Different Artists in FiM?

Rafa Stary · March 7

Hello everypony, I'm not sure if this is the correct forum to post this, but since it talks mostly about something from the FiM TV Series I'll do it here.

So, we're talking about a series animated on flash, you naturally won't see any artists on it, of course, someone or a group of persons drew the basis for what later become the famous puppets. but all of them used Lauren Faust's sketches, so it really doesn't count, plus, obviously, you're not seeing something hand draw, but what if there are actual arts in the show? Done by different artists or at least someone unrelated to the animation process?

The static images that appear in some episodes really catch my attention, some of them don't look anything like the vectors of the characters seen in all the episodes, nor Lauren Faust's arts, in fact, many of them show the characters being completely off-model, featuring different proportions, facial expressions and of course, completely different art styles, as if there really were multiple artists behind them, maybe it was just a single person who did them all, I don't know, but I think there were at least more than one.

Of course, even though characters are off-model, almost all of them are draw in the same visual style of the show (same colors, flat with no shading or lightning, colored lines), after all art directors want to maintain a consistency, now, I have no idea if these arts were drawn like this from the beginning, or if their artists first did them in their own styles and then they went through someone else's process to make them at least match the visual aesthetic of the show. Here are a few examples:

Images 1-3 are from Season 1 Episode 20, 4-7 from Equestria Girls Movie 1, 8 from Season 5 Episode 14, 9 from Equestria Girls Mirror Magic and 10 from Season 9 Episode 20. If you compare them, images 1-6 are closer to the characters vectors, but then you have something like image 9 where it just feels like that it came from a comic or if girls from a different animated show fell in the wrong show, this only convinces me even more that these are the works of multiple artists. There are more of them but I only saved these.

Now, I could remember only 4 examples where the arts not only feature characters completely off-model, but also feature visuals that are completely different from the series, these are the Anime characters from Season 5 episode 21 (which might actually even count as 5 separate pieces, I don't know), and the Sweet Apple Acres and the 2 Twilight arts from Season 5 Episode 22, all by unknown artists (in-universe are Fluttershy and Discord obviously), in case the ones above were indeed all adapted by someone else to match the show's style, then these might be 100% the original work of whoever made them.

There are also the arts from promotional material and merchandise, they mostly feature those early vectors from before the series premiered but lazily edited (that's why some of them look poorly made), but some clearly feature arts done by different artists, Derpibooru credited the artists of many of them, but others don't such as these two (they seem to be from the same person to me)

This is a very interesting subject for me, I'll be honest, as much as I love G4's animation and puppets, one thing I wish is that FiM and Equestria Girls were hand-animated, as I really enjoy seeing different styles of animation and art from different animators and studios switching between each other in the series (just like in the G1 episodes), these static arts were the closest I could find to that.

I really would like to make a collection with all of these arts in the TV series (& EG) + the ones from merchandise, so if you want to post some here I'll be grateful! Also, of course, if someone knows who is the artist behind them, please let me know!

Edited March 7 by Rafa Stary
Reorganize images