Would y’all believe me if I said this isn’t even my main Zora May piece? Ok, for those of you that have been with me for a bit, you probably do lol
It seems I’ve made a zora band! I had this idea because it's a part of my Sidlink animatic that I’ve mentioned a few times. There's going to be a scene in it of some sort of festival being held in the domain and I knew I wanted a group of zoras playing music for it, so I started doing some research and here we are!! The group consists of Marot on tambourine, Mei on harp, Tona on flute, Cleff on violin, and Laflat on conch! (Also if you guys remember my Sidlink drawing from Linktober this past year, that piece and this piece are from the same scene! Makes sense considering the prompt for that one was also music :D)
This really was supposed to be simple but simple is clearly not in my vocabulary! Originally I’d been saying that I didn’t need to go so hard on this but when I was talking about it in therapy a couple weeks ago and said that, my therapist legitimately told me, as soon as that had left my mouth: “Yes you did” 😂 She didn’t even hesitate for a second and she said it in the most dead-set tone I have ever heard, it low-key cracked me up! Though to be fair, her reasoning for that was genuinely really solid because she pointed out that this is a concept I've been working on for nearly a year and a half, so of course I was going to dedicate a lot of effort to making this, even though it's just a concept piece
Anyways, as usual I have a lot of thoughts so I'll put some more of my explanation under the cut as well as some more design concepts! I’ve actually figured out the designs for 3 of the instruments already so I recommend you take a look! (And there may be something related to the previously mentioned Sidlink piece in there as well 👀)
Something I find interesting is I had come up with the instruments I wanted back in February of 2024 and had actually figured out who I wanted to play each of them in November, meaning I'd decided on this months before I started designing my zora oc and thinking a lot about the Marot Mart dynamics, so it's kind of funny that all of them except for Laflat are part of the Coral Reef Crew or are Coral Reef Crew-adjacent (with Tona being Cleff's sister)! It was completely unintentional, but it coincidentally makes a lot of sense that they would form a group considering they spend a decent amount of time together!
I’ll get into it more when I eventually make a post with the finished designs for all the instruments but one of the main things I tried to think about was what sorts of instruments the zoras would make based on what specific resources are native to them and what materials they commonly work with! You guys know me, there was a lot of research put into this idea, and I’m so happy seeing it start to take shape beyond just a handful of words written on a page in my sketchbook!
I don't have all of the designs for the instruments finalized yet but I did manage to work out approximately what the tambourine, conch, and violin will look like. The latter two are pretty much done aside from maybe a couple tweaks on the violin, but I still need to figure out the pattern I want on the tambourine head cause it looks really empty compared to the rest of the design
But anyways yeah, here’s a version of the band without the background and the designs for some of the instruments, as well as some basic concept sketches for Link/Wild’s festival outfit as a bonus! :)
Also I just wanted to mention that I was originally going to tell y’all that I wasn't sure what I wanted to call the band and ask if you guys had any ideas or suggestions but as I was looking through a glossary of music terminology, "The Luminous Tones" (as a play on words of luminous stones since, you know, they're something the zoras use in a lot of their architecture) suddenly popped into my head and at first I thought that was kind of silly but then the idea got stuck in my head and no other name will feel right now, so I guess the Luminous Tones it is!
