Pix3M

ok, here it goes, I find the whole drawing fascinating, I like the Fluttershy alone, I can't say the same about the skirt of the dress, it looks very simple compared with the detail of other sections (like her face, her hair, or the corse of the dress).

I guess.

the skirt could have more layers and more complex type of folds,

I was imagining something rigid enough to be in its intended shape, so there wouldn't be much folds.

you could have added more shadow and highlights to the skirt and

I only use one layer of shadow. My darker colors used in the hair and coat is a bit like reflected light. However, I realize that i need to learn how shadows work a bit more before I can figure out where I put more shadows on the skirt. I dunno about highlights though. I've realize that I don't know how highlights work with cloth materials.

I didn't like the "spring" thing you put on the skirt

 

Unfortunately, the spring thing was on the skirt because it was on the original design to start with.

link to dA: http://fav.me/d5km6og

Drawn pixel-by-pixel on a program I'd liken to MS paint with keyboard shortcuts.

I kinda hope this makes it to EQD... or not because Seth has his reasons that definitely exists.... somewhere.

Haha, your proportions were divided by zero by Pinkie Pie. I think this looks totally nonsensical, but that's probably exactly what you want anyways.

For a scattergun approach that covers everything (not precisely), *Rathiain has a fast drawing guide: http://oracion666.de...al-V2-256073190

Not exactly accurate. They don't explain proportions at all and it shows when their mare nose examples are exaggerated in size. Its example drawing with the red pony with goggles also has log-shaped legs. Show-style, I am certain, has legs that start thin from the chest and flares out in width at the hoof.

If you want to get more in depth, ~Srskandy has a good five part tutorial that covers most everything that a beginner could want: http://srskandy.devi...t-1-5-265475852

Huh... what a head scratcher. On the example this artist have for the lower body, the front legs are short and are bent too far back so our pony does not appear properly balanced. What it looks like is there being an imaginary force holding our pony from the chest and the pony is holding their front legs back.

The artist also doesn't really show much understanding of the underlying bone structure which is stylized from real horses. Pony front legs are analogous to our own arms - their 'forearm' is much shorter, their 'lower arm' and 'wrist' are much longer, and the last joint is basically one fat finger with a giant fingernail. It shows when their front leg examples only show one major joint analogous to our wrist while the first joint analogous to our elbow is missing.

Inkwell-Pony has a good image on precise pony height (I believe he told me that he used Twilight as his base): http://inkwell-pony....lery/?offset=72

There's something about that that feels a bit off, but once I get off this comp on another machine more suitable for work, I can see for myself how accurate this is.

A very short (not DA) image about body structure: http://arch.413chan....8445298404).png

The back legs on this one looks very off balance. I believe any useful drawing tutorial has to cover proper balance of a figure so it does not appear a figure is tipped over. The largest section of the back leg is slanted forward too far. Show-style ponies have that same section completely vertical when standing. Look at the bottom of the tutorial - it's clearly not a guide to drawing them totally show-accurate but just a rough guide to getting something close enough.

I'll still stand by my point that guideline ideas offered in so many tuts can help, but they're not the best approach if you want something totally show accurate as even the writers of the tut don't really reach that ideal.

Not sure which tutorials you're talking about...but there are some great resources out there. There are plenty of tutorials that show you how to replicate a character from the show in exact detail, breaking the drawing process down into manageable pieces. It gives you a good foundation of where to start, if nothing else.

 

I don't remember seeing a tut that replicates in exact detail but instead close enough to pass off as decent, not for ponies yet at least. Surprise me with something?

I would not recommend tutorials for drawing ponies as it's not a good approach unless you want your own style of drawing ponies. If you want results that most resemble the actual show, get a picture of a pony in a fun pose and copy that by eye. Using help lines will in the end still make you draw what you think a pony looks like.

 

funny thing, all the time I thought that you were a female until I really stalked lurked your deviantART page, reason? I don't click on profiles XD

well, I say don't aim for perfect stuff, what you do it's already impressive and I think someone needs a lot of patience to work with pixels

 

But can I have not just impressive, but more impressive? I think that's a perfectly reasonable goal. Besides, if I notice a potential issue and I can easily just go fix it, I will do exactly that.

@@Pix3M, and I think that you are being TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO hard on yourself, I don't know if that the standard of the pixel artist but you seriously have to chill, yes, the anatomy may not be perfect, but the flaw is wonderfully covered by the beautiful dress she's wearing, and the advanced version looks awesome!

I can't find a flaw on it!

 

Nah. I just listed stuff that I feel could have been improved to better go with what I want. The things I listed are things that make me less satisfied with what I want.

Being a pixel artist doesn't mean that they necessarily have high standards. Most bronies into pixel art are ones who just sticks with desktop ponies and other styles comparable to that. I guess I'm just somebody who just feels like going directions other brony pixel artists haven't dared to go.

this is perfect, the only thing I could say is that the rest of the body and the wing doesn't have the same amount of effort you put in the face, appart from that, that Fluttershy is gorgeous!

 

Well, it is a work in progress.

If it seems perfect, look closer. You can find things to improve on if you stare at it long enough. There aren't very many perfect works out there. There might be something objectively good that can be changed. To make my point, here are some thoughts:

After a couple of days of starting at this while I casually work on my ultra-precise manual antialiasing (i'll just call it AA which is regular pixel artist lingo), I'm beginning to see problems that are fundamental. There is a potential issue that the pose is kind of like pony-creator - the body is aligned to the side so it creates a weak depth impression. I could probably draw her in 3/4ths so the back legs are definitely farther, creating a much stronger impression of depth. I also did not plan out this piece well enough so I wasn't sure how fluttershy would actually look in 3D. If I planned ahead, I would be having less issues with trying to figure out shading and the positioning of the legs.

I may have went with a side view for the sake of displaying a dress idea from the show that never went into practice, but still... there's a weak depth impression.

Anatomy wise... Look at the raised legs... doesn't it seem difficult to wrap your head around what the leg might look underneath the cloth? I also eventually found Fluttershy's head to be a bit wide for what I intended, and after making it narrower, I found the results more attractive. Some of the legs also appear to be different lengths.

Then, there is a stylistic problem found in what I manage to get done. In the version in this thread, look at the outline of her lower mane right below her eye. That line is of uniform length. I am going for an experimental outline style which attempts to add to the piece by varying in width. I've tried varying the width in an attempt of creating lines that flow more smoothly, and in the case of the tip of her nose, try to actually add a detail by merely thickening a line. What I have done to that outline of her lower mane right below her eye is make that straight line start thick from her ear, go thinner as it curves down, then thicken again.

Plus, there IS a better way to do the colors. The pink in the hair basically punches through the image so it almost seems like it doesn't belong. I also found a way to ditch the darker green color in used for her eye so I can use another color for more precise AA. Pixel artists like to go for smaller color counts which usually gets you more beautiful results. The AA around the edge of her eye is also punching through the image so it looks like noise which doesn't really add to the piece. The background color is also unecessarily saturated and it is best to desaturate it as much as I can without making the red AA colors on the exterior of the outline start to punch through the image. That way, the colors used on Fluttershy will have a much stronger focus.

And here's my latest version. See how I addressed the issues above by now:

https://dl.dropbox.c...web/tmp/FD4.png

If you're still doing video game remixes and manage to make them pony-inspired, I could probably offer some pixelated stuff for nostalgia's sake. Or... is that not a direction you're interested in going?

Thanks! I know, I noticed that i needed to work on the shading, but Im such a lazy ass I left it like that xD (and nao, the avatar isn't mine! (thats why I changed it!))

 

Shading is difficult, and ponies have no third dimension. I don't think we need to get into shading just yet as I think our pony proportions can be improved.

But... drawing something entirely show-accurate is still difficult albiet not as hard as mastering shading. Even if you are not interested in show accuracy, drawing them show-style should help you know which parts of your original pony style is different from show style.

Right now, what I'm seeing is is a long neck, thin front legs, small eye that's placed a bit far in front of the head, large flank, and wings angled rather high. I believe the best way to learn how to draw ponies is to get a picture of a pony, and copy that by eye. You'll get more accurate pony proportions into memory this way.

Reading this thread title makes me sad, really. The thought of making an incredibly insane and stupid decision to remove a major character is just not pleasant.

Motion's rant = Priceless!

 

Your rant was very entertaining to read, even though it is FULL OF BS... That was my first time drawing her as a human, and I admit that it didn't come out as well as I wanted it to...

 

BUT-

 

I think I did a really good job with how she looks, and how well it was for a first time... I still don't agree with (almost) everything you said.

 

READY TO BE DESTROYED???

 

 

Oh the fun drama over art. Eh... I've been annoyed by critiques of others before anyways, so I've been on the receiving end also.

Again, not a lot of drawing experience comes in my hand. I am still experimenting with the proportions of the face and body til I get it spot on, but this is about what we think human Rarity would most likely look like...

 

Again, experimenting with the eyes. I still don't think they look childish- why would you think that?? Anime style eyes are suppose to look like that, even when it's resembling an adult.

 

I imagined Rarity to be in between 22-30, a mature age. My Rarity eyes don't look childish in any sort!

 

I think there should be less experimentation and just look at what works for other artists. If you want realism, you can just find a picture and try to copy by eye (grid optional and can be helpful). If you want anime, look up drawing guides and see what sort of shortcuts you wanna take, and see how your results compare to other artists. Then again, what I seem to hear often enough is that learning realism always helps with drawing anime as anime is inevitably based off of real faces but exaggerate or simplify certain parts.

You also have to realize that babies proportionally have bigger eyes, and as we grow older, our head grows a bit faster than our eyes (dunno if eyes grow at all honestly). For this reason, we seem to subconsciously see large eyes as being younger, so anime styles have a tendency to shrink eye size to show age. (Fun thought: MLP completely flips this idea on its head, but they use roundness of eyes to show youth instead, I believe.)

If there's a reason why Rarity looks like a child, it's probably either 1. because Motion seems to like more realistic styles of human drawing while you are more interested in something stylized or 2. because that's what large eyes do to how young somebody looks... *edit* or 3. Because her face is rounder than a lot of women in the age range you're thinking. I don't see her as a child though.

Here's an idea... what if you show us a PNG (or jpg?) version on the forums? It's not like you'll be marked down because you showed it to forumers... I hope. All it matters is that you send the pics as a PDF.

Dem sparkles...

Next thing you know she tells me in her British/South African accent "Hey! My eyes are up here!". Them sparkles like to attract plenty of attention to themselves, heh.

Gen 1: Alright, but not great enough for me to recommend to even fans of G1. Characterization is barely there so Gen 1 isn't really going to make lasting impressions on me.

Gen 3: What do you get if you have too much artificial sweetener? You get cancer. Gen 3 was absurdly girly and had really lame plots. One movie I looked at was basically....

*It's spring!*

*Breezies are here!*

*OMG a garden weed in MY Garden? THE WORLD IS FALLING APART!! ZOAM$$UI&gT&Y&T*Q@GRF)Q(WHFo*

*Diggy diggy*

*Aaaaahhhh! There's a hole under the weed and now I'm falling!*

*Hey! There's a thousand year old baby dragon names Spike with really bad BO and a cool flower!*

*Wow, I touched that flower so now I'm a princess!*

*Let's celebrate! And host a parade!*

*On noes, now there are rules to what a princess can and cannot do and now it's no fun while everyone is setting up the parade without my own organizational skills.*

*Forget this, I'mma start breaking the rules and do all the fun stuff I used to do and still be a princess!*

*Spike faints*

*I have an idea, EVERYONE IS NOW A PRINCESS!*

Basically what the plot looked like in my eyes.

Hah. This old thread pops up.

I've also been thinking about this really interesting fact that there are IME's that lets people write any Chinese character on an electronic device with a 5 button keyboard. It works because Chinese is written in an extremely specific stroke order and any other order is considered improper. There's a button for a vertical, horizontal, curved (slanted?), bent strokes, and a dot. Press the buttons in a certain order, then a menu of possible characters pop up. Once you get close enough to have a Chinese character of choice, you select that character and then that character is written down on whatever you're typing in.

So pretty much... There's is the possibility of having a writing system that could work in a similar with two buttons plus the 'print' button. An even more complex writing system can work with just five... although the one I'm looking at has a bunch of punctuation buttons and there's a wild card probably in case somebody forget a stroke for a different character or something.

Equestria is a place that has a lot of similarities with our real world, and that's why I like MLP so much, because it is not a perfect place but no matter how alike Equestria is to our world, the gap is huge because Equestria is so fantastic and positive, even with the "evilness" that sorrounds the land, it would never be like our world.

Having said that, I portrayed this Rarity, as a very "real" person Rarity, not as a anime character like we all used to see people do when they draw human ponies.

I drew her as high society, yes, but what is high society in our world? celebrities, they can be trashy, but they are high society. Anyways, I drew her as a high society refinate young woman who works as a recognized fashion designer, she's famous, she's young, she lives in LA, she goes to red carpet events, she attends the best parties.

But what these celebrities do to be fashionable? they dye their hair, they try different colors and hairstyles, so that's my way to explain why does she have purple hair and a mohawk. Yes mohawk IS asociated with rebelion and delinquency, but it is also a memorable hairstyle than many famous people try these days. including both men and women.

 

What I meant by 'high society' is a stereotypical one with snobby people with top hats, British accents and such. I wasn't really thinking of whatever we seem to have these days (not that I pay attention to celebrities anyways). iirc, that trope was based off of capitalists from a time when the UK was a world superpower with enough colonies so the sun never sets on them. Eh, I guess we're thinking in totally different time periods.

?? What is it that makes it important to mention race in something that shouldn't have anything to do with race? It's a game, not a social studies class, haha.

let's face it, Rarity has purple hair, let's translate that to the real word...who is born with purple hair? no one, if I don't find a reason to explain why she has purple hair then the artwork wouldn't be very "human". She can still be sophisticated and femenine with a mohawk. Well, that's my thinking.

 

Rarity is formal, more mature than other ponies, and has a very high interest in Canterlot high-society culture. Mohawks can be associated with delinquency, immaturity, violence and rebellion which doesn't really fit in with the 'high-society' trope at all. Just my own thinking, and probably others too.

To add to what another person said, I would darken body outlines to feel just as dark as the outlines on the hair. You have very clear contrast from hair to its outline but you don't see the same contrast from body to its outline.

moriko's oc i drew earlier today--hopefully shes the right colours. still i like how she turned out.

as always, critiques are welcomed. i know the edges are rough. i wanted some sort of border, but i couldnt think of one that fit right.

Rough edges??? All I'm seeing are either overlapping lines, or the computer's antialiasing not smoothing the edges of the line adequately enough. Doesn't seem rough to me. At least your motor skills seem finer than my own.

I think the thing that keeps people from liking human versions of ponies is usually the fact that it's difficult to make a pony look like a human. You have to change the facial structure, the eyes, and the hair in order to make it make sense on a human being... you know?

While adapting human stuff to ponies is a real challenge itself, it seems that adapting ponies into humans is a whole different challenge.

Why do you want that extra weight if you wanna be crazy fast enough to go at light-barrier-breaking speeds? Haha It also seems totally inappropriate given her maturity level.

Same with music. Excellent songs have been rejected, and mediocre ones have been accepted. It's all dependent on whether whoever is previewing or prelistening happens to like your style and forward it, I assume. I've had a few of my songs get rejected that I thought were some of my best, and then much less polished ones get featured.

 

That said, don't get discouraged, your art is looking GREAT and I really like your style! Watching you on DA.

 

I have a hunch that all EQD really cares is what the art is about. With that considered, I'm concerned this piece isn't gonna make it to EQD either because I'm not aiming for cuteness that most fans seem to fall for, but rather something supermodel-like to go with that dress idea.

Makes me wonder... what's the last piece that got featured in a drawfriend that doesn't focus on cuteness at all?