I've wanted to do a zodiac collection for a long time. Like, before Pretty Creative Studios existed, before Flow Friends, back when this was still just a maybe someday idea. Twelve signs is such a good shape for a collection. It's built in, it's collectible, everyone already has an opinion about their own sign before you've even shown them the art. I just never had the right style for it until now.
Cosmic Cuties is my zodiac collection, what I'm calling celestial kawaii with goth and horror elements thrown in, and if that sounds like a lot of things stitched together, it kind of is. I wanted to see what happened if I let the cute and the creepy actually talk to each other instead of keeping them in separate lanes.
Honestly this whole collection is one more stone in figuring out what my actual artistic style is, if I even have one yet. Flow Friends was very clean, very soft, very rounded. Cosmic Cuties is me testing whether I can hold onto that cute foundation while pushing into something moodier. I don't know yet if this is closer to "my style" or just another experiment on the way to it. I'm genuinely not sure that question has an answer, or if it's supposed to keep moving instead. Either way I'd rather find out by making things than by sitting around waiting to feel certain.
Then real life happened, the way it always does. I got back from a big travel stretch and lost more time than I planned for, and by the time I sat down to actually finish this thing, twelve fully realized signs just wasn't going to happen without either rushing the art or blowing past the date entirely. So I split it. Six signs first, Leo, Virgo, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, and the other six two weeks later. Not the plan I originally announced, but the plan that let me actually finish the art instead of phoning it in to hit a number. Then, I lost my job.
And then, because one delay apparently wasn't enough, my printer ran out of ink mid batch. I'd gotten through Aries, Taurus, and Gemini and then nothing. Leo, Virgo, and Cancer sat half finished for weeks because I didn't have the ink and didn't have the bandwidth to deal with it right away, because I also have a full time job that does not care that my kawaii zodiac animals are in printer purgatory.
When the ink finally showed up, I thought I'd breeze through the rest.
Spoiler: I did not breeze through the rest.
Catch-up day was a whole event. First, the laminate went sideways, actually sideways, bunched and wrinkled in a way that made the whole sheet unusable. Fixed that, moved to the Silhouette, and the registration marks decided they didn't want to cooperate either, so the cut lines were off just enough to ruin the sheet again. Third attempt was the one that finally worked, and I have the footage to prove all three attempts happened because I filmed it, because apparently even my failures are content now.
Running two collections into Halloween season while still working (and then leaving) a day job, fresh off travel, with a printer that tried to stop me, is exactly as annoying as it sounds. There's no secret system. Some nights it's two hours on Cosmic Cuties after work. Some nights it's nothing at all because I fell asleep on the couch at 9pm and that's just what happened that day. Still working on letting that be fine instead of a failure.
But it's done, all twelve of them, which feels like something to actually celebrate. Six signs went live on October 1, the other six landed on October 15, and I made all of this happen around a full time job, a travel delay, and hardware that had genuine opinions about whether I deserved to finish. I'm tired and I'm proud, and those two things get to sit next to each other.
Go take a look at the shop. Collect the whole set if that's your thing. It's definitely mine.
-<3 Maggie