Aesthetics – Fireflies Project

I wanted to start posting something different, and the only good idea I had was to share aesthetics with some information about my WIPs. I hope you find these posts interesting!

First, a disclaimer: I’ve made all of these collages using free stock photos (and a couple of personal photos) on Canva, so to my knowledge all of them were free to use (or mine). Please let me know if that’s not the case for any of the photos (for instance, if you recognise your photo and it was uploaded illegally to Canva).

A second disclaimer: all of these WIPs are still in progress, so everything, even the titles (especially the titles), is tentative. Things may change as the stories and the characters develop. Also, the images I’ve chosen might not be 100% accurate, but they have some element that will be important within the story (if it remains there in the future).

And now that you know that, here is the aesthetic I made for the Fireflies project:

A collage with 9 different squares.

First row, left to right:
Fog lifting among green mountains in Asturias.
Two men at the beach.
A hill in Galicia, covered in green, with a narrow path.

Second row, left to right:
A ginger cat looking at the camera with golden eyes.
The central square has "Fireflies. Sol Vera" written in fancy letters on top of a dark green square that contrasts with the lighter olive background.
A brown Labrador is laying on its bed and looking to the left.

Third row, left to right:
San Lorenzo beach in Gijón with the church and the green mound in the background.
A small, hidden mountain lake.
The San Pedro church that appeared in the background on the image of the beach.

I decided to start with this project because it’s the one with the lowest word count on the list, and I wanted to give it some love. I was surprised when I realized this project came last if we just focus on the word count, because it used to be among the first ones in that regard. It’s not that I haven’t written much about it, because I’ve already started the first draft, but that the rest of the WIPs have grown so much in the last two years that they left Fireflies behind.

As you know, it was supposed to be a low fantasy short story, but will probably end up being something longer. It’s contemporary, set in northern Spain, and has both animals and fantasy elements. The fantasy part is related to Spanish myths and legends, which have strong ties with Celtic mythology in the north.

There’s also an illustration made by Helen T Kord that you can see here. So now you know a lot about the main characters and their pets! At the moment, the one holding the cat is the narrator of the WIP. He has anxiety issues and is trying to recover.

At the beginning, this WIP was two separate projects: the one about anxiety and the one about mythology. But they were lacking something, and soon I realized they had to become one and the same. It just makes more sense this way!