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Welp, much like the first installment of this series , I'm once again a day late. But this time it's very much not because I got a late start—quite the contrary.

No, this time I have my own perfectionism and ambition to thank for all the delays.

Before I go any further though, in case you missed last week's piece and can't be bothered either clicking the link above or manually checking my gallery, allow me to fill you in on what this is: Winxsona Winter is an event being hosted by wittywinx over on Instagram ; Starting December 1st and running alllll the way through February 10th. Each week You draw your "Winxsona," or you if you were dropped into the world of Winx Club tomorrow, in a different transformation. Last week we started off with the classic Magic Winx, and this week we're onto Enchantix.

Full disclosure that I had actually hoped to finish this one early enough that I could take a step backwards and sneak in a Charmix brooch & bag set to post first. Recently I discovered what I consider a gold mind of 1920s-30s Art Nouveu-type broochs on Pinterest that would work as amazing Charmix brooch inspiration and I thought that would be a fun way to "make up" for having posted the Magic Winx piece a little late.

I dared think finishing this one early would even be possible because as some of you lovely Sparklers my remember, [and as I also pointed out last week, too], I started off this year with my Winxsona in "her" Enchantix when I made You Magical Winx . Meaning unlike with her/my Magic Winx [and with allll the other transformations on the Winxsona Winter list...] I already had a solid design to work with.

More over, just a month later I spent all that time studying and trying to understand the Winx's official Enchantix wings for the second half of my Winx that Kiss series, so even if I did have to edit or re-do the Enchantix wings I'd already made, I should have had the formula for doing so pretty down-pat.

Essentially, a lot of pieces for this puzzle were already in place...So honestly even I'm confused that I still couldn't get it finished on time.

But here we are all the same.

It probably didn't help that I did decide before I even got started that I wanted to try my hand at, as you can see, not just a normal Enchantix end-transformation-pose or a simple-ish screenshot like last week, but rather the end-of-Fairydust-activiation scene, which you can see the official examples of here for comparison. And I opted to do this type of scene since it may actually my favorite of the magic sequences we see for Enchantix in the show, and yet I have never actually atempted to draw one of these before—Not even way back in my earliest and most amibitious Winx Fanart days.

And, y'know, I'd already done the "standard" end-pose for You Magical Winx , so I didn't feel like rehasing that, which meant it was either this or more "casual" screenshot like last week. The more casual option would've done the job just fine, but my eagerness to try this new kind made the decision for me before I could even properly process the question.

Now normally with a design this complicated, my next move before jumping into sketching for the final product would be to focus solely on the design itself, but at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'd already buffed out a design for my Winxsona's Enchantix for You Magical Winx , so I only had to worry about very small, very slight changes that largely boil down to the fact that I specifically did not go back and reference a ton of Season 3 screenshots when I was working on You Magical Winx —partly for time, partly because I remembered a lot of what I'd previously learned spending far too long staring at said screenshots the last time I drew my OC Ivy in her Enchantix.

I should clarify that re-examining the design, I really wasn't too far off base; Most of the "problems" I noticed are also present in that drawing of Ivy, and most of them can be chalked up to details that a super subtle in the show and really do take a keen eye and a lot of screenshot studying to notice at all.

The most curious detail and probably the most "obvious" [though that's still a very generous way of putting it] as it's not isolated to Enchantix or Season 3 alone is the lines. Suffice to say, Winx Club has a curious relationship with what lines on a character stay a solid black and which ones are colored, and Season 3 is largely where the colored lines become more prominent, at least while the girls are transformed.

Also suffice to say: In Enchantix, when you look at all six Winx, it starts to seem a bit random what parts of their outfits were chosen to be outlines in black and which ones weren't. So, likewise, when I had to consider which parts of my previously all-colored [except for the skin] linework to "turn" black for this piece, decided based on feeling above all else.

As just a small example of what I mean though: At first you'd think it's a "rule" that the barefoot sandals the girls' wear are always outlined in black...But then you look at Tecna's and her's are the only ones that are outlined in color.

There was a brief area of time where I thought maybe the outline color [or lack thereof] was supposed to indicate if the fabric was softer or more structures [colored for soft/flowy, black for stiff/structured], but when I looked again that theory also fell apart.

Anyway. Outline colors aside, I did make two pretty small changes to the outfit, one of which you ultimately can't really see here anyway:

1. Originally there were very thin straps the same color as the gloves that sat on the shoulders between the blue puff sleeve and the rest of the bodice. I think I added them as extra detail before, but here they were awkward and made that area too cluttered...So goodbye straps! [This is the one you can't really see because the hair blocks in on one shoulder and the fairydust trail ended up blocking in on the other.]

2. Previously I justed used the same "simplified fairydust bottle" for the little decoration that's supposed to be at the toe of the shoes. This time I changed it to a simple sparkle shape to be more consistent with the Winx's. It might be a little too simple, but I'm not going to worry about it too much for a "zoomed out screenshot" like this.

Going in, I had prepared myself to potentially change a lot more—particularly the way the skirt is structured—but the two things I described above were really the only "glaring" changes I felt like I need to make.

Similarly, I thought I was maybe going to have to make changes to the back/longest portions of the hair; Last time I used an existing line base to make it happen, but this time I was trying really hard to stick to making everything myself.

Honestly the worst of it was that second chunk that's partially hidden by the body...Mostly because I couldn't help myself and instead of just drawing what would be visible, I wanted to try and puzzle out the full piece in a vain hope the flow would look more logical that way.

To anyone that has similar thoughts on your own next art piece: Please don't waste your time doing that. Just worry about what's readily visible. I really don't think the extra time I spent trying to do that here ended up being worth it—I'm sure it did help a little, but the difference doesn't feel like nearly enough to justify how long I spent on it.

Oh, I suppose that does bring up one other notably design element I changed: All the Winx [except Tecna] have lighter strands/sections of hair in Enchantix, and I incorporated that in the design before, but even at the time I kinda wondered if I'd pushed it too far and made the color a little too light. So I adjusted to be darker and a teeny-tiny touch more blue here; My motivation for the slight blue shift being that my own purple hair in real life has started to turn a dark blue in certain areas where the dye has started to fade, so that makes the design a bit more accurate to my real appearance.

Other than that though, really the only other place I struggled with our central fairy figure was in figuring out what exactly to do with that other foot—not the one you can see really easily towards the bottom, the one that you could probably miss at a glance because it's almost tucked under "her" thigh.

The screenshot of Flora [from Season 2] I was referencing had that entire leg in a different positon and I opted to change it because I did not want to have to figure out how to draw the poofy blue bubble skirt in a stretched/spread out position to accomidate the position of the thighs. And to a lesser extent, this position felt a little more in line with the End-FairyDust poses of the Winx themselves.

Ultimately I'm not sure I saved myself that much trouble because instead of struggling with the skirt, I went back and forth over and over and over again with that dang foot.

Eventually, I found a screenshot of Stella in her Enchantix that helped, but trying to use it as a guide I put the foot on the otherside. It looked fine for the naked body base, but I realized that if I left it there, it was going to at the very least be competing with the ends of the hair for attention, and at worst get covered up by the flowy part of the skirt. And even though I was happy with the shape of the foot over there, having it on that side did still feel a lot less natural.

So I..."broke down" is a bit harsh but it's the closest phrase I have...And I went back and stacked 2-3 sketches until I felt like I'd finally nailed down a shape and position I could live with. And you know what? It looks a lot better properly lined and colored in than it did as a sketch, so I'm glad I stuck with it.

I think that about covered the key focus of the drawing, but before I move on to the other parts, one last thing I want to mention: I opted for closed eyes here mostly because it felt right, but also a little because it has bothered me ever since I noticed it that when I animated the blink for You Magical Winx , I completely forgot to add eyeshadow to the closed eyelid even though it's present on the little bit of eyelid visible when the eye is open.

In some twisted way, the closed eyes here felt like rectifying that mistake.

But I brought it up because I didn't realize until I was basically done that now this drawing has both closed eyes and a greenish-blue background situation very similar to last week's . It really wasn't intentional, at least not on a conscious level. So I may try a little harder to purposeful have open eyes and different color for the next one, but we'll see...

Moving along: After I had the lines and flat base color for "me" sorted out I took a break to work on the wings.

Once again, you'd really think this would be one aspect that took very little time considering how much I already in place, but Nope!

Last time, I drew the wings on the same file as the main fairy. It worked fine then, but for ease-of-future-use [especially after defining a personal system for Enchantix wings when I did Winx that Kiss ], a separate file with more unique layers is the better way to go. And to a similar end, because I hadn't done Winx that Kiss yet, I didn't have my set system and so the layers I did have weren't quite right by comparison.

So I took a screenshot of my original wings from that file and used that as a base to re-make them in a brand new one, this time sticking as closely as possible to that personal system for Enchantix wings I keep mentioning.

It wasn't a point-blank tracing fest though because I did need to give the lines more weight, which slight affects their position, and I did quite a bit of tweaking to the gems that are and hang off the wing tips; Before I just used a standard teardrop shape for all of them and arguably added a few too many. Here I switch the more noticably ones to diamond/rhombus shapes, cut a few out entirely, and changed the remaining ones to ovals.

And, sticking with the patterns of the official wings, I added some super small and hard to notice round pink gems attached to the existing hanging-tip gems.

The thing I struggled with the most with the wings though was actually the semi-transparent colored sections. Without delving too far into the grit, I had to tweak the flat colors a bit so that they looked more like the colors I actually wanted when I made them transparent. The original colors were so light that without that tweaking they looked really odd and/or nonexistant when transparent.

So yeah, the wings ended up taking way longer than I expected, but I am really pleased with the final result, and now I'll have that separate file of them in case I need it again.

Then I went back and finished up the shading and such on "me" so I could drop the wings in.

Er, well, I did drop the wings in at this point but it was more so for placement and visual aid since, as I've mentioned before, Procreate isn't great at resizing stuff, so much later I re-added the wings in Photoshop to preserve their clarity/detail.

Anyway, before I could get cracking on the more magical touches there was one more thing I had to do, and again it's hard to see here but that's sorta the point: The pseudo 3D fairy dust bottle in her/my hand at the top.

Fortunately, that was probably one of the absolutely easiest things here, because I only had to worry about the simplest teardrop-shaped portion of the bottle and not the whole thing, and it got soft airbrush shading for the 3D look.

Worth noting that I was mostly thinking of Stella's Fairydust sequence for that since it's much hard to see the bottles at all for the other girls' once they start drawing the symbols like this. The next easiest to see is Layla/Aisha's, but it's mostly just a little green blob over her hand.

Then it was time to make the magic. Kind of literally.

And let me tell you, you'd think the Fairydust Symbols are easy—"Oh it's just a glowing line with a little glitter, that's not too hard."

Hard? No, not really. But like I'm noticing to be true of more and more Winx design elements: Deceptively simple.

I think my "winning formula" ended up being 4-5 stacked layers with various amounts of glowing lines and sparkle/glitter.

It doesn't help that when you see all 6 official symbols side-by-side , they're all slightly different in their structure. Really only Flora and Musa's feel anywhere close to a 1:1 match to me.

Technically that means I could've probably do my symbol anyway I wanted and it would've been fine, but my brain insisted on trying to take a little from them all [but mostly Bloom and Musa's].

While I'm at it: I also spent way longer on the shape that I probably should've. I did try to come up with another symbol that would fit alongside the others a bit better, but it didn't take long for me to concede that a standard wing-outline is the most true to me personally and I'd just be either wasting my time or lying to myself in trying to come up with something else.

So my next challenge was fitting that wing shape into a "one line" design that felt "loose" enough to stand alongside the official symbols, while still feeling natural to have the hand holding the bottle in the over-head position I'd already draw it in. And that is why that wing shape is not symmetrical.

Dead-on symmetrical would've been more accurate in other ways, but I feel like the ways I captured here were more important. And it's hard to explain way exactly, but considering how easy-going the Winx are when they draw their symbols, this was feels more natural to me.

Truth be told, I think there's still more improvement to be made in the sparkle structure of the line, but it's "close enough" and if I didn't stop myself here, it would probably be after Christmas before I was able to get this thing done.

Speaking of weird consistencies though: The Fairydust backgrounds behind of the Winx. I really wish someone could tell me why is Bloom's so different from both the others' AND her Enchantix Transformation background??

All of the girls' backgrounds have slight differences, or even more notable ones in Flora's case, but something about the differences for Bloom's feels much more vast to me, and as pretty as I think her Fairydust background is, I find it perplexing.

But I digress. For mine, I msotly took notes from Stella's. Her fairydust background is pretty much the same as her Enchantix one, but with more hints of a blue cloud texture and no star outlines. So I used colors very close to You Magical Winx but tried to make the bright more greenish-blue present only in the corners a little more prominent here. And there's a hint of pink towards the left-center that wasn't there before at all.

More notably though, I was inspired by the more notable textures in Tecna and Flora's backgrounds and I wanted something more on top of what I already had.

Very serendipitously, about this time I took a "procrastination break" and scrolled by where someone had posted a Star Trail photograph on social media. If you don't know, Star Trail photos show the path of stars as they move around the night sky; They end up making curved lines and circle-ish shapes because of how the Earth rotates.

That broken-circle-lines effect was just what the doctor ordered as far as I was concerned! And if I ever get around to making one of these for my OC Ivy, I'll probably re-use the idea there, too.

If that happens though, after this I know better than to waste my time trying to find a brush that will recreate a good star trail effect in my Procreate brushes. I don't even want to know how much time I ended up wasting doing that.

It was so much easier and more statisfying to grab a real star trial photo from Pixabay, drop it in, and adjust the size and layer settings until really only the trials were showing through.

Believe it or not though, I wasn't quite done yet—I still had to spend a little time playing around with layer settings to get just the right amount and brightness of glow around "me" and the wings.

In retrospect, I sorta wasted my time trying to do that in Procreate because when I moved everything into Photoshop I found the layer settings in there much more effective and ended up not using my glow layers from Procreate at all.

But I think the only other reason I had trouble is because my "signature" color I was using for the glow is already so light, and Enchantix adds an extra kinda of lumosity/brightness to the glow are the girls that isn't usually present when they glow as Magic Winx fairies. Balancing that additional light with the already pastel color was a bit tricky.

That said...I did it, Sparklers, I really did it!

Figuring out the glow was the last piece of the puzzle, and compared to some of the other challenges I already talked about, it certainly wasn't the worst thing I had to deal with.

In that same vein, it may have taken forever to finally be able to say, "it's finished!" but I have to admit that my most difficult challenges here still really weren't that bad in the grand scheme of things. I've had other art projects that were far more frustrating from beginning to end and took probably half the time this one did, if not less.

So perhaps now you see how even I'm still a little unsure why this took so long, all things considered.

However, it IS finished and if I ignore my disappointment at how long it took...It's beautiful. My inner child is absolutely speechless and overjoyed at how much it really does look like it could be from the show.

To that end, it's pretty incredible for a first-attempt at one of these Fairydust scenes, huh? In that sense, I'm glad I did wait so long before attempting one—So I could feel like I've really done the look justice in terms of where my art skills are at. That was worth it even if literally nothing else was!

...I could wax a lot more poetic about that particular aspect and what this means it terms of where I'm at in my Winx Art journey, but I'd really just be repeating things I've already send at the end of the descriptions for Fairy Familiar Face and You Magical Winx , so instead I think I'll just wrap things up here so I can get to cross-posting before it's too terribly late in the day.

As a final recap, then: I'm not happy about how long it took, but I absolutely love the final results I captured here, and hope you Sparklers do too. And I hope you're looking just as forward to seeing if I can pull a miracle out of myself and manage to not post next week's entry in this series late.

I won't push myself too much since this coming week is Christmas and I'd rather focus on enjoying the holiday and potentially getting something cute, non-Winx, and Christmas-specific up instead, but it's that time of year when magical things seem more possible, so we'll just have to wait and see how it all works out it the end.

Until then, let's just try to stay warm, cozy, and optimistic, my Sparklers! :waves:

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings
Winx Club © Rainbow S.p.A.

Sparkle Brushes: Enchantix + Season 3 Resource Pack
Wings Referenced: Magic School Wings

Where to find me & my artwork:
My Website | My Book | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

Description
My Website | My Book | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi (Now with Membership Tiers for as little as $1 a Month!) | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

Welp, much like the first installment of this series , I'm once again a day late. But this time it's very much not because I got a late start—quite the contrary.

No, this time I have my own perfectionism and ambition to thank for all the delays.

Before I go any further though, in case you missed last week's piece and can't be bothered either clicking the link above or manually checking my gallery, allow me to fill you in on what this is: Winxsona Winter is an event being hosted by wittywinx over on Instagram ; Starting December 1st and running alllll the way through February 10th. Each week You draw your "Winxsona," or you if you were dropped into the world of Winx Club tomorrow, in a different transformation. Last week we started off with the classic Magic Winx, and this week we're onto Enchantix.

Full disclosure that I had actually hoped to finish this one early enough that I could take a step backwards and sneak in a Charmix brooch & bag set to post first. Recently I discovered what I consider a gold mind of 1920s-30s Art Nouveu-type broochs on Pinterest that would work as amazing Charmix brooch inspiration and I thought that would be a fun way to "make up" for having posted the Magic Winx piece a little late.

I dared think finishing this one early would even be possible because as some of you lovely Sparklers my remember, [and as I also pointed out last week, too], I started off this year with my Winxsona in "her" Enchantix when I made You Magical Winx . Meaning unlike with her/my Magic Winx [and with allll the other transformations on the Winxsona Winter list...] I already had a solid design to work with.

More over, just a month later I spent all that time studying and trying to understand the Winx's official Enchantix wings for the second half of my Winx that Kiss series, so even if I did have to edit or re-do the Enchantix wings I'd already made, I should have had the formula for doing so pretty down-pat.

Essentially, a lot of pieces for this puzzle were already in place...So honestly even I'm confused that I still couldn't get it finished on time.

But here we are all the same.

It probably didn't help that I did decide before I even got started that I wanted to try my hand at, as you can see, not just a normal Enchantix end-transformation-pose or a simple-ish screenshot like last week, but rather the end-of-Fairydust-activiation scene, which you can see the official examples of here for comparison. And I opted to do this type of scene since it may actually my favorite of the magic sequences we see for Enchantix in the show, and yet I have never actually atempted to draw one of these before—Not even way back in my earliest and most amibitious Winx Fanart days.

And, y'know, I'd already done the "standard" end-pose for You Magical Winx , so I didn't feel like rehasing that, which meant it was either this or more "casual" screenshot like last week. The more casual option would've done the job just fine, but my eagerness to try this new kind made the decision for me before I could even properly process the question.

Now normally with a design this complicated, my next move before jumping into sketching for the final product would be to focus solely on the design itself, but at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'd already buffed out a design for my Winxsona's Enchantix for You Magical Winx , so I only had to worry about very small, very slight changes that largely boil down to the fact that I specifically did not go back and reference a ton of Season 3 screenshots when I was working on You Magical Winx —partly for time, partly because I remembered a lot of what I'd previously learned spending far too long staring at said screenshots the last time I drew my OC Ivy in her Enchantix.

I should clarify that re-examining the design, I really wasn't too far off base; Most of the "problems" I noticed are also present in that drawing of Ivy, and most of them can be chalked up to details that a super subtle in the show and really do take a keen eye and a lot of screenshot studying to notice at all.

The most curious detail and probably the most "obvious" [though that's still a very generous way of putting it] as it's not isolated to Enchantix or Season 3 alone is the lines. Suffice to say, Winx Club has a curious relationship with what lines on a character stay a solid black and which ones are colored, and Season 3 is largely where the colored lines become more prominent, at least while the girls are transformed.

Also suffice to say: In Enchantix, when you look at all six Winx, it starts to seem a bit random what parts of their outfits were chosen to be outlines in black and which ones weren't. So, likewise, when I had to consider which parts of my previously all-colored [except for the skin] linework to "turn" black for this piece, decided based on feeling above all else.

As just a small example of what I mean though: At first you'd think it's a "rule" that the barefoot sandals the girls' wear are always outlined in black...But then you look at Tecna's and her's are the only ones that are outlined in color.

There was a brief area of time where I thought maybe the outline color [or lack thereof] was supposed to indicate if the fabric was softer or more structures [colored for soft/flowy, black for stiff/structured], but when I looked again that theory also fell apart.

Anyway. Outline colors aside, I did make two pretty small changes to the outfit, one of which you ultimately can't really see here anyway:

1. Originally there were very thin straps the same color as the gloves that sat on the shoulders between the blue puff sleeve and the rest of the bodice. I think I added them as extra detail before, but here they were awkward and made that area too cluttered...So goodbye straps! [This is the one you can't really see because the hair blocks in on one shoulder and the fairydust trail ended up blocking in on the other.]

2. Previously I justed used the same "simplified fairydust bottle" for the little decoration that's supposed to be at the toe of the shoes. This time I changed it to a simple sparkle shape to be more consistent with the Winx's. It might be a little too simple, but I'm not going to worry about it too much for a "zoomed out screenshot" like this.

Going in, I had prepared myself to potentially change a lot more—particularly the way the skirt is structured—but the two things I described above were really the only "glaring" changes I felt like I need to make.

Similarly, I thought I was maybe going to have to make changes to the back/longest portions of the hair; Last time I used an existing line base to make it happen, but this time I was trying really hard to stick to making everything myself.

Honestly the worst of it was that second chunk that's partially hidden by the body...Mostly because I couldn't help myself and instead of just drawing what would be visible, I wanted to try and puzzle out the full piece in a vain hope the flow would look more logical that way.

To anyone that has similar thoughts on your own next art piece: Please don't waste your time doing that. Just worry about what's readily visible. I really don't think the extra time I spent trying to do that here ended up being worth it—I'm sure it did help a little, but the difference doesn't feel like nearly enough to justify how long I spent on it.

Oh, I suppose that does bring up one other notably design element I changed: All the Winx [except Tecna] have lighter strands/sections of hair in Enchantix, and I incorporated that in the design before, but even at the time I kinda wondered if I'd pushed it too far and made the color a little too light. So I adjusted to be darker and a teeny-tiny touch more blue here; My motivation for the slight blue shift being that my own purple hair in real life has started to turn a dark blue in certain areas where the dye has started to fade, so that makes the design a bit more accurate to my real appearance.

Other than that though, really the only other place I struggled with our central fairy figure was in figuring out what exactly to do with that other foot—not the one you can see really easily towards the bottom, the one that you could probably miss at a glance because it's almost tucked under "her" thigh.

The screenshot of Flora [from Season 2] I was referencing had that entire leg in a different positon and I opted to change it because I did not want to have to figure out how to draw the poofy blue bubble skirt in a stretched/spread out position to accomidate the position of the thighs. And to a lesser extent, this position felt a little more in line with the End-FairyDust poses of the Winx themselves.

Ultimately I'm not sure I saved myself that much trouble because instead of struggling with the skirt, I went back and forth over and over and over again with that dang foot.

Eventually, I found a screenshot of Stella in her Enchantix that helped, but trying to use it as a guide I put the foot on the otherside. It looked fine for the naked body base, but I realized that if I left it there, it was going to at the very least be competing with the ends of the hair for attention, and at worst get covered up by the flowy part of the skirt. And even though I was happy with the shape of the foot over there, having it on that side did still feel a lot less natural.

So I..."broke down" is a bit harsh but it's the closest phrase I have...And I went back and stacked 2-3 sketches until I felt like I'd finally nailed down a shape and position I could live with. And you know what? It looks a lot better properly lined and colored in than it did as a sketch, so I'm glad I stuck with it.

I think that about covered the key focus of the drawing, but before I move on to the other parts, one last thing I want to mention: I opted for closed eyes here mostly because it felt right, but also a little because it has bothered me ever since I noticed it that when I animated the blink for You Magical Winx , I completely forgot to add eyeshadow to the closed eyelid even though it's present on the little bit of eyelid visible when the eye is open.

In some twisted way, the closed eyes here felt like rectifying that mistake.

But I brought it up because I didn't realize until I was basically done that now this drawing has both closed eyes and a greenish-blue background situation very similar to last week's . It really wasn't intentional, at least not on a conscious level. So I may try a little harder to purposeful have open eyes and different color for the next one, but we'll see...

Moving along: After I had the lines and flat base color for "me" sorted out I took a break to work on the wings.

Once again, you'd really think this would be one aspect that took very little time considering how much I already in place, but Nope!

Last time, I drew the wings on the same file as the main fairy. It worked fine then, but for ease-of-future-use [especially after defining a personal system for Enchantix wings when I did Winx that Kiss ], a separate file with more unique layers is the better way to go. And to a similar end, because I hadn't done Winx that Kiss yet, I didn't have my set system and so the layers I did have weren't quite right by comparison.

So I took a screenshot of my original wings from that file and used that as a base to re-make them in a brand new one, this time sticking as closely as possible to that personal system for Enchantix wings I keep mentioning.

It wasn't a point-blank tracing fest though because I did need to give the lines more weight, which slight affects their position, and I did quite a bit of tweaking to the gems that are and hang off the wing tips; Before I just used a standard teardrop shape for all of them and arguably added a few too many. Here I switch the more noticably ones to diamond/rhombus shapes, cut a few out entirely, and changed the remaining ones to ovals.

And, sticking with the patterns of the official wings, I added some super small and hard to notice round pink gems attached to the existing hanging-tip gems.

The thing I struggled with the most with the wings though was actually the semi-transparent colored sections. Without delving too far into the grit, I had to tweak the flat colors a bit so that they looked more like the colors I actually wanted when I made them transparent. The original colors were so light that without that tweaking they looked really odd and/or nonexistant when transparent.

So yeah, the wings ended up taking way longer than I expected, but I am really pleased with the final result, and now I'll have that separate file of them in case I need it again.

Then I went back and finished up the shading and such on "me" so I could drop the wings in.

Er, well, I did drop the wings in at this point but it was more so for placement and visual aid since, as I've mentioned before, Procreate isn't great at resizing stuff, so much later I re-added the wings in Photoshop to preserve their clarity/detail.

Anyway, before I could get cracking on the more magical touches there was one more thing I had to do, and again it's hard to see here but that's sorta the point: The pseudo 3D fairy dust bottle in her/my hand at the top.

Fortunately, that was probably one of the absolutely easiest things here, because I only had to worry about the simplest teardrop-shaped portion of the bottle and not the whole thing, and it got soft airbrush shading for the 3D look.

Worth noting that I was mostly thinking of Stella's Fairydust sequence for that since it's much hard to see the bottles at all for the other girls' once they start drawing the symbols like this. The next easiest to see is Layla/Aisha's, but it's mostly just a little green blob over her hand.

Then it was time to make the magic. Kind of literally.

And let me tell you, you'd think the Fairydust Symbols are easy—"Oh it's just a glowing line with a little glitter, that's not too hard."

Hard? No, not really. But like I'm noticing to be true of more and more Winx design elements: Deceptively simple.

I think my "winning formula" ended up being 4-5 stacked layers with various amounts of glowing lines and sparkle/glitter.

It doesn't help that when you see all 6 official symbols side-by-side , they're all slightly different in their structure. Really only Flora and Musa's feel anywhere close to a 1:1 match to me.

Technically that means I could've probably do my symbol anyway I wanted and it would've been fine, but my brain insisted on trying to take a little from them all [but mostly Bloom and Musa's].

While I'm at it: I also spent way longer on the shape that I probably should've. I did try to come up with another symbol that would fit alongside the others a bit better, but it didn't take long for me to concede that a standard wing-outline is the most true to me personally and I'd just be either wasting my time or lying to myself in trying to come up with something else.

So my next challenge was fitting that wing shape into a "one line" design that felt "loose" enough to stand alongside the official symbols, while still feeling natural to have the hand holding the bottle in the over-head position I'd already draw it in. And that is why that wing shape is not symmetrical.

Dead-on symmetrical would've been more accurate in other ways, but I feel like the ways I captured here were more important. And it's hard to explain way exactly, but considering how easy-going the Winx are when they draw their symbols, this was feels more natural to me.

Truth be told, I think there's still more improvement to be made in the sparkle structure of the line, but it's "close enough" and if I didn't stop myself here, it would probably be after Christmas before I was able to get this thing done.

Speaking of weird consistencies though: The Fairydust backgrounds behind of the Winx. I really wish someone could tell me why is Bloom's so different from both the others' AND her Enchantix Transformation background??

All of the girls' backgrounds have slight differences, or even more notable ones in Flora's case, but something about the differences for Bloom's feels much more vast to me, and as pretty as I think her Fairydust background is, I find it perplexing.

But I digress. For mine, I msotly took notes from Stella's. Her fairydust background is pretty much the same as her Enchantix one, but with more hints of a blue cloud texture and no star outlines. So I used colors very close to You Magical Winx but tried to make the bright more greenish-blue present only in the corners a little more prominent here. And there's a hint of pink towards the left-center that wasn't there before at all.

More notably though, I was inspired by the more notable textures in Tecna and Flora's backgrounds and I wanted something more on top of what I already had.

Very serendipitously, about this time I took a "procrastination break" and scrolled by where someone had posted a Star Trail photograph on social media. If you don't know, Star Trail photos show the path of stars as they move around the night sky; They end up making curved lines and circle-ish shapes because of how the Earth rotates.

That broken-circle-lines effect was just what the doctor ordered as far as I was concerned! And if I ever get around to making one of these for my OC Ivy, I'll probably re-use the idea there, too.

If that happens though, after this I know better than to waste my time trying to find a brush that will recreate a good star trail effect in my Procreate brushes. I don't even want to know how much time I ended up wasting doing that.

It was so much easier and more statisfying to grab a real star trial photo from Pixabay, drop it in, and adjust the size and layer settings until really only the trials were showing through.

Believe it or not though, I wasn't quite done yet—I still had to spend a little time playing around with layer settings to get just the right amount and brightness of glow around "me" and the wings.

In retrospect, I sorta wasted my time trying to do that in Procreate because when I moved everything into Photoshop I found the layer settings in there much more effective and ended up not using my glow layers from Procreate at all.

But I think the only other reason I had trouble is because my "signature" color I was using for the glow is already so light, and Enchantix adds an extra kinda of lumosity/brightness to the glow are the girls that isn't usually present when they glow as Magic Winx fairies. Balancing that additional light with the already pastel color was a bit tricky.

That said...I did it, Sparklers, I really did it!

Figuring out the glow was the last piece of the puzzle, and compared to some of the other challenges I already talked about, it certainly wasn't the worst thing I had to deal with.

In that same vein, it may have taken forever to finally be able to say, "it's finished!" but I have to admit that my most difficult challenges here still really weren't that bad in the grand scheme of things. I've had other art projects that were far more frustrating from beginning to end and took probably half the time this one did, if not less.

So perhaps now you see how even I'm still a little unsure why this took so long, all things considered.

However, it IS finished and if I ignore my disappointment at how long it took...It's beautiful. My inner child is absolutely speechless and overjoyed at how much it really does look like it could be from the show.

To that end, it's pretty incredible for a first-attempt at one of these Fairydust scenes, huh? In that sense, I'm glad I did wait so long before attempting one—So I could feel like I've really done the look justice in terms of where my art skills are at. That was worth it even if literally nothing else was!

...I could wax a lot more poetic about that particular aspect and what this means it terms of where I'm at in my Winx Art journey, but I'd really just be repeating things I've already send at the end of the descriptions for Fairy Familiar Face and You Magical Winx , so instead I think I'll just wrap things up here so I can get to cross-posting before it's too terribly late in the day.

As a final recap, then: I'm not happy about how long it took, but I absolutely love the final results I captured here, and hope you Sparklers do too. And I hope you're looking just as forward to seeing if I can pull a miracle out of myself and manage to not post next week's entry in this series late.

I won't push myself too much since this coming week is Christmas and I'd rather focus on enjoying the holiday and potentially getting something cute, non-Winx, and Christmas-specific up instead, but it's that time of year when magical things seem more possible, so we'll just have to wait and see how it all works out it the end.

Until then, let's just try to stay warm, cozy, and optimistic, my Sparklers! :waves:

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings
Winx Club © Rainbow S.p.A.

Sparkle Brushes: Enchantix + Season 3 Resource Pack
Wings Referenced: Magic School Wings

Where to find me & my artwork:
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