Inside Look: Starlit Lovers – KitsuneArt Gives Us a Behind-the-Scenes Look at Her and Lor Phoenix’s Slice-of-Life Sapphic Romance Comic

PRIDE MONTH 2024! Our Inside Look feature at Broken Frontier provides creators with the opportunity to share exclusive commentaries on their comics projects with our readers, giving insights into the genesis, process and themes of their work. It’s one of the oldest regular features at BF, first appearing on the site back in the mid-2000s and also one of our most well-received. Today, as part of our Pride Month 2024 celebrations KitsuneArt talks about her collaboration with Lor Phoenix on the small press title Starlit Lovers. You can read a full review of the comic here at BF.

You know that #PortfolioDay hashtag that used to get you traction and visibility on the platform that used to be called Twitter? Well, every once in a while the magic of that hashtag still works, and that is how Lor Phoenix found my comics and decided to contact me to create a story together. (But you have to actively let the universe work its magic, so listen to me when I tell you: always check your spam folder! I almost missed Lor’s missive!)

After the first email contact, we started to chat back and forth to define which kind of story we wanted to work on. It was my first time working in tandem with a writer, but we clicked very well together. We quickly found out which kind of tropes and settings we liked, and settled on childhood friends to lovers who lost contact after a life-changing event in one of their lives.

Tessa was the one left behind. The story follows her as she’s working in a flower shop and receives the news that her dear old friend is back in town and will attend a mutual friend’s birthday party.

With Tessa’s character design, I wanted to convey a sweet personality, someone who seems chill and happy on the outside. It can be hard to come up with an original character design for a “just a girl” personality without making it too boring, but I think small details like moles, a good sense of fashion and cool colour scheme can instantly make it more interesting and unique.

Drew is the one who literally disappeared from everyone’s radar once her parents got divorced. With her character design, I wanted to convey an edgy personality, someone who’s independent and tough (or wants to look the part). But I’ve also been super self-indulgent and given her piercings and an undercut, the kind of design details I love the most.

Choosing their hair, eyes, and the colours they wore was very intentional. I put a big focus on how they had to complement each other and mesh well together. Narrowing down the character to a specific colour that defines them is one of the things that – in my opinion – makes a character design good and recognisable. Tessa’s main colour is purple and Drew’s is blue. 💜💙

My storyboards tend to be quite detailed as I prefer to have a clear vision of how the pages will look, and for this project, I also wanted to give Lor a full understanding of how the layout would look before finalising and inking them.

I tried to keep the panel flow engaging, with the subjects often getting out of the constrictions of the panels and taking full advantage of splash pages in emotional moments, such as this one when Tessa realises that Drew is coming back and suddenly all the memories of growing up together return to her.

For Starlit Lovers, I opted for a limited colour palette that is more brown-ish than stark black and white, with a warm pink as the dominant colour. This made it easy for me to help the reader’s eye focus where I wanted it to be, on the important bits of the image or the text, and also to enhance the emotions of the various scenes.

Usually drawing a big crowd for several panels can be tiresome, but in this case I found a way to keep it fun. The secret was to ask some of my comic artist friends if I could borrow their characters. It makes for fun Easter eggs for the readers and a way to promote my friends’ comics within mine (as I added all the credits at the end of the book).

With two main characters being the heart of the story, there was a lot to say and a lot to show as well: in particular, how the unresolved can be resolved through clear communication and trust.