Moonphase: Topsfield Fair Entry 2021

Welcome to my fourth week of posting about my old Topsfield Fair entries. This time, I’m showing off my entry from 2021. If you have been keeping up, you may have noticed I skipped a year. I would’ve liked to submit a new image to the 2020 Topsfield Fair, but we… didn’t have the fair that year. I think we all understand WHY there was no fair in 2020, don’t we? (gives White House the stink eye)

(sigh) …Anyway, instead of making a piece of digital art in 2021, I decided to try my hand at a hand-drawn piece. My folks often comment my hand-drawn work comes out better (maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, I’m my own worst critic), so I figured I would see how far a hand-drawn picture would go. And, of course, I would once again rely on my muse – Sakura Miyazaki – to help me through this.

Specifically, I wanted to illustrate Sakura’s self-made superpower: Moonphase. I’ve done a couple of pieces long ago about this ability, but to sum it up, she can project either an attractive force she calls “Fullmoon” or a repulsive force called “Newmoon”. Fullmoon manifests as a cyan-white disc which pulls objects toward her, while Newmoon conjures a reddish-black disc to push objects away. These discs are the centers of their respective forces and have the strongest effects right near them, though their influence could extend as far as Sakura can see. She could use this ability to pick up objects or redirect enemy attacks and later launch them back at opponents (as long as she doesn’t hurt herself with those captured attacks).

I thought shooting this pink laser toward Sakura would help illustrate both effects: using Newmoon to block and diffuse the laser shot, then collecting the scattered embers of the laser with Fullmoon.

One other detail about both forms of Moonphase: while voice-initiated, Sakura also needs a certain hand gesture to use these powers: an open palm for the inviting Fullmoon, or a closed fist for Newmoon. Speaking these phrases without their respective gestures could result in unintentional use.

As for the environment, I wanted something slightly alien but kinda recognizable, and able to be drawn in the limited time I had to work on this picture. I also kind of heard about the vaporwave aesthetic about this time, so I went with a desert of cold colors with an odd pyramid. It now occurs to me that 1) I didn’t use enough warm colors in the environment to truly call this “vaporwave”, and 2) vaporwave is probably an aesthetic better left to digital art.

I think I developed this picture over the course of a couple of weeks, and it was nice to do something relatively big as a hand-drawn picture. But the next year I would submit a piece, I returned to digital art with an ambitious idea.

I hope you like this change of pace, and I hope to see you around next week. Thanks for reading and looking at my art!