Download for full view. One of the stranger things I've drawn.

See, in Celestial Souls, Konstancja (the girl on the right) was always sort of a tricky issue. In the original version she wasn’t married because I hadn’t thought too closely about the society; in the revision, she was going to get married but things happened and it never came through; i.e: she was unwed because the plot demanded it.

However, since I’m considering scrapping the revision and starting a second revision, because I’m crazy like that, I thought a little harder about it. The society is clearly pre-industrial; people simply didn’t live as long as we do, even with medical help (something like Doctors Without Borders), so by that logic, people (especially women) were married off younger than us. Konstancja is seventeen, so she hasn’t been married long; I’m guessing somewhere around two years.

Husband, to the left, has no name. I probably should have thought of that while working on the picture, but there you go. He is older than her – I don’t want to say ‘considerably’, but there is a decent gap. Ten to twelve years older, I’d guess. This right here is apparently the wedding day (judging by the Sunday best they're wearing), and Unnamed Husband is evidently giving her one last gift. Some kind of really short hatpin or something. The detail was…I don’t want to say difficult, since most of the embroidery and such is geometric shapes, but it was time-consuming.

I don’t know why I have such a fondness for Konstancja. If she were a real person she’d be utterly intolerable.

The background shows how little I know about planet-building. The blue-green sky has been shown before; the purplish-pink foliage has not. I read somewhere that in Earth’s early days, there was a sort of competition between reddish-purple algae and greenish ones (that would eventually evolve to chloroplasts), and green won out. I wondered what would it look like if the reddish-purple one won out. There are already some reddish-purple plants about, albeit in small numbers; I just sort of took that, badly created the colour palette, and ran with it. I never claimed to be a scientist. I just draw pictures.

Not sure about the leaves in the foreground. They’re blurred because you can’t focus on two things at once (either the leaves or the couple, and since the focus is on the couple… ), but I’m not sure if I like it now. It looked nice in the sketch.

Kind of odd, and I’m a little relieved to have it done. It feels nice to be working on CS art again; it feels like a while since I have.

Character and image © ~callisto-chan