Owner: Silver-OPs

Gender/Species: Female/Alicorn

Name suggestion(s): Mayblossoms, Apollonia

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A design for my shipping grid adoptables ^{^}

The buyer gave me no instructions, except to make them an alicorn, so I could play around quite a bit with this design :) And there is quite a lot you can do with it, since the parents are so opposite in themes and designs. AJ being very sunlight and summer/fall themed, to Luna’s obvious night theme. So there’s things like the harvest moon (obv), halloween (spooky, nightmare night, somewhat linked to harvest celebrations?), blood moons (red and orange color scheme, yet moon), various other autumn and harvest celebrations etc. When I see other people making LunaxAJ nextgen designs, in my experience they tend to be very dark color-wise, with reds and oranges as accents. So I thought I’d base this design around another idea I’ve had that fits thematically with the parents -the idea of the daytime moon. Thus a design which I could then use more of AJ in and make brighter. The moon being out during the day is not an uncommon sight in our world at all, but seems to be extremely rare in the mlp verse. So I thought it’d be fun to base a character around it. ^{^}

I wanted the daylight theme to really come through, so I made the mane midday-sky blue, with the gradient from the horizon-color to the color of the middle of the sky. I then had a bit of a trouble with what color to make the coat. I already knew I wanted them to have appaloosa markings in light blue, so that the moon cutie mark appears as if it was in the sky during the day. But I needed something that went well with that, while still tying her back to AJ. I tried with a warm golden color first, but that didn’t… it didn’t look good to me, it clashed to much imo. (Also, made me think of the swedish flad too much…) So messed around a bit and eventually settled on a brown color -my logic being that it’s AJ’s orange color, but darker and less saturated, and it contrasted nicely with the bluw. Then some details, the socks because I like them and the freckles because I really like them.

For the mark, I wanted a moon obviously, but I thought it was fun if its craters formed something, like how it did with Nightmare Moon. I was unsure of what, but eventually settled on just a simple tree-silhouette -it’s easily recognizable, and thematically fitting. I felt like it was a bit too… bare still though, and wanted to add soemthing else to it, something bright yellow or orange to contrast with the blue. Some options I considered were apple slices, wheat and flowers. I picked flowers, because then I could use buttercups, and I thought it would be cute to tie back to Pear Butter <3

Names… there were some ideas fit, and sounded nice, but I didn’t like how they felt -like Midday Moon. Fits, rolls of the tounge, alliterations… its a bit too boring and doesn’t feel like a name, kinda. What would the nicknames be? Midday? Hrm. So I went digging. Did you know that the different fullmoons have different names. Dunno how traditional or real it is, or if someone just made them up, but I found them mentioned a bunch online by different people. Apparently, full moons in january are “wolf moons”, and march has “worm moons” (clearly the best moon). Important here is, there are “Flower Moons” in may! And her mark is a moon with flowers… hence the name “Mayblosoms”. “Apollonia” (or just “Apollo” if you don’t care for the feminine version) is for a few reasons. One minor one is that it ties back with Luna’s name being in latin (though this is greek, but still…). The major one is that Apollo, as far as I understand, is the god of mane things, one of which is sunlight. But, Apollo X was the names of our missions to the moon, most notably Apollo 11, the first moon landing. So the name ties to both sunlight and the moon, which I feel fits a character who’s design and mark is based around a daytime moon.

And that’s all folks. I hope you like her, and thank you so much for the support! :D