The Arcryla City Fantasy Summer Festival officially is over now. In the course of the last one and a half weeks I finished three more prompts before the final showcase and I still have got ideas for more of them.
Howerver, I only will share them on social media one after another and same applies to present them on my website and in my PaintLog. So, today I will start with the painting that sort of concludes the comic from the previous main challenge.
Spelling Backwards
The admins of the Arcryla City Discord server announced another, a fifth main challenge added to the initially four ones. In the end it narrowed down to hand in all the other prompts we still were working on but there was a story to conclude the festival, too.
In the end of the fight Lynette, the kingdom’s princess in the fantasy realm, intervened and sent our OCs back to their own world.
I took the opportunity to paint an entry for the general prompt Spell. At the same time it concludes the comic from two weeks before. It’s the final page of the comic, if you’d like to say. To this purpose I even kept the exact size of the comic pages.
But, as you easily can spot, I also took the silhouette of Crissy that’s in the foreground (and added a silhouette of Paula). To hint at the cover page of the comic I even took the same background, the same clouds minus the cannons and plus some more clouds to fill the gap in the bottom right corner.
Lynette’s design and color palette is derived from the general prompt list and the Fantasy Festival announcement sheets. As those were published, the fantasy AU design of Lynette wasn’t finished yet but we got the information about the fairy wings on the Discord server, so I added them too.
The candied apple is depicted in both of above-mentioned announcement sheets. Therefore, I included it into this painting and even made it a magical artefact. Right from the beginning I thought of something like a Sailor Moon like pose and the apple even looks like the stick she changes with into Sailor Moon.
A running gag on the Discord server is the phrase „With the power of friendship“. Candied apples in Germany are called, literally translated, „Love apples“ (not to be confused with the old term for „tomatoes“). Now, it’s „the power of friendship“ and not „the power of love“ but „it’s“apple of friendship“ still is near enough to be a reference to this local name for candied apples.
Still, something else was missing. The rays are reference back to the ones of the cover page of the comic. Then I remembered that I love to add glitter and blossoms to my paintings. In this case I painted the latter one spiralling through the air towards the apple, this way giving the apple a moving look.
Last but not least I added those „chirp“ sound words. The narration of the summer event started and ended with birds chirping outside the window, the first time when our OC awakes in the fantasy realm, the second time when they awake back home.
You could say, we now have come full chirple.
The Fight against Sir Alexander went better than expected but worse than desired. But before every hope of returning home flew away (literally, Paula was just about to carry Crissy away on her giant bird mount Sparrow), Lynette intervened.
With the words „Please, travelers. Close your eyes“ and with the power of the apple of friendship she reversed the spell that brought them here in the first place.
Zum Kritzeleck 