akita-ken

yes i'm a big fan of the guide grid, line and circle method cuz it always serves as a constant reminder of where an object is facing and how big it has to be in proportion to the other elements of the drawing. furthermore since it's on a digital medium the guidelines can be easily erased after everything is done, certainly much easier to accomplish neatly than with an eraser and pencil since some of the overlapping lines will tend to get rubbed off as well

i like color splash, she's really well done, looks like a cross between fluttershy, rarity, twilight and rainbow dash if you ask me

i tried using a picture of roseluck upside down to try doing what you said and one thing i noticed is that i'd tend to exaggerate the curves when the picture is upside down. in the end i got so dizzy i flipped her right side up again i redrew the picture again (with a different OC in mind) and tweaked the curves and lines as best as i could to follow the advice given, tried to make the head as big as i could while 'squashing' it into a more oval shape and increased the curve on the nose. i also made her eyes 20% larger and tried to shrink the neck as much as i could. i also made all four legs thinner and shortened the overall body length while increasing the 'roundedness' near the end. however i suspect the head might still be too small for the body; i'll probably take more time to draw more guide circles/guide lines on my next piece since the mistake i'm making seems to be systematic in nature. (i.e. i'm consistently drawing the head too small). hey man just keep practicing! whenever you're free and feeling cozy grab a pencil and paper and start sketching away, after a couple of tries you'll start to see improvement! i've never had much of a flair for art as well (in fact when i was small, other kids would sometimes laugh at my work, i hated art in school D:)

hey thanks for all the advice guys, i really appreciate it and i'll be sure to follow them the next time i start on a new piece! i'm not quite sure i understand what you mean here though

i just bought crysis warhead (i've played the SP long ago, only bought it for the prospect of playing the MP) from the steam sale you mentioned, but i'm afraid i'm not around for most days of the week (at least until the end end of the year) so i guess i won't be playing it much

awesome bassline dude, my sub was making everything shake. it has a lot of potential though, maybe consider adding an upper track to it?

so i've been practicing drawing my OC lately who so happens to be a stallion, and it dawned on me that i've never once attempted drawing a mare before. i used a picture of apple cobbler as a reference and tried to mirror cheerilee's colour scheme. took me almost a day before i could get the proportions to not look so awkward, i hope it didn't turn out too disastrous

thank you! i'm glad that you liked it i finally figured out what was wrong with the gif too. apparently flash doesn't handle resizing of bitmaps very well so when i gave it some 2000x2000 picture it turned out all jagged when i brought it down to 500x500. it antialiases fine when i export the image at a smaller resolution before importing it into flash. oh well, another learning point and here's the antialiased fixed version:

cool! i could see the improvements as i scrolled down the pictures, i can't wait to get a tablet too, right now i'm still stuck with using a mouse to draw

i agree with demi, 50 shades of hay is quite a clever and witty name. i'm not sure how your fanfic goes but i'm assuming it has something to do with AJs journey of self-discovery and so such a name captures the process.

just came back from a tiring week of clearing obstacle courses and what better way to destress than to draw ponies after some encouragement on my previous thread i've been practicing drawing my ponygenerator-ed OC quite a bit with pencil and paper in order to figure out how to do a different perspective other than a side view, and boy was it difficult! i've also recently got myself illustrator in order to try dabbling with digital medium and it seems to be rather forgiving for mouse users like me (at least it seemed so, i just found the paintbrush tool and started drawing) but i'm not exactly sure if i'm using it correctly though, as it did not turn out the way i expected it to when i tried to color it using photoshop and for some reason flash totally bunged up the antialiasing when i tried exporting it as a gif. i suspect it's some little checkbox i forgot to click somewhere, either that or i'm doing it wrong i love the weekends! :3

thanks for all the inputs, i'm totally blown away by the response i've gotten on this thread guys, i'll continue practicing when i get back on the weekends for sure! i just have one question (to those who draw on computers) though, do you use a mouse or a tablet?