Behind the Scenes of Project: SFA - Magical Girl
Hello everyone!! Welcome to the behind the scenes post for the latest Project: SFA batch, “Magical Girl”. I wanted to go back and show some concepts, pages cut from the final version, inspirations and my thoughts on trying to adapt characters from my other project into Project: SFA!
Larissa & Maria- Adapting characters from a written format into comic format
To start this off, I feel I must start with this topic, since everything is built around adapting Larissa to this format.
Nintendo Precure! (will be shorted to NP), the main project Larissa comes from, is written in an episodic format with occasional art going along with the text. For the most part, both Larissa and Maria are only shown in well… words. For a comic where there’s no descriptions but rather the artwork you see on the pages, I had to think about how to SHOW their dynamic.
In NP, Maria for the majority of the time is simply just a voice in Larissa’s head that only she can hear. After transformation is only when she’s physically interacting with everyone else. For a comic, having just a voice speaking to Larissa wouldn’t really work in a compelling way. Sure, it could work, but would it be engaging?? So with that in mind, I made Maria appear as a ghostly spirit that looms behind Larissa as she goes about her time in the Mushroom Kingdom. Overall, I think this is a great way to show more of Maria to the audience and ties very well in with NP’s overall involvement with one’s spirits (which is inspired off of Smash Ultimate’s spirit system. I won’t be getting into that here since it isn’t important for SFA.)
Another thing important was Larissa’s expressions. I tried to make her as emotive as possible, but in the end I guess it just ended up looking like she was about to explode from anxiety for most of the time ahahaha (she’s has so many shocked/scared faces😭). For the most part, it’s really nice to actually get to draw out her faces instead of just describing them in written form.
Concepts- warmup sketches, ditched ideas
Before starting on drawing the comic, I would often do warmup sketches to get myself into the grove. Usually it would just be the characters, but sometimes I’d use this time to explore ideas I had for how I could take the comic’s story before drawing the actual comic pages.
Simple sketch warmup on Larissa and Maria, exploring their dynamic of the girl who had made a deal to take upon a responsibility that is much bigger than herself. The caged motif with Larissa is very important to her relationship with Maria. For the comic, I decided to use the paneling to reflect the cage instead, seeing it as a good opportunity to play around with paneling.
These were sketches for a ditched transformation route— where as both Larissa and Maria danced, Larissa’s form would slowly turn into her form’s version of Cure Jump. This sequence was inspired off of Infinity Nikki’s opening, where Nikki dances with one of the miracle outfits. As that happens, her form slowly changes into said outfit as the scene plays out.
In the end, I decided to not go with these sequence of events for two reasons.
1) You NEVER see Larissa transform into Cure Jump herself.
This is something that is a rule to me. NP’s whole story revolves around the fact that well… Larissa isn’t supposed to be in these events. As stated in the comic, Larissa was never meant to be Cure Jump, and she isn’t. She’s just a vessel for the fragmented piece of Maria who is now stuck inside of her. So having Larissa transform wouldn’t be accurate when she physically can’t. Only Maria can, hence why you always see her take over Larissa’s body before transformation. (Blue eyes JUMPSCARE)
2) This would have taken up A LOT of pages!!!
Essentially, if I did this whole sequence in actual comic format after the warm up sketches… it would have taken up a lot of pages. And frankly, I was afraid of this ruining the pacing of the scene if I had this drag out for too long. Also my iPad. My poor iPad. She hates me already. (If you guys didn’t know, my iPad… I really shouldn’t be using it for anything right now.) So in the end, I decided to cut this idea from the final product. The idea was fun to play around with, but in the end I think what I ended up with was much better in terms of pacing and showing off Larissa and Maria’s dynamic. (The cage strikes again!… it’ll be showing up quite a bit in Larissa’s story…)
This batch introduces Merlon, a wizard that many are familiar with from Paper Mario, though SFA’s Merlon is… a bit different. Their intro is already up on my account, but here’s the concept sketch page for them.
Ditched Pages- The Real World
Like any comic draft, there are pages that didn’t make it to the final draft, being cut completely. These pages I cut were actually set where Larissa is from, the real world. One of them featured Larissa on the bus heading home from school, and another one of her returning home to be greeted with Pixelena, her team’s crazy mascot.
I had these pages drafted because I was honestly struggling on how to start this batch. During this stage, I wanted to emulate how the artwork is done for NP’s story. There’s no creative comic paneling to emulate NP’s “anime screenshots”, including dialogue being at the bottom, just like subtitles (font and everything). Below are some of the artwork from NP to try to show what I mean by this.
I did this to differentiate the two settings, if that makes sense. With the format like this, readers would be able to see how we’re currently not in the Mario universe and elsewhere due to these format changes. I do the same as well when I want to flashback to scenes in SPM, using the same speech bubbles and font as the game!
Eventually I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to show the real world and cut these pages from the final product. Shockingly (well, to me anyways) I’ve had people ask me about wanting to see more into Larissa’s life, which is something that I will confess I wasn’t planning on showing much of in SFA. I love Larissa, she’s my baby, but SFA is well… NOT her story. She’s in it, yes, and there are going to be moments that are important to her character (same with Maria as well) but this is not her time to be miss main character. That’s what NP is for. I do appreciate how lots of you seem to care about her and want to learn more about her, it does makes me very happy,,, I will continue to try my best to find a balance that works well to share more tidbits about Larissa & Maria for SFA only readers to enjoy without having to dive into NP to learn everything about them.
Though just because I cut the real world from this batch, it doesn’t mean in the future I won’t include scenes from the real world. It honestly just depends on when it’ll fit without throwing off the flow, if that makes sense.
Inspirations- The essence of a magical girl
Since Cure Jump is still at her core, a magical girl that so happens to be Mario themed, I turned to the Kamikita Twins’ work on the Precure mangas to channel that same type of energy into her when she appeared transformed especially for the transformation page.
I heavily took inspiration from specially the Fresh Precure manga adaptation (to the shock of absolutely nobody that knows me, Fresh is my favorite Precure season and forever will be) for the formatting on Jump’s transformation page. I didn’t want to drag out the transformation, mainly because the joy of magical girl transformations are seeing it in action but well— I can’t really animate!… so we go with the next best thing. Of course, this isn’t a manga, so I adjusted the formatting to fit a comic better, along with color. I’m honestly really happy with the final result, it makes me so happy seeing the page come together so beautifully…
The cover image is also a reference to another piece of precure artwork from the Kamikita Twins of Cure Lovely and Cure Unlovely. I’ve always wanted to draw Larissa and Maria in these poses, and I figured that the cover image for this batch would be a perfect time to do so!
I’ve realized that when I use references, the proportions end up looking almost exactly like the reference and I need to get better at flat out not replicating the whole thing… you can always tell when I draw something with vs without a reference💀 There’s always room for improvement…
For what it’s worth, this comic batch I started to work on October 21st and finished on December 16th… a total of 57 days… and even then afterwards, I was making quick edits because I realized I had mistakes (thank you to everyone that pointed them out to me😭). I don’t know when the next batch will be out, because once again, my iPad is acting up on me and won’t charge. I really do want to continue making digital art, but I have to remember to be cautious with what I have before I ruin it beyond repair and can’t do ANYTHING at all. I would actually cry.
As both NP and SFA has been around with me for a long time, seeing the two together after so long makes me pretty emotional. I think younger me would be so happy to see that one day I did actually finally put the two together like she’d hoped. Not in the format she originally thought, but alas still together. SFA I feel does give off the vibes of a project that perhaps someone younger would have wanted, and I take no offense to that now. It’s honestly what I’m going for, to capture that feeling is genuinely a compliment to me.
Next comic batch, I really want to focus on either Flame or Aqua, since both are main characters which I haven’t really explored much. This is due to the fact that I will have to put a lot of effort into their kingdoms’ world building instead of using an already existing one that everyone is familiar with for Sweetheart. I love them too and they deserve love as well!!
Thank you for reading until the end!! Until next time, stay peachie!