Pix3M

I believe in a mixed economy as all successful economies that have ever existed have been a mixed economy. But, since that's not a crystal clear option since all of your terms are poorly defined and others are loaded with assumptions. I'll just vote bondage slavery as it sounds fun

I dunno about just being more than an oval. An oval shape is perfectly okay, but to make it resemble closer to the show, it has to be an oval shape with a slant, and only the top eyelid should be given an outline. There can be styles that use an outline to define the entire circle of the eye but those styles seem to go better with more comical art styles. The detail you mentioned works better for anime/FiM styles that are a lot more expressive than the usual cartoon eyes. Last I remember a stallion head though, the eye is right next to the ear. You have a TOOONNNN of space between the eye and the ear. You can find more problems by directly comparing your drawing with a screencap of a stallion head. But, do you use references? When you draw, you have to know what you're drawing so in this case, you have to look at a pic of a stallion head to be able to draw something with likeness to the show.

I kinda disagree. If you carelessly add more Fluttershy, it will lose its focus and ends up being an aimlessly done piece. If anything, it may be better to have a much larger Fluttershy instead. Personally, the only thing about the colors is that yellow is probably not the best color for a wallpaper. It's a rather harsh color if you think about it.

It helps to know a bit about composition in art and photography. This wallpaper will probably be lot better if Fluttershy wasn't facing toward stuff away from your monitor.

Hah. I like these wallpaper styles too as I'm not much for the idea of having wallpapers with crazy potentially distracting colors. The only thing I dislike about them is that they have their ponies facing off-screen.

I can't remember the exact workflow of established mangakas, but one thing you can do to make sure you're drawing figures with appropriate head sizes is to establish the height of the head by marking two lines. Then using that distance as a unit of distance, you draw more lines down with the same length. When you have three equal sections then you should have a framework for deciding more proper proportions. You can look up human body proportions and see how various diagrams dissect human proportions by using the head as a unit of measurement.

I think the biggest thing I can nitpick is the style of pony you're drawing in. ^I was going to write a tutorial that would use this visual, but I was having second thoughts about writing it, but I saved this part in case there was gonna be a use for this. Look at this diagram. Look at how the head generally shrinks in height from base of the jaw to the top of the head. There is a general tendency in art to use smaller head-to-height ratios on baby-ish and cute characters. Larger head ratios on characters are for more ideally beautiful or in the case of Iron Will, make them appear more terrifying as characters who have proportionally small heads are usually because they're huge. Look at the first pic. Whenever I think of overdone makeup and cigarettes being put together in the same character, I think of them as rather promiscuous persons. I think that clashes a bit with the low head-to-height ratio that's making your first pony look a bit like a baby as her height in heads are about 2.75 heads. To compare, the vectors here used for fillies and mares are roughly 2.66 and 3 respectively. I dunno what people think, but it feels a bit weird seeing a 'filly' smoke and wear overdone makeup. Ever wondered what that same OC would look if she had a much smaller head for her height? I think there would be less stylistic clash as proportionally larger heads work much much better for cute stuff.

If money doesn't exist, it will be invented again. Imagine the silly mess we'd get if I was a corn farmer having to put up with people offering me crap I don't want because there isn't a commodity that's universally accepted to have value.

I'm having a lot of difficulty trying to make our King Sombra's face. Don't you have that same feeling yourself? The only thing I can make out is the eye.

Also, if you were to picture a circle representing Pinkie's head, it would be an oval that's taller than it is wide. It ought to be more round to keep our ponies' cuteness. The ear could also be rounder for the same reason.

Lol I cannot really understand the thing about really big ears that doesn't look like a horse's ear (as far as I've seen them) or a FiM-styled pony's ear.

Hmm... The colors feel a bit muddy. All of the colors are pretty dark. There's a bit of read which is really good at grabbing attention, but what I end up doing is looking at King Sombra's butt wondering what I was looking at. It took a second for me to realize that I was looking at King Sombra's butt as his face almost blends in with the background. Also kinda funny to be able to see the horizon. If you're in the middle of a snow, there's gonna be a ton of snow blocking your visibility so it doesn't make sense to be able to see the horizon during a snow storm. Just a funny thought. Snowy ground is also funny. Whenever I see snow on top of the ground, there is no texture. Everything is perfectly smooth. But... overall, while you're on to something with this basic idea, there's probably a way to better color this that makes people go 'wow'!

Eh, almost. While it's close enough to be convincing to a lot of people, it falls a bit short if you were to say.... put a transparent layer of a pic of a pony on top of these drawings.

There's probably a cleaner way to approach this. I'm seeing odd textures and little dots everywhere. I think you could benefit from looking around for tutorials on an artist's workflow to create a digital painting, see what works for them and see if there could be new tricks for you to pick up.

o_O Realism? If we ought to put realism and MLP together, it ought to look something comparable to this: Source: http://fav.me/d4fjeda That's something I could call realism, putting aside the exaggerated features and outlines looking at a few photos of actual horses. You have to be a savant to be able to draw realism without heavily relying on references, just sayin'.

Crystals are highly reflective and thus deserves much MUCH stronger highlights than what we have here. Shading doesn't need to be 'smoothed out', whatever that means. I find the shading extremely blurry if anything. The shading looks a bit sloppy as there's a bit of unshaded areas in between outlines and the shaded area. I believe good shading has more to do with darkening the right places, and I can point out a few places which should be shaded. If anything, the shading needs to be much much sharper to convey clear-cut surfaces like a crystal. Blurring the edges instead conveys something else that's rather smooth and lumpy. I also don't think her body is too curvy. I think her chest needs to be rounded out more instead of rounding out the belly. Can't find a reference to double check how show-style draws bodies at this perspective though. Also, here's a caveat when shading ponies... it's explained in something I've written very recently, and I'm calling it 'slant-face syndrome' for convenience. So, I wouldn't say the face is perfect per se as there's a mistake that seems largely unoticed in show-accurate faces in 3/4ths which you can easily reveal if you try to shade it. http://fav.me/d5lbq5e

Hmmm... Seems to be a pretty good piece of art. Looking at it for a while though, I'm starting to see inconsistently sized and shaped legs (mostly front legs), and the nose seems wider at its base than it is at the tip. Not sure if that's intentional. Straight bangs don't seem to go well with me for your description of your OC though. Whenever I see straight bangs on a person, they're either socially awkward, 'square' and nerdy like Twilight. Not sure what you think of straight bangs though.

I uploaded it to my dA: http://fav.me/d5lbq5e It's a pretty different tutorial as it puts less emphasis on the workflow but more about why some drawings seem to be more convincing than others. Let me know what you guys think.

I was mainly tossing out suggestions that immediately come to mind. but I think a better alternative is to just look at a picture of a boxer, perhaps a top-tier professional one who definitely knows his stuff, and try to imitate his pose. (I am no fighter so I don't know jack about any martial arts of sorts). Position the hoofs in a similar fashion, bend the back in a similar fashion, etc etc.