What did you use as inspiration for Paola's creature-design? The biblically-accurate angel influence is easy to see, but some of her other features are more unique than even that 🤩
(I promise I'll get to reading and reblogging certain stuff soon, I'm just juggling a bunch of my own stuff and don't want to let myself procrastinate.)
She’s mostly based on a biblically accurate angel, you’re 100% correct on that! But you’re also right that there’s a few other aspects of her design that are based on other things mixed in… 👀
First off being that I also kinda wanted her to look a bit like a white hole, and her wings are meant to look like an accretion disk (white holes, as of right now, are purely theoretical objects, but are the proposed opposite of a black hole - where nothing can escape a black hole, nothing can enter a white hole. There’s a LOT more to it than that ofc and many many other theories about what a white hole actually is, if they even exist, but my point is that Paola’s eye was based on the centre of a white/black hole, and the gravitational lensing effect such a massive object would have)
Although, her eye was *also* based on a globular cluster, or a very large and tightly packed group of stars, many of which can be found near the galactic core, like this!
However I also wanted Paola to parallel the “god” on AT-5 in some ways, while also contrasting it, so her having one giant eye is also a reflection of this scene in the movie;
Also, both her materializing out of the fog and having long, thin tentacles were inspired by these pieces by Vorja Sánchez;
Since I did want her to be just a liiiiitle bit creepy 🤭
Additionally, the world of Eternia itself was inspired by Saybrook’s Planet in the 1950 short story Green Patches by Isaac Asimov - which I would highly recommend reading! Mainly because it’s intriguing, but also because it’ll probably make Paola’s hivemind make a bit more sense.
(Oh and don’t worry about taking your time with those “certain things” 😉 I don’t mind. All I hope is that you really enjoy them once you do read them 💖💖)
