Thought I would give it a shot...

[Agent505 661]

So...as it's clearly never been done before, and such an original idea, I thought I would throw my sketches in with the endless amassing sea of fanart ponies out there...wait what?

 

Anyway, here they are, please let me know your honest opinion. I dont want people to say "yeah they're great!" when you think they're terrible

I've been drawing anime for some time now, so im used to criticism and can take it on board to learn more. I have been using GIMP to draw ponies in for a while-ish. I'm not overly brilliant at it, and can barely do anything out of the *click here then here* points...so if you notice things like Embers tail being a little jagged, you'll have to forgive those.

 

I may or may not have given up on Colgate half way through... http://mlpforums.com/public/style_emoticons/default/dry.png (if you look at the eyes you'll see what I mean)

 

 

Sorry, HERE they are I'm trying to learn how to use this program, how to draw ponies, and trying to create my own OC to "play" my music for me at the same time.

This is Blaze...she's my OC...kinda. I HATE this drawing, but it was my first one so I thought I would show my progress.

 

 

This is the second version of Blaze that I drew...dont quite know what happened with her but there's something I dont like.

 

 

This is Ember...it's...um, well she's Blaze, with a name change, and like a derp I forgot to leave room for the mane...again! Blaze sounded too cliché so I asked friends for a name change idea, and Ember is what my brother came up with.

 

 

 

So if you could please let me know your honest opinions on these, and how you think I can improve then it would be more than welcomed I would have "spoilered" these to save space, but I dont know how ;_;

Edited November 25, 2012 by SeriousNinjaBrony

[CloudFyre 848]

I love Colgate! She's so adorable!

I'm not a great artist, so I really can't criticize anything here. It all looks wonderful!

 

Oh, and if you want to spoiler things, just put the text/images inside of tags that look like this:

 

(spoiler)

Content goes here.

(/spoiler)

 

^But replace the round brackets "(" and ")" with square brackets "[" and "]"

 

Anyhow, nice work!

[Agent505 661]

I love Colgate! She's so adorable!

I'm not a great artist, so I really can't criticize anything here. It all looks wonderful!

 

Oh, and if you want to spoiler things, just put the text/images inside of tags that look like this:

 

(spoiler)

Content goes here.

(/spoiler)

 

^But replace the round brackets "(" and ")" with square brackets "[" and "]"

 

Anyhow, nice work!

 

Haha thanks! I should have probably been able to figure that out by myself...lol

And thank you for the kind words Of course i'll accept praise just as willingly as critique

[HomuraBL 851]

 

 

Colgate looks fine except spots are missing.

 

The first one looks pretty good but that last part of her hair looks a bit unnatural. The top right part. Also her mane coming around her neck looks a bit unnatural, I don't know how to put it but maybe it's just too straight.

 

 

The second one is actually my favorite.

 

The third one...err. She looks kinda like she has hair only on one side of her head. Though, maybe I'm looking at it wrong. But other then that I like the design.

 

These are all pretty good Regardless and would love to see more.

[Dusty Soul 2,611]

The Colgate one is unfinished, but it is good still. The 2nd one is really solid, and the mane looks kinda unnatural, the third ones mane is just awkward. They are all good though.

[ReGen 1,466]

I can't really be that critical from an artists point of view... So i'll judge from an average pony's eye.

 

It looks great! Keep it up!

[Agent505 661]

The Colgate one is unfinished, but it is good still. The 2nd one is really solid, and the mane looks kinda unnatural, the third ones mane is just awkward. They are all good though.

 

I do agree, like I said though the first one that is literally just made of cubes was the first one I did, it was good at the time...then I realised what i'd created...honestly I hate that drawing with a passion lol.

The Colgate one is finished, but like I said I just gave up while I was making it, I was trying out a new drawing technique, and I think I messed up something, so I just though..."you know what? Forget it, im done" then just threw everything else over the top to get it finished (The eyes )

[Pix3M 607]

So...as it's clearly never been done before, and such an original idea, I thought I would throw my sketches in with the endless amassing sea of fanart ponies out there...wait what?

 

Anyway, here they are, please let me know your honest opinion. I dont want people to say "yeah they're great!" when you think they're terrible

 

I've been drawing anime for some time now, so im used to criticism and can take it on board to learn more. I have been using GIMP to draw ponies in for a while-ish. I'm not overly brilliant at it, and can barely do anything out of the *click here then here* points...so if you notice things like Embers tail being a little jagged, you'll have to forgive those.

Eh, there ought to be a community of brony artists to actually try to give critiques, don't you think? If you ask me, MLPforums, while pretty nice a lot of times, don't tend to try to give in-depth critiques.

 

(First picture)

Hmm, this one seems mostly accurate, save for some slight silly mistakes like you mentioned in the eye. Notice how there's a bit of a blank space between the mane and her left ear (i.e.one to our right) though.

 

I think we should also be careful about how we crop our images. Cutting her off at the tip of the horn and right below her chin makes it look like she is gonna have a bit of a hard time breathing. Maybe if we don't cut her off at the horn bit leave a bit of space on top, and crop her mid-neck or so... I think the composition will feel much less cramped.

 

(Second picture)

Take a screencap from the show of a pony in profile view - any one. What you will mostly find on that screencap is that your eye in comparison is a bit small and placed a bit too close in front. I feel as if I could mention other things about the head but the eye is throwing me off quite a bit. I think I'll just stop there before I wind up pointing mistakes that don't exist.

 

Also, what's funny is that looking around in my own collection of hundreds of screencaps, I practically have almost no screencaps of profile-view ponies because profile-view is one of the least interesting. It may be a very easy perspective, but you are better off using the same pose but in 3/4ths perspective. Profile views work better in compositions in which there are multiple characters or points of interest as they tend to direct attention toward a direction a character is facing. That easily means a piece directing attention away from itself, which isn't necessarily what you want. It's not easy to create an interesting profile view (though possible), so avoid that unless you're confident that you know what you're doing.

 

The pose is also a bit unnatural as a FiM-styled pony's standing pose will have the tip of their hoof under their hips. I could probably be wrong as I'm only very quickly glancing at what few screencaps have, but it shouldn't hurt to look at a standing pony and see how their legs are positioned. When drawing figures, whether humans or even ponies, it's important to not make them look awkwardly balanced.

 

(Third picture)

Phew, I am not fond of the coloring for this one. All of the colors here are saturated, and have roughly the same value. It's a good practice to have colors have a range of different values so they don't wind up muddy; color schemes that can work with very little value contrast is often ones that use only light colors (e.g. Gala Fluttershy). Even then, I like to see that the green is darker than the pink which is darker than the yellow for her color scheme.

 

Your outlines also don't really stand out on this one. I think the results will be more exciting if they were darkened to be more visible.

 

Saturated colors also like to grab attention, and it is ideal to have only one dominating color that's clearly grabbing more attention. All of the colors used here are pretty saturated. There are probably many ways to approach fixing the color scheme to have less clashing colors, but the biggest thing I would suggest desaturating the coat to let the mane and eyes take over.

 

With that in mind, I really think I ought to be writing a OC coloring tutorial soon, giving some general tips to getting more satisfying results.

 

(Fourth Picture)

 

Phew, I really don't think red outlines are gonna work out. Red is one of the more attention-grabbing colors and I don't think there's a great reason why the outlines ought to attract more attention than say... the eyes.

 

And for some reason, this one appears to have a horizontally squashed head? Last I remember, ponies have rounder heads.

[Agent505 661]

Eh, there ought to be a community of brony artists to actually try to give critiques, don't you think? If you ask me, MLPforums, while pretty nice a lot of times, don't tend to try to give in-depth critiques.

(Just as an FYI, the quote has nothing to do with my reply, I just wanted your attention and didn't want to quote the entire post, it would take up too much room)

 

First off, thanks for the feedback, i'll be sure to take into account the things you have said.

A lot of the points you have made can easily be explained due to me just not caring right now, as im still learning I've only done a couple of doodles of ponies on paper, before moving into a program I dont even know so...well yeah haha.

 

Explanations would be say for Colgate, because im a genius I decided to just start drawing from a template straight off, without making sure I left enough room for the whole pony (as is the case with the mane, in several instances) and like I have said, I gave up half way through and just wanted her finished.

 

That gray block was of course the first thing I scrawled together. I was impressed with it at the start (WTF was I thinking?!) and now I look back I just want to hop in a time machine and punch myself in the head.

 

Honestly I dont know what happened to the colours on the 3rd one o.O They where fine in the program, but when I exported them they all distorted. If you look closely around the mane end you can see it's blurred for some reason, when GIMP snaps the lines clean...so I have no idea what happened there. Looking at the colouring scheme in general though is a very IN-YOUR-FACE contrast, especially with the lack of detail and just pure solid colour, so I see what you mean.

 

The colour scheme in the last one was based off a friends colour scheme in Halo 4 lol

She was going to be red and black originally, but the main colour being black just didn't look right considering it stole the rest of the detail (eyelashes, mainly). So I went for grey instead.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

TL;DR - I can understand where you're coming from with these points, when I look back at them. It's amazing what you can see when you're not burning deep into getting them finished, or just asleep while you're working on them. Clearly i'll have to work on the colouring, and size management so I can actually get the whole thing on. Maybe when I get better at drawing i'll be changing poses, and more bothered about keeping them in place.

OMG I just realised if you zoom in on the last picture you can see the outline of the eye colouring xD wow...

Edited November 25, 2012 by SeriousNinjaBrony