wear when transformed with their Soul Players btw. So the outfit that Sky didn't bother describing during her guitar battle with Boris? It's that one. Yeah, there's really no reason for them to have magical girl transformations outside of me loving to draw cute outfits lol. But I'd say that's reason enough! The final version of this is gonna be a lot sparklier, don't worry. Which means, yes, my story does contain a gay sparkly vampire. I hope the dude bros that hated Twilight for "ruining vampires" like 12 years ago are shaking in their boots (I've never read/seen Twilight lol I just hate elitism over a fictional species).
I think I should be a lot quicker finishing up the rest of the cover, I feel a lot more motivated now that I'm over 40% finished with Year 1! Gossamer may take a bit, though, I think I'm gonna redesign her outfit to be more goth. Also I just think her outfit is the most boring because I didn't really know what I was doing with her character at the time I designed it. But now I definitely know that her Soul Player knows she's a goth at heart and dresses her accordingly.
