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.