Alright, we're kicking off chapter 26, Not Christmas Without You! This one will be similar in format to Storms Are Brewing, which was chapter 15, in bouncing around between various short stories focused on various members of the cast, though this one is a little more restrained in scope and largely is about Alex and the Black Court with shorter stories mixed in in-between.
It's sort of funny, the cover here puts the primary focus on Starchild and Xandy, but they won't actually be showing up until fairly late into it; I actually spent quite awhile trying to decide how to divide this up, with some thought given to opening on part or all of Alex's subplot and then moving on to the rest from there. Instead though I decided to let the other stories in this chapter take the center stage for a lot of of it with Alex getting the endgame spotlight, largely because we've been following Alex unbroken for awhile and it's the longest section of the chapter; Alex is taking a backseat to start with but this is still very much their story in this one.
What's funny is even fairly late into writing the chapter this was an issue; due to Adam's current problems I decided to add a few light, breezy pages to the start of the chapter (after the first page) to kind of give some room to more easily build up a backlog given we didn't really get the usual chance to do that during a lot of the filler. Ultimately there were three pages written as part of that, one of them being the groundwork for this leg of the story that'd then be revisited later, but Adam figured two was enough and so I pushed that one back to the end of the chapter with the rest of this part of the plot.
We tried to work in some little nudges toward some of the various faces and things we'll be seeing in this chapter among the background here, kind of wanted it to be a cover that communicates a lot even while being somewhat minimalist. I think the last cover was probably better, but that one's sort of a hard one to top. I've got an idea I'm very partial to for the next one though so there is that.
Really hope everyone's going to enjoy this chapter, it's a little more conventional for us than that last one was but in a lot of ways I wanted to try to keep the high focus on emotion and character stuff going with it and we'll be seeing a lot of the cast in it in some capacity.
Well, we can all relax! I'm back at home, my power and wifi are back up and things are starting to look back to normal! .... Oh, wait, it's 2020. "Normal" is Godawful.
This cover was a lot of fun to do; the idea of Starchild sitting on a Christmasy set looking depressed was the basic idea, that covers the main focus of the chapter. Like Martin said, a lot of the emphasis is Alex and Xandy, hence the hints on them. I especially love the flowers growing on the snowman to indicate Xandy. ^^
But yeah, that won't be until fairly late in the game; in the meantime we had a lot of other little stories that we had to emphasize. So we peppered this cover with a bunch of extra little clues to what's going on, with each of us having different ideas for hings to put in.
Was a fun, easy cover to work on and I love the result. I think my favorite bit is the streetlamp's hazy glow, like you tend to see on humid December nights. ^^ Just was fun trying to make things as Christmasy as possible. It's a little odd doing a Christmas chapter for WaR since Blues missed the chance during the timeskip.
I kinda want to go into all the little touches in the chapter but they all relate to stuff so I guess I should ease off.... Heh.... One thing I do wanna single out is that Nutcracker. I sort of collect nutcrackers myself; get a new one as a gift every Christmas, so I wanted to include one. Martin really got a laugh out of me with the Geno color scheme. ^^ ..... It's not related to anything in the chapter, Geno never shows up, I just thought it was sorta neat. ^^
I tried to write "Rosebud" on the sled but couldn't get it to look right.
It's sort of funny, the cover here puts the primary focus on Starchild and Xandy, but they won't actually be showing up until fairly late into it; I actually spent quite awhile trying to decide how to divide this up, with some thought given to opening on part or all of Alex's subplot and then moving on to the rest from there. Instead though I decided to let the other stories in this chapter take the center stage for a lot of of it with Alex getting the endgame spotlight, largely because we've been following Alex unbroken for awhile and it's the longest section of the chapter; Alex is taking a backseat to start with but this is still very much their story in this one.
What's funny is even fairly late into writing the chapter this was an issue; due to Adam's current problems I decided to add a few light, breezy pages to the start of the chapter (after the first page) to kind of give some room to more easily build up a backlog given we didn't really get the usual chance to do that during a lot of the filler. Ultimately there were three pages written as part of that, one of them being the groundwork for this leg of the story that'd then be revisited later, but Adam figured two was enough and so I pushed that one back to the end of the chapter with the rest of this part of the plot.
We tried to work in some little nudges toward some of the various faces and things we'll be seeing in this chapter among the background here, kind of wanted it to be a cover that communicates a lot even while being somewhat minimalist. I think the last cover was probably better, but that one's sort of a hard one to top. I've got an idea I'm very partial to for the next one though so there is that.
Really hope everyone's going to enjoy this chapter, it's a little more conventional for us than that last one was but in a lot of ways I wanted to try to keep the high focus on emotion and character stuff going with it and we'll be seeing a lot of the cast in it in some capacity.