All right, all right, you've worked hard enough. I confess, this is my Morningstar:
Afraid I don't have a story or anything like that planned out, so instead you get some background information and whatever else I feel like rambling on about. If anyone wants to make up their own story, I'd love to hear it!
I had originally planned on just making some kind of creepy bone-winged doggy-thing, mostly because I fail miserably at drawing fully-feathered wings, but one thing led to another and I eventually ended up going more or less with the concept of a fallen angel. As I said, he was not supposed to be directly based on anything from Supernatural -- well, besides the angel part in general -- nor was he supposed to be in any way a representation of Lucifer specifically even though I decided to use the name Morningstar.
The idea I had with the transparency and glow is that the wings are a memory of what he's lost and exist only in his mind, so they aren't truly there in reality. I thought about adding a halo of some kind, too, but I'm not a big fan of halos myself and it didn't seem altogether proper with a fallen angel. I also thought it would be nice if the pet could be left more open to interpretation for anyone who might not want to see it as an angel for religious reasons or what have you.
So, let's take a look at the hints:
- Name is "Morningstar."
- As has been pointed out, "Morningstar" can have a couple meanings; the one I was thinking of is it's use as another name for Lucifer.
- The hint chart has the day 2 comment wrong: there was a "possibly" in there.
- None of the features on my final design are based on a bird, nor can my dog fly in any way. Instead, you may find my dog has something in common with a cricket.
- Nope, not based on a bird; it's based on an angel. Although I suppose technically angel wings are inspired by birds, and A = B = C, so I could probably have phrased the hint better: "I did not directly base any of the features on a bird." That was something of an error on my part. Some of you still got it, anyway, so good job! I'd also point out that I never said my dog didn't share characteristics with birds, only that it wasn't based on one, so those of you assuming mine had nothing in common whatsoever with a bird were making a jump there. ;)
- Maybe he once had the ability to fly, but I doubt he'd get very far off the ground nowadays.
- The idea I had with the cricket mention was simply that crickets, at least the species I'm most familiar with, have wings but can't fly, similar to the state my little doggy-angel is in at the moment.
- My dog has all five colors of the palette visibly incorporated into its design.
- It does, actually, although it's a bit hard to tell: the body has the two blues and cream color, the feathers are the lighter orange, and the necklace band is the darker orange.
- My dog has eyes and can see perfectly fine.
This one is open to interpretation, I guess, but I imagine he has no problems seeing. As a magical creature, his eyes are just different than a "normal" animal's eyes.
- A part of the original lineart has been erased on my dog.
- Also takes a bit of looking, but I was talking about the small part of the lines on the front legs and chest that was removed to make room for the necklace. Everything else uses the original lines, except what was added for the wings. I'm not really counting the mouth because a lot of CS dogs don't have the full smile, but it's true you could say that was an edit, too.
- My dog uses a fair amount of blue. / My dog has markings. / Main dogs fur color is not two-toned. / There will be something different about my dog's eyes when it grows up.
- I open at the close.
- Like with the crickets, my thinking with this line was simply that the quote = golden snitch = wings, but I love how some of you went a lot deeper with it. Makes me wish I could say all that deep meaning had been intentional from the start. ^^
- All of these posts and that newest hint have a common theme / relation to the primary aspect of my dog.
- The day of Reckoning draws near! Thomas swears to the End of his Days that Aaron will defeat the Leviathan during his quest after he has accepted his destiny to save those Forsaken beings who have Fallen into despair at the coming Armageddon -- an Aerie prophecy indeed.
- The Fallen, Leviathan, Aerie, Reckoning, End of Days, Forsaken, and Armageddon are the seven titles in the book series "The Fallen" by Thomas E. Sniegoski, with the main character's name being Aaron Corbet. The sentence is a loose summary of the series, which is all about fallen angels.
Sorry for trying to mess you all up on technicalities with some of the hints,
not!but of course I didn't want anyone to guess it too quickly! As it is, I see my name came up almost immediately after this little guy grew up. :P