#034
FEBRUARY 7, 2025

so, real bayportsheads 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️ will recall that way back when, in... either late 2021? or early 2022 (clearly i am not a real bayportshead myself) i made a cover theme for julia (soulofstaars) as a prize for placing first in my 600-followers competition. since then, julia and i have become very good friends and i am so glad we met and became closer through the competition. i don't know what i would do without her (or nim, another founding member and trustee of the julia emotional state charity). people who read my updates here as well as my writing will have noticed that the ever-talented and extremely generous julia has made various gif spams for my marvel fics (american animals, now you see me, unspun and now, creature fear.)

to show my gratitude as well as challenge myself, i decided to make her a brand new cover theme for 2025! i don't often remake covers (typically only for myself) so this'll be interesting. without further adieu (prepare for a triple-rhyme): julia's theme 2, electric boogaloo!

see the full theme in its two colour schemes above. colour scheme i. is the predominantly blue one; colour scheme ii. is the predominantly green one. for this theme's quote-unquote "highlights", we'll be using colour scheme ii. i asked jules if she wanted a colour scheme like mine, or something "brighter", and to no-one's surprise she wanted something brighter 🤣 the bayports classic is an acquired taste /lh.

jokey-jokes aside, you can see i did sneak the red in there. muahahaha.

for this cover theme, i went with the rule of two minimum, as per usual: meaning, that for every significant element in one cover, it has to be repeated at least more in another. so that's why you'll see fonts re-used across covers as well as colours. here's a fuckass little map of how everything connects.

angel eyes and andante, andante are two covers that are most clearly coordinated with each other, with both using the same colours—pastel pink and pastel purple—and the same criterion collection template, made by myself.

andante, andante is mostly pink with a purple accent; angel eyes is mostly purple with a pink accent.

when the clock strikes twelve and roman holiday use the same font and text treatment (so does dracarys, but that cover is more similar to killing boys because of the rare use of red. i say rare in the scope of jules' theme; obviously red is not that rare in my graphics as a whole 🤭🤭). people who've seen the original wtcst cover will recognise the core of the cover, which was retained even for the new version. i just really liked the "sapphic butterfly" thing that was going on, and chose to repurpose it.

roman holiday is named after the halsey song, not the audrey hepburn / gregory peck film—i mean, tangentially, i guess it is named after the film if the song is named after the film, but i digress—but i chose to use a still of audrey and gregory's characters anyway. this style of cover has been recurring in my recent cover themes; i might retire it for a bit, since i don't want everyone's themes to look identical, but i think it definitely fits in here. in general, i wanted a "pretty" look for jules' theme. i don't know how to quantify pretty, but here we are!

the next "connection", for want of a better word, is this light, olive green. green is my favourite colour, but because the covers i typically make are very dark, intense—with my colourings changing pretty much every shade of yellow and green into grey or blue—i don't often get a chance to use the shades of green i adore outside of graphic design. i was very happy to do so here. nemophilist is in a very similar vein to its previous incarnation (both versions utilising a decomposition book-brand notebook, which is one of my favourite brands in real life; i actually own the notebook seen above!). so is feel my rhythm. its previous cover was based off the red velvet song, so the new version kept that focus.

above is my red infiltration 😼😼 in the time between now and the original cover theme's creation, the film bottoms (2023) was released. having seen it for the first time recently (and knowing that julia also likes it, especially the gorgeous, beautiful, stunning havana rose liu who stars in it) i decided to make the new killing boys cover based on it. any excuse to put a photo of an otherworldly woman in a locket. i used red sparingly in this cover because i didn't want it to feel too jarring; however, i felt it was appropriate considering that i knew i would make dracarys red, too.

dracarys' new cover uses the same image of daenerys targaryen that the old one did. it was another one of jules' covers that i did like the original of, so i only wanted to update it for this new theme. the previous version had some funky warping shit going on, which isn't really what i like to do anymore. so i kept things nice and simple and clean.

for this theme, i also made jules a number of icons and backgrounds to use at her leisure that match colour scheme ii. though both colour schemes do emphasise different colours, they have been chosen specifically to allow mixing-and-matching between different versions of the cover.

julia, thank you for letting me make this for you! now more than ever i appreciate your friendship, generosity, and all-around kindness; i hope this theme demonstrates that to at least a fraction of the full extent that i feel it. simply put, i love you so much, and i'm so glad we're friends! also, sorry for the trauma! (we're called the julia emotional state charity for a reason.)

love you longtime! 🫂🤍🌷