"lock in" is probably one of the most important phrases to enter the public lexicon in the 2020s

ALT

Keep 'em guessin'

i hear a good lyric and start mentally holding up blorbos like im in the home depot paint aisle comparing swatches

Thank you again for looking at them! https://www.tumblr.com/regaldragonempres

s/791604624819896320/closeups-without-the-background (I hope I did this right? I don’t submit things very often…)

ANSWER

Ok, before we start, I’ll repeat it again so you don’t forget: DON’T CHANGE THINGS ABOUT YOUR ART TO APPEAL TO ME, YOUR FIRST OBJECTIVE SHOULD ALWAYS BE YOUR OWN SATISFACTION.

General Corrections:

• I understand that you want your team to have a unifying transformation accessory, but keep in mind that choker necklaces don’t go well with most high necklines.The Tokyo Mew Mews can pull of that because their outfits are different variations on bunnygirl outfits, but your girls are much more diverse in shape and functionality. Mind you, you can have the Flora Gems as you call them in that position, all I’m saying is that you need to incorporate some of them better.
• Having all the sleeves be a different color than the top feels forced on most of the outfits. You’re also better off experimenting with other types of shapes that aren’t perfectly spherical. Having said that, I do appreciate you taking the challenge of incorporating complimentary colors on each of them.
• If you want all the girls to have some form of belt with their flower as a pin that’s fine, but you gotta find better ways to integrate them. Especially, you have to find a way for the pins not to compete with the gems on the choker, because that’s two focus points right at the center of each outfit.
• Careful with the ombre. Much like frills and ribbons, it must be used wisely.
• The length and trimming of the gloves is important. It needs to fit the aesthetic of the outfit you’re going for and not compete with the sleeves.
•  Some of the flowers on the shoes are kinda cute as a detail, but to be honest I would get rid or at least modify of most them. I’ll explain more on each case, but to generalize, some of the flowers you’ve chosen have shapes that aren’t well suited to becoming that kind of accessory and most of the shoes you put them on don’t even look good with that kind of accessory either.

To summarize, your problem is that you’re trying to balance two general types of aesthetics, but haven’t quite figured out how. Back in my first part post about the Holy Quintet, I talked about cohesion vs individuality as a scale. To better illustrate my point, I’m gonna keep comparing your team to the Tokyo Mew Mew’s, since Team Flora is almost diametrically opposed to them on that. Like I said before, the Tokyo Mew Mews are very slight variations on the same concept, and that’s in part because the functionality of their outfits is almost secondary to their aesthetic. All of them have a base moveset of rythmic gymnastics, and their weapons are less about combat styles and more about looking pretty. That’s not to say that their differences are irrelevant, but they clearly come after the fact that they are all kemonomimi girls in playboy-inspired (but cuter) outfits who fight with acrobatic maneuvers. And only after all that mouthful you get The One That’s a Ballerina, The One That Jumps Around Like a Cat, The One With The Whip, etc., etc.

Your girls, on the other hand, are functionality first and aesthetics second. While you obviously want them to be a unified team with points of commonality, you can’t disguise the fact that all of them are meant to move very very differently from eachother. Now, you seem to have taken care of making sure those points of commonality don’t go against the first rule about practicality and movement, and I really appreciate that, but the fact remains that you’re still cutting some corners of the square pegs to get them to fit into the round hole. Same with repeating the flower motifs; it’s good that you want to be clear about which flower represents who, but reiterating it so much and so explicitly launches it straight into redundant territory. All of this is to say that you should allow the girls’ clothes to be clothes first and only after that you put in the twists and details to make them unified.

Keep reading