Senshi Princesses, Empress of Light thumbnails (Patreon)

While I was waiting for last week's poll results (don't think there's an expiration date, you should fill it out if you haven't yet!), I decided to do some thumbnailing this week. I'm kind of enjoying writing these as text posts with photos interspersed rather than photo posts with a big text essay at the bottom. If you have a preference between the two formats let me know :)

Empress of Light (Terraria) 

Terraria is the game that got me into gaming; to those who don't know it it's basically Minecraft but 2D. I can't play Minecraft or most 3D games as my depth perception is awful, but I've always preferred the pixel art RPG fantasy style of Terraria too. Also, there's one biome called the Hallow that's all rainbows and unicorns and glitter, which is totally up my alley.

There's a recently added boss to the game called the Empress of Light who is specifically Hallow-themed, so I really wanted to take a stab at making a design based on her.

My first pass is not as high fashion as I would like, but it still fits the RPG style of the world while being a little bit nicer to look at. But I can't get over how costumey it looks...

My second pass is less of a redesign and more of "high fashion inspired by the Empress of Light". It's not as fleshed out as the previous thumbnail because I wasn't really feeling it at the time. 

The second thumbnail is more fashionable and feels more like something I would do, but I think it strays too far from the original for Terraria fans to appreciate. Most people who play Terraria are not exactly fashion fans... 

So I think I would draw the first thumbnail first and then maybe if the Terraria community likes it enough I would draw this second one as a follow up. But I would really like it to look not so costumey, so I'm gonna have to think of ways to fix it.

Princesses (Sailor Moon)

I'm finally tackling this series that I've been avoiding for so long 😩 It's been really hard coming up with fashion based on the princess dresses from Sailor Moon. On one hand, I love the dresses so much that I feel like anything I do will be adding too much. On the other hand, I fully acknowledge that the og dresses are VERY minimal designs which makes it hard to come up with new ideas. But I will tackle this even if it's at a very slow pace 😤

Starting with these three:

And here's what I came up with after 2h40m of thumbnailing (I'm trying to keep track of how long it takes me to draw things):

For Uranus I took the back strap and made it a whole motif, inspired by Versace. The silhouette is still pretty understated and not that interesting, but maybe that's okay because Uranus's womenswear has always been very understated...?

Neptune I struggled with the most out of the three. I really wanted to focus on the gathering of her dress which no other character has. Normally I can draw rly big gathered silhouettes (like my Venusaur dress), but Neptune has always given me this "old Hollywood glamour" vibe and it felt like she needed a more classic silhouette.

I added the ribbons because I felt the dress was kind of meh without them and she has crossed ribbons on her shoes which is also exclusive to her character. But even with the ribbons it felt like something was missing. 

At the suggestion of someone in a Sailor Moon server, I added some ruffles to resemble waves, taking care to not make it look too much like Jupiter's ruffles. I think it's more interesting to look at now, especially with sparkles~

Jupiter's was easiest for me to design because I knew I wanted to add pink roses to her green dress. Pink roses are a common accessory for her and it only made sense to spruce up the gown with them. I'm also giving her boots that match the dress which I think makes the overall look feel more couture than cottagecore.

That's it for this week!