Be Human (coverart)

This is the cover art for Shinzakura's Be Human: All American Girl Sidestories, a collection of sidestories to his main story All American Girl. The idea of this story-verse is that Rarity's daughter Sandalwood was teleported to our dimension when she was two weeks old during a freak thunderstorm. She was found and raised by humans, whom named her Daisy Jo Hikaru Martinez. Twilight finds our dimension 15 years later,and there's a small misunderstanding*. I won't spoil it, though. It's worth a read.

Be Human acts like a companion piece to All American Girl, fleshing out parts of the story that are hinted to in All American Girl. Both are equally important, as it shows several key stories and viewpoints the main story just can't place in an elegant manner. I likes that. Helps separate the storylines.

The concept for the cover was originally going to be a shout out to Ghost in the Shell, with DJ floating over water, with half of her pony, and the other half human. It made symbolic scene due to DJ viewing herself as "human, only pony shaped". But i didn't like how the water came out so I just put it on the back burner and forgot about it.

Several months later, I get a poke and return to this with a new idea. I'm not sure where the idea came from (but i was in church at the time so it must have be divine intervention), but the concept is the title of the sidestories: her pony half and human half**. DJ is human in all but species. So I dew those halves floating in the middle of space because space is cool and symbolic.The plan originally was to have both DJ's nude as they float around space for extra symbolism points, and while I do have that version (I'm not posting it on DA, but here's a link ), i added clothing for two reasons: 1) I wanted it to be safe for the kiddlets. This is, after all, based on a kid's show. I'm doing my best to (try and ) keep it that way and 2) DJ has a human mindset. Nuff said.

the blue/ orange that light up the background serve as a way to show teh two races mental foils for each other: blue's calmness (as the ponies as a whole try to be diplomatic and calm first) against the brighter and fierier orange (Human's answer for everything → When it doubt, punch it out!).

Comments and critique is very appreciated! I like how it came out but I really would like some criticism. Know what you did wrong teaches you more that what you did right.


All American Girl,Be Human, and DJ © Shinzakura


*Sarcasm!
**Yes, DJ has a human half, and I mean that literally and figuratively.Twilight worked on Star Swirl's the Bearded Amniimorphic Spell, so that non-unicorns could use the spell via magic items. The real benefit this has for DJ is that Twilight's improved version enables cross-breeding between species by dinking around with genetics (and if the speces are pretty close to the other genetically). That's right, a pony and a human can get it on and have kids. Their kids would be human with pony aspects (technically chimeras, but it's a little rude to call them that..)