The Art I Keep Forgetting To Post... My Take On Shadows!Azura.
Kept telling myself I'd upload it eventually, kept forgetting. But she's here now, and this is the hill I'm dying on - this is what peak Shadows!Azura looks like, or at least my attempt at the concept. Making her a siren or mermaid is too easy, and if you went the fish person route, you'd just wind up with something similar to Lumen from Arknights, I feel (one of my favorite characters from that game, but it felt too... safe.) That, or Haruka from the same game. At the same time, I feel like her design's silhouette and certain parts of her outfit lent itself extremely well to jellyfish imagery, and it's an animal that has plenty going for it in the "beautiful, but uncanny" department (no brains, tentacles that can be wispy and ethereal in some species, translucent, sometimes lethal stingers, can be in deep waters, the whole nine yards.) To me, it just made sense, but because the only other Shadows!Azura takes I had seen didn't even so much as think of jellyfish, I knew if I wanted others to see the vision, I had to make it myself.
Light Form was more of a rough sketch/proof of concept, which is why it looks unfinished, but I knew that Shadow Form had to go all the way in on the concept to tie it in with the comparatively mild Light Form. Obviously, give her the Nohr outfit for symbolism, but also, turn her canon headwear into a translucent veil that is both bigger and is meant to resemble the bell of a jellyfish, make the tentacles more prominent (Light Form's are more subtle and resemble normal hair at the top, but become translucent at the bottom, save for the darker ones,) and more frilly, replace her legs with more tentacles, just really go in on making her look like she's as beautiful as she is lethal, the vibe of someone who would rather let you drown after she gets you with her toxins, but is also completely capable of using her lance or strangling you with her tentacles to get the job done if need be.
Whenever I get my drive to draw back, I want to do more "fitting, but unusual" Shadows concepts. The aforementioned Arknights is an inspiration to me, with how they semi-regularly use some of the most obscure species as inspirations for their designs, even if they're categorized into a more "normal" group. I want to do more out-there takes, but ones that make people go "Oh, this makes so much sense and fits this character to a T, you've changed how I see this character now." Like, I think I saw Alm as a pistol shrimp or something similar once, and that lives in my head rent-free. So if I see an idea I like enough, I might take a crack at it.
