akita-ken

I almost thought this was a real thing, then I read the poster in it's entirety and cracked up (especially on the part where 'the exits would be sealed')

i decided to give my OC some love by drawing him together with my favorite mane 6 pony ^.^ took me two weekends to complete instead of the usual one (having an incomplete piece of work waiting at home while in camp is such a torturous feeling! ) lemme know what you think!

Please forgive my random 1 minute doodle. But I couldn't help but try to visualize how a musical note would look like with a lightning bolt coming through it.

Thanks! The Bamboo is indeed a great move by Wacom to make tablets more affordable for the masses, especially younger aspiring artists who might not have disposable income. I was expecting some small-ass drawing area too with cost-cutting finishes considering it's price point, but the dimensions of the sensitive area are really quite modest and the product is elegantly designed. Not bad at all. (Y) That being said, I'll still consider a tablet as being 'nice to have', but not necessarily a requirement. A good mouse with a moderately-high dpi (which essentially most gaming mice can achieve) can be capable of some really nice smooth lines. Again, it's all a matter of getting used to

deceptive innocent eyes! now that's evil.. well-played Flaret.. well-played. I can just imagine her using them to charm unwitting ponies http://mlpforums.com/public/style_emoticons/default/dry.png

I like it! Perhaps you could try experimenting with a 'greener' green for eye color instead of a pastel green/teal since pastel colors tends to soften the look of a character. Also, she reminded me of a piece of chocolate when I first saw her

So I've recently been practicing drawing ponies starting with pencil and paper, then later moving on to a mouse. I've gotten quite comfortable with mouse drawing especially with it's ability to manipulate vectors in order to make small changes in conjunction with the mighty ctrl+Z shortcut However, I've heard a lot about the alleged benefits of using tablets so when my pay came in last week I thought what the heck and got myself a Wacom Bamboo Pen to play around with (quite a bargain at $100 too! i used to remember a time long ago when tablets were professional equipment that cost $300 and up). I set my sights on a relatively common front-view Twilight (since all my ponies so far have been either side or 3/4 view) in order to ease myself into using a tablet (as well as drawing different POVs). (i know i made another proportion misjudgement somewhere >_<, but then again its my first front view..) Thoughts so far: Using a tablet definitely takes some getting used to, the benefits might not be immediately apparent for some users but after using it for a while I notice that I'm definitely capable of more accurate lines (which means less tweaking required). However, this accuracy is a double-edged sword because minor 'squigglies' tend to get picked up more easily if one's hand shakes a bit while drawing a line. New users might also expect the cursor to continue moving from it's last location from any point on the tablet. That said, once one gets used to the fact that every point on the tablet maps directly to a point on the screen, drawing feels very natural. Side note: I happened to get my tablet while I was still working on Sakutama's zebra-pegasus OC, so this piece became a partial-mouse-partial-tablet drawing (if the pose looks familiar its because I used one of Honey Puff's art request thread poses as a reference)

Elementary mathematics involving the manipulation of simple numbers without too many decimal places can be done manually and in fact should be encouraged to ingrain the fundamental concepts of mathematical operations into younger students. Making students perform manual operations on numbers with long strings of decimals places is extremely time-consuming, and the only purpose I can foresee of doing so is to drill precision in the face of having to keep track of large inputs. However, this turns the question into less of a 'do you understand long division etc', and more of 'lets see you keep track of this 10 decimal number and not make any mistakes *evillaugh*!'. High school (and above) mathematics tends to become more applied in nature as the scope of questions posed changes from 'here is a mathematical operation, go solve it' to more of 'here is the problem, we need you to find this angle, you are free to choose your method so long as you can find the answer and explain how you got it'. In this respect I fully agree with what @Aureity said earlier, calculators become an invaluable asset to students because unless teachers are going to set questions based around things like special angles (which is really just a matter of memorizing them really), it is close to impossible for students to perform stuff like trigonometric and logarithmic functions manually. The only other alternative would be to issue students with reference books that include trig and log tables, but then we'd be regressing to what was practiced in the 60s. One must also consider the fact that precision and accuracy is paramount in fields of work which require applied mathematics, and as such getting students comfortable with using their calculators to crunch large numbers is an important life skill, especially for those who are aiming to go into fields like engineering. I'm also a strong advocate of the graphing calculator and I believe students should be introduced to them in their senior years (11th grade onwards) because it opens up a wide variety of options for them to tackle whatever mathematical problem that arises. In many cases the GC actually provides more than one method of obtaining the answer (a simple e.g. one could plot the graph of a quadratic eqn to find its roots, or they could just punch the quadratic formula in, or even use an in-built function to factor it) and it is the student that actually makes the effort to RTFM of his calculator who will excel because he always has more than one option to fall back on. I can't remember how many times my familiarity with the TI-84+ has helped me out of sticky situations in tests where I've forgotten a specific method of solving a problem.

argh oh dear i'm still making the 'head too small' mistake!!! this is like the fourth time i've made the head too small >_< note to self: fluttershy's mane is extremely difficult to draw properly

thanks! i hope to be able to be able to draw as close as possible to the show's style one day so if you mistook it as a screenshot from the show at first then thats good to hear haha

As I continue my journey of trying to draw ponies as show accurate as possible, I decided to try one of the Mane 6 instead of an OC this weekend, and what better candidate than my favourite pony Fluttershy I used a tiny screencap from the 'yay' scene as a reference and tried to replicate it as close as possible. This time I went with the show's style of having the pony outlined in a darker hue of it's coat colour rather than just leaving it as black. However for the life of me I was unable to figure out a way of getting the paint bucket to fill the whites of her eyes without leaving at least a thin line to contain the 'paint' so that it wouldn't end up colouring the whole pony white. My poor Fluttershy ends up looking like she got punched in the eyes with those black rings around the bottom halves of her eyes. Could someone enlighten me as to the proper way it should be done? I really scratched my head for a good hour or so trying to figure out a way around it before compromising on the 0.25pt line.