Themed Pet Showcase

Note: Before I jump into this, I want to apologize for leaving Limor to write an entire newspaper by herself. Thanks Limor-I promise I'll take the next 2 or 3 months before I leave on my three-week road trip ;P)

Hey folks! Welcome back to yet another edition of the Themed Pet Showcase! Spring Fest is upon us (and those stingy bosses are being quite stingy with the seed pouches...unforuntaely for me :P) Of course I just had to show off a few of this fest's Themed Pets, especially since my new themed lupora mission pet is giving me puppy eyes...literally.


Springshot, my Spring Tempest Lupora

Now I know I've done Aerindis before but right now they're poping up all over the fest zone and of course who can resist? Certianly not me! So here is SerenityEather on her Rose Arcanist Aerindi!



Me: What was your inspiration for the themed?
SerentiyEather: The original name for the Theme was "Knight of the Rose," which I changed to align with the festival I submitted it to. The inspiration was a combination of a "red" rose bush (which is sort of pinkish red), and a Fae. The "Knight" part mostly being leather and wood for armor, because traditional fae (Elves, Fairies, ect) can't touch metal, because it burns them.

Me: Did you already know what you wanted it to look like before you even started designing?

SerentiyEather:Yes. I knew exactly what I wanted. It took a bit, but I got the design exactly the way I wanted before I ever submitted it.

Me: How easy was it to create the themed?
SerentiyEather:I knew the general color palette I wanted, so yes, the design was pretty easy.

Me:. Did you expect to have your design chosen?
SerentiyEather: No. After my Mountain King Ny'vene and Winter Tanuki Lupora, I didn't expect another design to be chosen. Particularly after seeing no familiar names in the new theme list at the beginning of the festival. Heck, I was dumbstruck when I saw my first design chosen, after... well, my first design contest was the week of love, 2015, soo... long time ago

Me:. Anything else?
Advice?
SerentiyEather: Well... Make something that looks great, and hope for the best. I'm really not the best to ask for advice. I've made so many gorgeous designs that were never chosen, that last autumn was going to be my last design contest, and I was going to use whatever means I had to implement my own designs. Then, my MK was chosen.
I guess the best advice is to not give up? I still plan to implement designs that haven't been chosen as themes. Eventually.



A Rose Arcanist Aerindi

WOw, thanks Serenity!

So anyway.....back to spring fest! This year we've not just got the Shared Garden (which sprouts out a double chance for pets of a certain species that are themed to appear, plus all those special encounters that drop lovely thing) but the Egg Maze, both which can nab you plenty of themed pets. That's probably why I have no room in my stables...
ANyhow, just drilling the egg maze a few times cna nab you not only themed pets, but eggies, avi items, and garden supplies! And by gardening, you can get MORE themed pets.

....I think I need to stop entering that egg maze....



A Wildflower Aerindi

Thanks for reading! If you have questions, want to be featured, want to nominate someone to get featured, or have something related to Themes to share, let me know through a PM. Happy Spring Fest everyone!




This was the last thing that the Sylestia Times staff saw after Orca turned in her article. She presumably went swimming in that giant lake in the center of the fest zone in another attempt to find a kelp theme that ran away from her. Her current fate is unknown as she hasn't appeared in about a week.

So just a quick note for next month! I sometimes always forget to send Letsplay the finished articles for edeting so from now on if everyone could please ping her when you finished an article she can get to work editing and sending the edited version to me right away it would be much appreciated! There's no need to worry doing that this month since it comes out tomorrow but for future issues please keep this in mind.

Otherwise great job everyone keep it up!!!

Almost done with the one about extended fest grape! (TIme to pull an all-nighter, should be at least get it sent in by Friday since that's my main day on here) Plus am waiting for Red to send me what they've done so far

I got Ebony's guest article, it needs a name still!


In this article, Ley, Tori, and I are each going to design a summery sylvorpa, as currently summer fest themes are open for submission. Hopefully, taking a look at our process can inspire others with their own vorpas. All of us are multiple-time theme designers that also have artistic backgrounds, so we tried to apply some color theory to these designs.
~Ebony

Ebonyflicker

Sample Design: Ocean Shimmer Sylvorpa
I decided to use a yellow/blue palette to simulate sunlight upon water for my design. Since I favor high saturated colors, I don't use photo references since they aren't as vibrant as I like.

I began by giving the vorpa two of my most commonly used vorpa traits, Alpine Newt and Seaweed Whirlwind. Then, I chose a couple warm-toned blues and yellows and arranged them on the vorpa, making sure that there was a difference in how dark/light adjacent colors were in comparison to each other.

I decided I wanted to incorporate the gradient of Water Dragon Wings into the design, and figured that Fairy Crowns accents were a good parallel to how the wings became ragged at the ends. I wasnt liking how haphazardly the yellow was placed.


In my opinion, high saturation colors are most prominent with summer, so I decided to completely saturate all my colors. I deliberately used a lemon yellow color, which is slightly greenish and made the fade to blue more natural. I made the top of the body darker versus the yellow underbelly to make the wings' and headdress' yellow accents stand out.

Tori

Sample Design: Sunset Heat Wave Sylvorpa
We wanted to go with something warm-toned for a summer scheme, so a heat wave seemed suitable. While we named it after sunsets, we did not use a photo reference either, as they tend to be too all over the place for our liking.

Our first draft tends to be rather messy - we grab a few random traits and start working on getting the colours we want to use. We know we want a lot of warm tones - and we were originally thinking to mimic clay baking in the sun, so we knew we wanted a few colours to be close in value and hue.


Then we made a big jump - the dried clay look wasnt working for us, but we knew we could make something really pop with darker shades of purple instead. Something warm and akin to a sunset - with plenty of warm purples and oranges. We know we wanted plenty of fades, so we chose traits that did just that and tried to master a sunset-like look.



Then it was time to decide muts - and we already knew we wanted them to have highlights of a bright, bright yellow to compliment the purples. We chose traits that only have highlights of yellow for this purpose, setting the mut colours to a darker, cooler purple to add more complimenting colours and make it more like an encroaching night sky..

Ley

Sample Design: Cloudless Skies Sylvorpa
I took my initial inspiration from the appearance of clear skies, and played with the saturation values to give it a summer feel.

The C3 wasnt working well with the body genes and the color distribution was off, so the C3 was changed to dark blue and the G1 was lightened. The Mantis Shrimp gene gives the body a good mid-blue value and creates a good bridge between the dark blue body and the light blue from Alpine Newt.


The off-white wasnt working in the mutations slots, so I did more color rebalancing. While the pale color provides more contrast in the M1 and M2 slot, it remained unbalanced and blended into the pale background. I eventually went with a bright blue to give the Encroaching Seaweed and Nereid Wings a nice gradient. The Seaweed Whirlwind mutations small orange lights provide accent points around the design and complement the G3.

Since blue and orange are complementary colors, they do well in making each other stand out. The orange and white were used as small highlights as to not overwhelm the blue tones, but still provide small focal points at various places.

Thank you to Limor and the rest of the Sylestia Times for allowing us to write this guest article!

Thanks for telling some people to give me work. I'm finally done with school and can be on more often. So, I can work a lot now.

Eeeek sorry xD there was a bit of confusion between me and orca about who was submitting it to you. Here it is tho, and plz put the banner at the top of the article?


As time passes, so do the seasons. This May brought us the end of the Spring Festival of 2019, but it wasnt any kind of festival ending weve ever seen before. This Spring Festival was unique in multiple ways. One way was the release of the Spring Blossoms mutation on every species. To obtain sylesti with this rare trait, one would have to participate in a special event during the Spring Festival in which people would collectively donate enchanted water to a chosen flower in the shared garden in order to trigger these events.

On May 21st, the festival was scheduled to end at midnight. Due to the fact that there was currently a shared garden event running, with a few more queued up afterwards, Krinadon decided to let the festival run until the events ended. This decision led to one of the greatest community events Sylestia has ever seen. Something that really helped everyone feel involved and like they were in a somewhat organized community event, was that some people had different roles. For those roles, we came up with some names. The Water Warriors explores the zone and went on boss runs as much possible to grind out waters. The Guardeners stayed in the garden and helped with organization to ensure waters were being used as efficiently as possible. The Water Warriors could send waters straight to the Gaurdeners so they could keep exploring and grinding waters without having to stop. The list of Guardeners is short- Jonathananubian, RedDestiny37 (Krinwillpoop at the time), Monarchsreign, Sarcelle, and Niverus. No role is more essential than another, but the list of Water Warriors is long. All of our Warriors deserve a huge shout-out and thank you, though. Not everyone sent waters through the Guardeners, and those who didnt deserve just as much of a shout-out. This was a huge community event, and so much fun for everyone involved.

One of the participants, Jonathananubian, says, In all of my four years of being on this site I have never felt more included. It was a lot of fun to do something like that as a group. Working as a team toward a goal. I hope we'll be able to do something like that again. Maybe next year.

Krinadon stated after the close of the zone, I thought that it was rather impressive and it was fun to watch. It has always been extremely interesting to watch how the community works together over the years and seeing everyone collaborating to spawn certain events and not waste waters was a really neat thing. I expected it to last a handful of hours and instead it lasted for more than a day. The final time we managed to get to was 26 hours and 16 minutes.

Monarchsreign also had quite a bit to say about the challenge: I thought it was super fun!! I'm glad I had to stay up that night, it was well worth it! Everyone went above and beyond that night. Sylestia's community is already amazing, but I truly think that impromptu challenge showed it off the best. The dynamic was amazing! Once we gave the final push towards 24 hours, we did lose some momentum unfortunately. However we did decide on a 'last hurrah', a Nephini event. It was after that that we truly all started to tire. We decided on a goal of at least 24 hours just to be able to say we did it. It wasn't about the events or the actual festival extension. It was about being able to say that the community pulled together for at least 24 hours to make this happen. Overall, I'm absolutely floored by the teamwork that made the extension possible. The community really pulled through just to say we did it. It wasn't about the themed or Spring Blossom pets. It wasn't about scavenging those last few items. It wasn't even about getting that last maze run in. It was solely for the community to say, Look what we managed!! This is amazing!!. And it really was!

In conclusion, this spring fest was definitely one to remember. And what's next? Well, if Krin lets us do this again, we're definitely going to try to do this again. it was fun, engaging, and it brought the whole community together-3 of Sylestia's main purposes.

Welp.

Um...

I accidently deleted a whole 2 interviews i did.

*cries*