Membership Brooches of the Cult of Hope

The Cult of Hope is an in-universe religion centered around The Goddess. Fans will know her as Godoka. If you haven't read TTS, the basic idea that's going on is a giant alien invasion of vastly superior firepower has forced the magical girls of Humanity to unveil themselves, possibly in the most epic way possible. The main canon characters, Kyouko, Mami, Homura, and later Yuma (no, Sayaka still dies, sorry) formed a "Magical Girl Union" way back in the day, and it is this union that has now come to humanity's rescue. Cue lots of moral issues, but that's neither here nor there. The origins of the Cult of Hope are better explained in the story (I think chapters 4 and 5?) than here. 

I talked to Hier about this design beforehand, specifically with regard to the primary symbolism the Cult would use for its "logo" of sorts. For example, Christianity has the Cross, Islam has the Crescent Moon & Star, and Daoism has the Yin-Yang. After some conferencing, we decided on five apple seeds, arranged in a star burst and surrounded by a ring. This is shown in the centers of the brooches above. If you cut an apple in half along its diameter, you'd see the same exact image. There's some further extensive symbolism I won't go into, as it gets quite long and interpretive of Madoka Magica canon, but it ultimately boils down to apples being excellent symbols of both temptation and redemption. 

In terms of the design of this jewelry, I wanted to go with a fairly modern design that would still mostly fit into any particular outfit. 

The modernity/futurism is inspired by Canturi's Cubism Pave line, specifically a ring that combined long, swooping lines with straight cuts in a grid pattern. The basic idea here seems to me to be combining more organic and fluid lines with rigid ones. I incorporated this into the design above by using ellipses and circles to set the piece in space, then the curvy weirdness in the middle to make things more chaotic. Nature being fairly chaotic itself, I feel like I've done a not-terrible job of this. 

In terms of fitting into any particular outfit, I'm not sure I've entirely succeeded. The primary way I tried to do this was through color. The brooches come in red, green, or blue and can thus integrate into most brightly colored outfits. Since this is the standard with magical girls, it should be mostly okay, but a lot of problems show up with the more subtly or darkly colored outfits. Additionally, brooches are generally designed to hold articles of clothing or be ornamental in some fairly non-discrete way, as they usually are part of a more plain outfit, so by definition it's difficult to make it subtle. By keeping the shape rounded off and fairly simple, I feel like I've mitigated a lot of the problems that could arise, but that's not necessarily true either. Clearly, I have a lot to learn about how to design jewelry. -_-'

Anyway, this was all done in Inkscape. Part of me loves it because it's free and apparently has a lot of useful filters. The other part of me hates it because apparently it runs pretty damn slow on Macs. Maybe it's just because I have a laptop without a mondo GPU? In any case, lots of frustration trying to get it to actually render. 

Finally, background is based off of a PNG Texture provided by: drkzin.deviantart.com/

I think it's one of the Apophysis series? I don't remember exactly.