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MysticSparkleWings — Light that Burns the Sky (+ Time Lapse!)
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Published: 2023-02-16 20:13:34 +0000 UTC; Views: 7452; Favourites: 107; Downloads: 5
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Funny how we've had three of those already this year...Please accept my infinite frustration, this art, and a Time Lapse of it being made as a...I don't know, an admission of defeat?
The point is this was supposed to be my big Valentine's Art for this year, but despite my best efforts it was not ready to post ON Valentine's Day or even the next day. [Well, the art itself was, but not the description or Time Lapse video...]
There's some joke in here about this being a "labor of love," but I'm going to let you Sparklers try and puzzle it out and save my brain power for the rest of this description because I'm sure it's going to be a doozy.
Anyway, to explain why this—a lovely representation of Bloom and Stella's sisterly bond and the first time I've ever drawn Canon[ish] Enchantix oufits—ended up being my choice for Valentine's Art this year, a bit of backstory first [scroll down until you see if you're not interested in the backstory and just want to hear about this year's art]:
Some of you may remember that last year I was extra-ambitious and made a little mini-series called "Winx that Kiss" counting down the days from February 1st until Valentine's Day, inspired by not just Valentine's Day, but also my " Words that Kiss" series and the fact that February is often touted as "Fairyary" or "Faebruary."
Back about mid-January-ish, I wasn't really worried about thinking up a new Valentine's project like that for this year because I foolishly thought I'd finish up Winxsona Winter in time for the holiday and then my big "Valentine's Project" could be the last art piece in that series or the one big Time Lapse video of all those pieces together that I want to make [assuming I wouldn't have them both done at the same time].
The more days in January passed though, the more obvious it became that wasn't going to happen even if I worked on nothing else but Winxsona Winter pieces right up until today. So I knew that if I wanted something to post on Valentine's Day, I was going to have to come up with a different project that could be finished much sooner. [Ignoring for now I still couldn't make the deadline regardless of what I planned...]
In the last few days of January, I did seriously consider reviving Winx that Kiss in some way since it would suit my needs pretty well (the series was designed to work on a tight schedule, after all), but I was having trouble deciding exactly how to do it. Since I already covered Magix Winx [in conjunction with Charmix] and Enchantix in this format, the next logical conclusion would be to do Believix, but even ignoring that I already did Roxy as last year's finale [I could've re-posted her's as this year's opener], that would only be 7 days, not 14. Technically, that would've been fine, but it didn't feel right to me for some reason. And adding Sophix or Lovix wouldn't help since even if I only did each of the "Main 6" Winx, I'd be either 2 days short [if I did Believix + just one of them] or 4 days over [if I did Believix + both].
And while if I ever do add Believix to the "Winx that Kiss" series it will only make sense to do some bonus pieces with the Special Wings [Speedix, Zoomix, and Tracix], those wouldn't help in this particularly scenario either.
And it was only after I'd committed to this project and late in the afternoon on February 1st [and therefore too late to change my plans] that I had the idea, which is 100% worth re-visiting next year, that instead of making all-new Winx that Kiss pieces, I could have just re-vamped the pieces from last year by adding backgrounds and perhaps animating the wings behind each mouth.
That said, how then did I come up with what you see here for this year's Valentine's Art?
Well, I did want to stick with something Winx-themed, and I have had a couple of ideas sitting on the back-burner, assuming I'd get around to them sometime after Winxsona Winter ends. Most of those ideas either still would've taken too long or just didn't feel like good fits for Valentine's pieces, so I actually somewhat quickly landed on...not this concept exactly, but a key building block.
Last year, after a sale in May, I got my hands on this beautiful necklace made by OnceUponADesign on Etsy, featuring Stella's Enchantix Wings, but in a custom purple color palette as part of a Valentine's Day collection.
I've wanted to pay tribute to that necklace in some way pretty much ever since I got it, but never got around to it...until now.
They're not quite a 1:1 for reasons I'll explain momentarily, but hopefully if you compare the Etsy listing to Stella's wings here, now their influence should be obvious.
For a Valentine's piece though, I didn't want to draw just Stella by herself, and I sorted wanted some additional reasoning for why her Enchantix wings would be shifted to purple like that.
What felt like the natural inspiration for me then, as my fellow veteran Winx fans likely already recognized, was a limited-edition "Pink Enchantix " Bloom doll released several years ago. And that's where pretty much the entirety of Bloom's look here came from.
To this day, I'm not really sure why that doll exists—I've seen some fan interpretations that this design is what Bloom's Enchantix would look like as "Dark Bloom" [from Season 2], though I doubt that was the intention behind this doll and even if it was this feels like an awful lot of pink for an "evil" character—but she's one of few Winx dolls I actually own and easily my favorite, so I suppose I shouldn't question Rainbow's motivations for making her too much.
[Stick a pin in that "Dark Enchantix" idea though, we'll be revisiting it later.]
With Bloom's "Pink Enchantix" and that necklace in mind though, I decided I'd try my hand at what a "Purple Enchantix Stella" might have looked like, and I could dark "Purple Stella" with "Pink Bloom"; Both to make the connection between the designs more obvious and...
Even though Valentine's is most commonly viewed as a romantic day for lover's, I've always viewed it more as a day about showing love in general—Love for your family, love for your friends, etc. I blame my mom always making "Valentine goodie bags" for me and my brother, and then that Elementary School tradition of getting Valentines for the whole class. Oh, and can't forget that SpongeBob episode the hinges entirely around Spongebob giving Patrick, his best friend, a Valentine even though they'd introduced Sandy by that point and could have easily shoe-horned in a more stereotypical Valentine's plot with her.
So why not take today to highlight things like a bond between best friends so strong that they might as well be sisters?
[...Yes Bloom has an actual sister and long-lost parents that very well may have worked even better for a non-romantic Valentine's piece, but I don't have a pretty sparkly necklace of any of their wings, now do I?]
Anyway. It's worth mentioning that even with the necklace and Bloom's Pink Enchantix design, it still wasn't exactly a piece of cake to make decisions about how to change Stella's Enchantix into a Purple version in that same "style."
I already acknowledged Stella's wings aren't 1:1 with the necklace colors, and that's mostly because I wanted to incorporate some "black" into her wings to better match Bloom's, as well as bringing up the vibrancy of the border to more closely mimick how bright the orange border is on her normal Enchantix wings.
"Black" is in quotations because other than in their eyes and some outlines, there is no flat jet-black here. The "black" for Bloom here is actually the same color as her Season 2 "Dark Bloom" Magic Winx outfit—a very dark midnight blue color. While the fabric on the doll doesn't hint at any blue, I don't really like using jet-black in clothes or hair for Winx Art since there are very few instances of it actually being used in the show. [Mirta's casual clothes are a rare exception, especially in the early seasons.]
Likewise, I took that same super dark blue color and shifted the hue into a purple to get the "black" for Stella...And maybe a near-black-purple wasn't actually the most logical choice, but I went with my gut and I'm sticking with it.
I suppose this is also as good of a time as any to mention that the Pink Enchantix doll did take a few liberties with Bloom's Enchantix design. In case it's not obvious, I ignored those and actually took a few of my own. Namely, Bloom's gloves [arm warmers] on the doll are solid black. And in the show, her Enchantix gloves are a solid pastel pink. Even though I was using a dark blue instead of jet-black, I thought making her gloves that dark would be...well, too dark. So instead I opted for semi-transparent gloves, which is the norm for Stella and a couple of the other girls' base Enchantix designs.
Later, I broke "the rules" a little more and gave Bloom's a hint of sparkle they normally don't have too. But I'm getting ahed of myself...
I also totally guessed on making the heart clips in Bloom's hair pink [they're normally blue], as the doll doesn't have them. I think "black" might have been more consistent with the other elements that were changed to that color, but much like the solid gloves, I thought it would be a bit too harsh.
To that end, I'm still not sure if I handled Stella's skirt exactly right. Various elements of Bloom's outfit that were shifted to any given color aren't really "consistent" with her normal colors—Her dress is normally entirely shades of blue, for example, not a blue section with two pink sections underneath, etc. So it's possible I should've made that little front section of Stella's skirt "black" instead, or just generally handled it differently, but I went with my gut and I'm sticking with it.
Other than that though, I feel fairly comfortable with my other color/placement choices. Which is nice since even after my planning beforehand [I used this Enchantix Color Guide in Photoshop, which is why you don't see me fiddle with them too much in the Time Lapse ] I was still pretty nervous about how Stella in particular was going to look in the final piece.
And speaking of things I was nervous about, I will now disclose [also as noted on-screen in the Time Lapse] that Bloom here was pretty heavily traced from a Season 4 [Episode 6 if I remember correctly] Screenshot—mostly to cut down on time, but also in small part because I have found I kinda hate draw ruffle skirts like the majority of her dress.
There was however still a considerable amount of adjustment and guesswork needed though because even having grabbed the screenshot myself from the official Winx Club YouTube Channel, it was still a not-great resolution that was pretty fuzzy compared to the size I was working at. And even if that hadn't been the case there was some inconsistencies/"bugs" I could not leave the way they were.
Before that though, you can't really tell in the Time Lapse , but I tried a new technique using Procreate's symmetry tool for the base anatomy [since I needed two of almost the exact same pose anyway] where I dropped the screenshot in, and then drew on the opposite side of the canvas. That way I could get the benefit of seeing exactly where my lines needed to be to line up with the reference without point-blank tracing.
I was hoping that method would maybe be a little bit faster than free-handing—less trial and error to get to the same conclusion without having it completely spoon-fed to me. But I don't know if it really saved any time, so I'm not sure I'll use it again.
But with the base anatomy down, Stella was otherwise all me...And about a dozen various reference screenshots on my phone that I was constantly cross-checking for little details like how many of the little teardrop marks were supposed to be on that front section of her skirt [four above the line, five below, if anyone cares and didn't want to zoom in to check].
I will say though that for as uneasy as I was about how Stella's clothes were going to turn out...They really weren't as bad/complicated as I was expecting.
Her hair was another story, mostly because while I could "borrow" the shape I'd used for the back tail of Bloom's [which was a major correction from the screenshot as it was] and tweak it a bit to fit for the back of Stella's hair, her two additional ponytails proved more fussy.
I think it's mostly because they have tight corkscrew curl sections not unlike my Winxsona , but on Stella they're much more narrow and less..."bouncy" I guess, because the sections of hair they belong to are a lot smaller. So that was an on-the-fly learning experience.
Even so, trying to draw what I consider to be Stella "classic" wider smile might have actually been the most difficult thing for me. A large part of it has to do with using hard-edge pixel lines* on such a small, "zoomed out" scale—it's harder to accurately capture detail in small areas like that. The other part is I am exceptionally out of practice with draw open Winx mouths of any kind, and even when I was originally making Winx art all the time I still don't think I drew them very often.
As you can see though, I did eventually manage something I consider "close enough" to what I wanted.
Additional Honorable Mentions for things-I-made-more-difficult-than-they-really-needed-to-be:
1. The sparkles on the girls' clothes. By default, Stella has them on her gloves and Bloom on the edges of her ruffles, but so they would match a bit better [as I mentioned briefly earlier] I added some faint sparkle to Bloom's gloves, and just a little to the front section of Stella's skirt and the little wrap/tie strands beneath her top.
I spent longer than I really should have placing allllll of those sparkles, except maybe the ones on Stella's gloves. And that also goes for the sparkles I added to the wings.
2. Actually placing the wings "on" the girls. Which I think the Time Lapse does a disservice.
Why I had such a time getting the placement what felt like right, even having a screenshot I could use more directly for Bloom's, I could not tell you. Even as I was experiencing it, I was baffled as to why what should've been a fairly simple "drop in, adjust size once or twice, done" was taking at least three times as long as it should have, if not worse.
Eventually I did move on though, and I think added some of the extra effects to make the whole thing look more screenshot-y helped; Namely a couple additional layers of the wings that are super-transparent to imply they're moving. [As I noticed was a thing in some official Enchantix screenshots]. Those kind of trick your eye on what the exact size and placement of the wings is.
Now, one saving-grace about the wings is that, as some of you may know/remember, I already did the hard part last year because I had to make all of the Winx's Enchantix wings when I couldn't find "show accurate ones" that suited me already made (unlike their Magic Winx wings). So here, all I had to do was open up Bloom and Stella's and change the colors.
As an aside, if anyone would be interested in me adding these additional colorways to that full pack of the wings I made so you can use them too, please let me know! I have no idea what the interest level in them would be, so at present I don't know if adding them to the pack would be worth the extra effort.
Once I was finally settled with the wings though, it was time for the background.
You'll see a little in the Time Lapse that I spent quite a while on a background more like the Fairy Dust Sequences that I didn't actually end up using. Though, you can see that version as a Mystic Star or Higher Member on my Ko-fi Page because I didn't want it to totally go to waste.
The longer I sat with it, the more it didn't feel right—Even with the bit of backstory I came up with for these altered Enchantix forms [which we'll get to soon, I promise], there is still no precedent in the first four seasons of the show for two fairies either transforming or otherwise having a magical sequence where they're both on-screen while the sequence background is still there. And that bothered me.
So I ended up switching directions.
The "base" background here is actually modeled after the sky/background we see while the girls are in the Golden Kingdom late in Season 3, and then over that you have a vague "pulsing" heart outline that I hope came out looking more like various instances of the girls cast spells in Seasons 3 and 4. [Seasons 1 and 2 usually have less saturated color for the casted magic].
I don't think Bloom and Stella are actually back in the Golden Kingdom here, it was just the easiest source I could find for a relatively simple background that still felt like it..."shared DNA with" the transformation sequence backgrounds, if that makes any sense. If anything, it's more likely they're in the Negatus Realm and it just happens the sky looks the same.
Just before I get into the very loose story I have for what exactly in-universe would be going on here though, I would like to point out that I have harped on Procreate several times recently [usually with Winx Art, as fate would have it] for not being very good at re-sizing things.
As it turns out, in this case it seems that worked to my advantage—I had to shrink the flat image of Bloom and Stella together a little to make room for the heart-shaped magic, and it seems like that blurred them just enough I could skip my new usual step of using an auto-action in ClipStudio Paint to blur out my hard-edge pixel lines. [As part of the faux-screenshot look; I explain more about how that works with Fairy Familiar Face ]
And again, since this is supposed to be a faux screenshot, the blurring that was done to the wings when I resized them also works, as it was mostly consistent with actual screenshots from the show.
I did still have to add a tiny bit of nosie and film grain in Photoshop to feel like it was 100% were I wanted it [though admittedly it could still be pushed farther; I'm going more for "super HD" screenshot, not so much the more typical "has been passed around the internet and compressed and distorted about 50 times" screenshot], but skipping that one CSP step and not having to re-place the girls and their wings in Photoshop was really nice.
Oh, and guess who finally realized she can check a little box when saving the .PNGs from Photoshop that keeps the vibrancy of the color the way it was in Procreate?
Me. It was me. And I really should have realize that way before now, but whatever.
The point is—Art done, looks nice!
Before I get to celebrating though, about the little bit of story I came up with for the image that I've alluded to twice already now...[same as before, if you don't care about that and just want to read the wrap-up, scroll until you see !)
Remember how I mentioned some people in the Winx fandom cosider Bloom's Pink Enchantix what her "Dark Enchantix" would look like?
That is not the concept I went with, but it was definitely weighing on my mind for consideration. [There was no singular point where I stopped drawing to think about this, it was running circles around my brain while I was working.] Also on my mind was how the official text descriptions of Bloom's Pink Enchantix focus so heavily on the fact that Enchantix requires a sacrifice to earn, and how while these outfits arguable have a little too much color to be "evil" the near-black coloring does suggest there's a darker element at play.
After a bit of thinking about that, I realized Bloom's Pink Enchantix kinda reminds me of the early "Pra Believix" designs [please click the little "see more" at the top of where that link takes you to actually see them] from Season 4.
Two things about those early Believix designs:
Personally, I think the super-early color palettes for Believix were actually just placeholder colors [especially since the later ones feature palettes closer to the ones we know for each Winx], but even so, here I was yet again with an overlap between a pink/black color palette and dark magic.
It's not 100% watertight, but after mulling over all the above and just my general knowledge and understanding of how Winx Club [at least pre-Nickelodeon partnership] works, this is what I came up with:
Incantix [from "Incante/Incantation," which shares the root word for "Enchant" as in "Enchantix"], A sub-form of Enchantix:
- An Enchantix [or higher] Fairy must sacrifice herself (again) for someone she hates (probably framed as "your greatest enemy" in the show, but in practice it's not that literal because...well, that would mean making sacrifices for truly evil characters which would kinda fly in the face of what the Winx stand for). This demonstrates the fairy is capable of making the "right" decision despite her own negative feelings. [As in some people are worth saving even if you don't like them.]
It shows the fairy in question is able to regulate her negative emotions, which early Seasons of the show demonstrate is the different between fairy and witch magic—the positive or negative emotions fueling it. So it stands to reason if a fairy can regulate her negative emotions "for the greater good," she can be trusted to use dark magic "for the greater good." - This "boost"/sub-transformation grants the fairy the ability to use Dark Magic without fear of corruption [assuming that using dark magic without it would eventually lead to either a "Dark" fairy like Season 2 Bloom, or the fairy turning into a Witch]. With this form, fairy dust can now lift/break light magic spells in addition to the dark spells it already could, and it can be used to create dark or light "seals". [For comparison, in my mind these "seals" would operate pretty much like Valtor's mark, but without the mind control. They can be used literally as seals or to boost existing magic, etc. And I'm thinking this could be more of where the name comes in—A few times when Valtor uses his mark in the show, he doesn't seem to use a specific spell but rather a very careful longer phrase, an "incantation," if you will. So perhaps Incantix seals use more "incantations" than they do typical spell names?
- Incantix can be earned after a fairy moves beyond Enchantix, but it is adaptable in appearance, so it won't always look like a mis-colored Enchantix. [This is my way of also explaining Bloom's "Blue Believix" doll . Or, it could be used instead to explain the single-color Believix Power dolls , Or we could circle around and bring the "Pra Believix" designs back into the mix; your choice since whatever comes after Enchantix is not my focus for today.]
So you can see instead of this being point-blank a "dark" or "evil" transformation, I wanted to sort of preserve Enchantix's "purity," as it were. And another heavy influence is I was fishing for a concept that could actually be possible within the show as we know it—Perhaps Bloom and Stella actually did earn this sub-form in between the End of the First CGI Movie [Secret of the Lost Kingdom] and the beginning of Season 4, but they never really needed to use it and that's why we never saw it.
And this does still work more specifically for just Bloom and Stella at that point in the timeline too, and less so the rest of the Winx. (But the concept is intentionally loose enough it could apply to all of them at some point, depending on how you write it.)
Bloom has two good candidates for "people she hates" that wouldn't be completely ludacris for her to sacrifice herself for if the situation called for it—Mitzi or Diaspro [Diaspro in particular might make more sense and explain how she went from being banished from Erakylon in Season 3 to on the royal staff in Season 5]. And in Season 3, Stella "gets" Chimera, or maybe even Cassandra, but I think Chimera might be a slightly better fit.
They're all thoroughly dislikable characters, but saving any of them wouldn't be as deplorable as saving one of the big villains [including the Trix]. And it wouldn't be hard to imagine one or all of them getting themselves into trouble and having to be rescued by the Winx.
Anyway. More to the point for today, here I imagine Bloom and Stella are either casting an Incantix convergence spell, or perhaps a "twin seal." And the title would be the name of said spell, or something. [It's actually the name of a special Pokémon attack because I've been thinking lately some Pokémon moves/attacks would also work as magic spell names and was super-duper struggling with what to title this. This specific attack name happened to feel like a good fit for a collaborative effort between a fairy of sun [and moon] and a fairy of [dragon] fire.
The twin seal thing is actually why I ended up making that background I didn't use —That was my initial idea for how to get a more obvious heart shape around the girls, thinking a fairydust-ish style would work. But the fairy dust style for the heart already felt kind of off in a weirdly cluttered way.
I tried this approach to the heart on a whim—It's closer to the magic shields the girls use in Believix, or the super-saturated Magic Winx/Charmix spells. And it did the trick—you still get the heart shape, and while it is bright it doesn't demand too much of your attention.
But even with that change, the whole thing felt too much like a transformation background—Which I already discussed didn't feel right since there's no existing examples in the show of two fairies existing in the same "transformation space." So that's how I ended up scrolling through screenshots until I decided to try re-creating this Golden Kingdom background, which while still not 100% what I think I wanted, ultimately felt like a better fit and "close enough" that I was not compelled to mess with the background further.
As per usual, I think it's obvious I completely overthought just about every element that went into this piece—Would it even be "MysticSparkleWings Art" if I didn't? And that was definitely yes, a contributing factor in why it took so long and ultimately ended up late...but for once, not actually the primary cause.
But. I feel like there's a lot to love about the final product, and at least half of that wouldn't have been possible without the overthinking.
And for as frustrated as I am about missing the Valentine's deadline, for as many challenges as it took to get to this point, I wasnt to be clear I am generally very happy with how the art itself turned out, and there's very little I'd change if I had to do it all over again.
There were several points during the sketching process where I was really nervous Bloom and Stella weren't going to end up looking like themselves in the final product, and I think those nerves are largely why I haven't made a lot of "purely Canon" Winx fan art before, let alone trying to design my own wholly new transformations for the Winx. But then, this is exactly why you take art beyond the sketching phase—it only tells part of the story. You can't say for sure if a character is going to look "right" just based on the sketch a lot of the time; The only way to know for sure is to keep going.
And if they don't? You can make changes/tweaks as you go.
So I did that—I kept going. And guess what? Sure, if you really go looking there are still yet more tweaks that could be made, but generally Bloom and Stella look plenty like how they're supposed to, I think even more than I really could've hoped for considering how apprehensive I was.
Honestly, they came out so well it kinda makes me want to revisit this "Incantix" concept with the other Winx in the future...but you Sparklers know me—I'm very much not going to commit 100% to doing that unless and until I feel confident I have the time and motivation to do so [especially after how this drawing already went off schedule despite my efforts...]
...Also honestly, I don't know what else to say to wrap this up, Sparklers.
When I first finished the art, I was really please with it, but it seems all the delays in being able to post it when I wanted to have knocked the wind out of my sails quite a bit. I think at this point I need a little time away from the art to get back to really appreciating it like I did before.
I hope you Sparklers at least have much more positive feelings towards it, and that maybe the Time Lapse Video will make up for me winding down on kind of a flat note here.
I will emphasize one more time I am still happy with how the art turned out, and in a vacuum looking at the skill on display it makes me kind of excited to continue making yet more Winx art. Which is good since I've still got Winxsona Winter on the table.
And as much as I'm not crazy about wrapping things up this way, I do need to go ahead and leave this here so I can get back to working on the Winxsona Winter pieces, and maybe squeeze some other non-Winx projects in there, yeah?
So even if it is two days late, I hope you Sparklers had a love-filled Valentine's Day, whether that means romantic, platonic, or otherwise. If nothing else, know that your support of just viewing this art or reading this epic-length description means the world to me—I love you for it, and I hope to see you again next time too. 
Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings
Winx Club © Rainbow S.p.A.
Sparkle Brushes: Enchantix + Season 3 Resource Pack
Wings: Winx Club: Enchantix Wing Pack
Where to find me & my artwork:
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