Pix3M

Eh, there ought to be a community of brony artists to actually try to give critiques, don't you think? If you ask me, MLPforums, while pretty nice a lot of times, don't tend to try to give in-depth critiques. Hmm, this one seems mostly accurate, save for some slight silly mistakes like you mentioned in the eye. Notice how there's a bit of a blank space between the mane and her left ear (i.e.one to our right) though. I think we should also be careful about how we crop our images. Cutting her off at the tip of the horn and right below her chin makes it look like she is gonna have a bit of a hard time breathing. Maybe if we don't cut her off at the horn bit leave a bit of space on top, and crop her mid-neck or so... I think the composition will feel much less cramped. Take a screencap from the show of a pony in profile view - any one. What you will mostly find on that screencap is that your eye in comparison is a bit small and placed a bit too close in front. I feel as if I could mention other things about the head but the eye is throwing me off quite a bit. I think I'll just stop there before I wind up pointing mistakes that don't exist. Also, what's funny is that looking around in my own collection of hundreds of screencaps, I practically have almost no screencaps of profile-view ponies because profile-view is one of the least interesting. It may be a very easy perspective, but you are better off using the same pose but in 3/4ths perspective. Profile views work better in compositions in which there are multiple characters or points of interest as they tend to direct attention toward a direction a character is facing. That easily means a piece directing attention away from itself, which isn't necessarily what you want. It's not easy to create an interesting profile view (though possible), so avoid that unless you're confident that you know what you're doing. The pose is also a bit unnatural as a FiM-styled pony's standing pose will have the tip of their hoof under their hips. I could probably be wrong as I'm only very quickly glancing at what few screencaps have, but it shouldn't hurt to look at a standing pony and see how their legs are positioned. When drawing figures, whether humans or even ponies, it's important to not make them look awkwardly balanced. Phew, I am not fond of the coloring for this one. All of the colors here are saturated, and have roughly the same value. It's a good practice to have colors have a range of different values so they don't wind up muddy; color schemes that can work with very little value contrast is often ones that use only light colors (e.g. Gala Fluttershy). Even then, I like to see that the green is darker than the pink which is darker than the yellow for her color scheme. Your outlines also don't really stand out on this one. I think the results will be more exciting if they were darkened to be more visible. Saturated colors also like to grab attention, and it is ideal to have only one dominating color that's clearly grabbing more attention. All of the colors used here are pretty saturated. There are probably many ways to approach fixing the color scheme to have less clashing colors, but the biggest thing I would suggest desaturating the coat to let the mane and eyes take over. With that in mind, I really think I ought to be writing a OC coloring tutorial soon, giving some general tips to getting more satisfying results. Phew, I really don't think red outlines are gonna work out. Red is one of the more attention-grabbing colors and I don't think there's a great reason why the outlines ought to attract more attention than say... the eyes. And for some reason, this one appears to have a horizontally squashed head? Last I remember, ponies have rounder heads.

... seems about right. Show-style ponies put the other leg slightly in front like what was done with the front legs here. Sometimes I forget other little things worth mentioning.

I personally don't see the point of having proportionally accurate eyelashes. I have her general shape right so it shouldn't make sweetie belle look less like sweetie belle. I think I have her head proportions correct (mostly) and that's what matters most. I'm also not seeing a point about nitpicking over eye highlights imo. It is not something I use to distinguish different characters and they aren't a proper part of one's 'actual' anatomy. I did not sample any colors. I picked them through gut instinct.

Heh. Nobody here has thought of bringing up how she's awkwardly holding the soda not in front or noticing her questionable balance. Oh well.

It's screaming because I took it from a scene from the newest episode. I found the little soda cup's expression to be kinda funny.

I hand pixelled this one for the luls in about two and a half hours or so. I didn't plan this out well enough to be as super awesome as possible but I'm satisfied with how this just makes me laugh xD

Who said you can't have fun? What's more curious was that he looked at a candle fire and used red. If you ask me, if you wanna color well, you can't approach colors literally all the time so you can't say that the color of fire is red. Also, sometimes you gotta know when you can stretch your colors a bit to make something look better.

Then again, I am not particularly fond of sugar-coating comments. They're the reason why I don't improve sometimes. At the very least, I left a clear suggestion on what would have been a better way to approach it as it's definitely useful for any artist looking to improve. Then again, I guess I don't get along well with artists who are more interested with having a bit of fun than improving. Yes, from burning chemicals you're not gonna find on a candle wick. I originally asked if there were red candle fires.

It is fair to say that there are things to learn about FiM style though. You might not need to draw them FiM style but it certainly helps to what FiM style is. I see too many people drawing their own style but not understand extremely basic horse anatomy. You're certainly not not horrible at this at all as your style is still pretty convincing, but I think it still shouldn't hurt to understand how show style works.

http://fav.me/d5lfjb1 ^ plus another thing that might be adding to creepiness may be that the full circle of the iris is almost visible. Any more you can see then it starts being an uncanny stare.

Funny as I remember fires being orange, not red. Wait, are there red-colored candle fires around? The difference between the background and mane could also benefit from a stronger hue contrast.

Its complicated to explain. Your brain has two halves called hemispheres. Both halves are good different things. The left side of the brain is usually the more dominant one and coincidentally, it's the side of the brain that cannot draw for its life. The right hemisphere of the brain has all of the ability to grasp spatial relationships and thus, the hemisphere of the brain that must be used when drawing. The left brain can't make any sense of spatial relationships and the reason why a lot of people can't draw well. There's a lot for me to explain as the stuff I'm talking about came from an actual textboom I once found in a library.

Part of learning how to draw is being able to see something exactly the way it appears. If you're interested in even more massive improvement, there are sources like a book titled 'drawing on the right side of the brain' which gets you to actually seeing an object right so you can better draw it yourself.

Aww, we can always shoot for a pose that isn't as static as this though? One thing that's making me scratch my head a bit though... why is the picture cropped like this? Why are some outlines weighed more than others? No offense, but it kinda looks traced. Your body is uncannily good but your work on the head looks off (I.e. bottom of jaw, and ear). Looks like we copied a big stallion body and pasted your own head. If this isn't traced then consider this a compliment.

Kinda funny as a lot or posts on this forum of yours aren't really the critical sorts anyways, and pretty much all of the drawers on this forum are hobbyists, not necessarily professionals let alone masters. A lot of pieces are a lot more flawed than most people realize, but sometimes it really takes another artist to point out the flaws. Personally, I wouldn't be so concerned with trying to replicate gradients. I remember this pose. From what I remember, the legs are a little thinned out on the left side to the legs are slightly skewed to the right. We end up with Rarity looking like she was tipped over. She does not appear balanced.

I do not want to offend anyone, but I'm curious. Are you aware that your ponies are missing a joint on their front legs? I've recently written a drawing guide concerning pony legs if anyone is interested: http://fav.me/d5lwqfl

It helps to look at your reference to see for yourself where your faults are. However, if you need another artist to help out, her legs are proportionally too short as mares like her are about three heads tall if you use the height of the head as a unit of measurement. I counted 2.5 heads, which is about the height of a filly. The top of the nose is also placed too high on the face. Placing it lower will make the nose smaller and thus more cute. Ear could be a larger, and neck appears to be very fat. Pony irises are also not circular. They are ovals. Pegasi wings don't have 5 feathers on their longest row of feathers; they only have three really big ones and a very small one. There should also be three rows of feathers closest to the base of the wing. Front legs flare out in width and are widest at the hoof. The legs here are a bit more uniform. But, this is better than my first attempts anyways. Aside for anatomical crap, the next step should really probably go for a more interesting pose than this.

I think a better example that's easier to relate was one I scratched up a while to poke fun at the idea of having an original pony style: ^As you can see, this is MY invented style of drawing horses and you cannot criticize it at all! EDIT; dropbox is being slow so umm... I hope it loads soon -_-

I believe every aspect of one's style should be purposeful though. But, I suppose there's no use in trying to criticize an original style, rite?

It may help to pay much closer attention to your refs if you're interested in making drawings with more likeness to the show. Notice your squar-ish shape of your eyes? FiM-styled eyes are actually slanted ovals.

I had a bit of fun with this even though I'm a bit old for coloring books. Eh, I just wanted to color something considering I've been told enough times that I have a good sense of colors. The Pinkie to the left has a pink eye mainly to make the G3 face weirder in comparison.

200 times long? Surely I hope you're not referring to newer artists who haven't developed a bit of fluency with their own tools of their trade.

Do you use references for drawing this comic? This may seem perfectly show accurate to some but others may see a whole bunch of other stuff. Plus silly scanner shenanigans making traditional works look kind of off is a reason why some people may consider going digital so they have more control of how their work is presented.

Well, this video was what gave me much of my understanding of fascism, when I was in a mood to poke around with viewpoints I don't actually understand:

That is not my understanding of fascism. Fascism in a really simple nutshell built on a premise of strong leadership, people literally only allowed to do stuff for greater good for their country, and trying to become as economically independent from other countries as much as possible.