Aesthetics – Academy Project

I hope you liked my second aesthetics post, because I wanted to share another one.

This is the one I made for the Academy project:

A collage with 9 different squares over a green background.

First row, left to right:
Blurry snowdrops among the green grass bathed by the light of dawn or dusk.
A small cemetery, with a few tombstones and a mausoleum in the background.
A striking purple gladiolus flower.

Second row, left to right:
A basket full of yarn.
The central square has "ACADEMY. Sol Vera" written in an art noveau font on top of a square that's a darker shade of green than that of the background.
A close-up of a violin.

Third row, left to right:
A neat stack of old books on a wooden table.
A green lane in front of an old university building.
A whirlwind of books and notebooks, all open on some surface, like someone is in the middle of studying.

After the last Word Count Update, this became the project with the second lowest word count among those in the list, so I’m trying to find some inspiration via this aesthetics post. I’m surprised it did so good on my earlier word count posts, because it used to be a knock-off of my Alcalá project at the very beginning (over two years ago). I had an idea for a story and I’d been wondering whether it would be better to tend towards fantasy or historical romance. In the end, I said “Why not both?”.

So yes, the Academy project started as the High Fantasy Romance version, but now it has very little to do with the other project. This one has magic in it! Yes, there’s a university of magic.

I wanted to finish one of my stories for The Pact, so I started this one thinking it would be easier. It’s all fantasy, right? So it doesn’t need the enormous amount of research a Historical Romance does, I thought.

And maybe I’m right, but then things got complicated and the story ended up needing a lot of research I haven’t finished yet. Well, I guess you never really finish doing research for your book. Not even once the book is published and suddenly you find something you could have used in your book. Ah, how I long to be able to feel those regrets…

Anyway, this one is an enemies-to-lovers set in a fantasy world where there’s a university, there’s magic, and there’s they-were-roommates. I’m still struggling with some of the plot points, like deciding how evil the villain is (I think I mentioned that in one of my posts and, well, it was about this story), but making this collage I realized the villain was not that important. I had started to think like the main character, while I should have a broader perspective.

I know better now, thanks to these aesthetics posts!

Disclaimers:

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. Please let me know if that’s not the case for any of the photos.

All of these WIPs are still in progress, so everything 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 elements that might be important within the story.