Misterfanwank's Ponies

[Misterfanwank 20]

A couple of days ago I decided to start drawing ponies, so I took a ruler to some official art and measured out the proportions. Aside from practice sketches this is the first fruit of my efforts:

 

Line art

 

 

Color

 

 

I'm not 100% happy with the shading, but I'm ready to start on another drawing, so this'll have to do for this one for now.

[akita-ken 581]

Looks good!

I try to strike a balance between using too analytical an approach and just letting muscle memory take over when it comes to my art. I do recognize the value of certain proportions between body elements (when I first started my pieces were littered with all sorts of guide lines and circles and have you) and try to keep them in mind while drawing, but mostly let my intuition take over after a while. I still rely on the occasional guide circle here and there, but it's more or less become second nature. 

[Misterfanwank 20]

I've been experimenting with drawing pony faces at 3/4 view. I'm not very good at it yet. I'm not happy with the line art of this Rainbow Dash, but I'm ready to move on to the next drawing, so I'm going ahead and coloring her.

 

One thing I noticed is if you don't get their colors exactly right ponies tend to look awful when you start coloring them, even if the color's off by only a little bit. I wish I knew more about color theory so I could understand how to pick good colors and good color combinations.

Edited March 1, 2013 by Misterfanwank

[The Soldier 2,044]

One thing I noticed is if you don't get their colors exactly right ponies tend to look awful when you start coloring them, even if the color's off by only a little bit. I wish I knew more about color theory so I could understand how to pick good colors and good color combinations.

I know that feels, bro.

 

The first one, by the way, looks good. Except the legs seem a bit short to me, and the hind leg joint should be in front of the body, if you could understand what I saying.

[Misterfanwank 20]

I can't tell if they're actually a little bit too short or if the posture is only causing them to seem too short. FIM Pony legs have an impressive ability to scrunch in on themselves.

 

Example:

 

Take a look at Bonbon (and Lyra) sitting:

 

Bonbon's shoulder is pretty far back and pretty high up. Her neck's bent forward, which makes the actual shape of the torso hard to identify, so it's hard to understand where the shoulder is actually placed on her torso.

 

The solution  I figured is this:

 

These legs are roughly the same, but in different poses. The blue circle is her chest and the blue dot is the center of her chest. The joint, which rotates around the blue dot, is the equivalent of our clavicle, which allows our shoulder joint to move in a similar way. I'm pretty sure the equivalent joint on real horses isn't as flexible. As you can see, though, the leg can retract and scrunch up quite a bit depending on what it's doing.

 

In the Twilight picture the front leg is supporting a lot of her weight, so it's compressing on the "clavical" joint. Similarly the background legs are scrunched up because they're not being held straight. Because of that I THINK the leg lengths are fine, but I'm not entirely sure. I may need to measure out the leg proportions again.

 

 

As for the rear leg being behind the body, I know what you're saying. I tried it both ways and I ended up going with this way because it showed more depth, although that may not be perfectly accurate. I may go back and try it again soon.

 

 

EDIT: My current progress on Rainbow Dash:

 

 

After several failed attempts at coloring her hair I decided to just do the shading on her body. I'm extremely pleased with it, although it still needs some work.

 

EDIT2:
 

I'm still cleaning up the shading and I need to do some detailing on the hair, but this should be much better:

 

I'm really not sure what I'll do about the hair, but I'll think of something. I may just shade it in sweepy strokes or something.

Edited March 2, 2013 by Misterfanwank

[Misterfanwank 20]

I've figured out a decent way of making hair. I'm not 100% happy with it, but I'll be experimenting with it in later works. I'm not entirely happy with this Rainbow Dash, but I'm tired of working on it.

 

One thing that really bothers me about this is the different levels of detail between the mane and the face. I think if I use a similar blur technique to do the shading on the head as I did on the mane this might not be as much of a problem. Also, not using outlines would help the mane, but I don't really want to do that. I like outlines, they have character.

 

Doing a less detailed head might help, too, as that won't demand a more detailed mane. While the head on this one is not exceptionally detailed, it has a lot more consideration of depth than the 3/4 view used by the show. This is why the mane on the Twilight in the first post looks fine, but the simple mane on earlier versions of this Rainbow Dash look wrong.

 

On the topic of depth, one thing I've noticed is the mouth is too small. It has no way of realistically meeting with the cheek, which is at a different angle. I didn't notice the exact source of this until I started shading because the definition of the cheeck only came out with the shading. I only knew something was wrong, but I couldn't identify or fix it.

 

I've got a lot to learn, but as a mere stepping stone and an experiment this satisfies me.

Edited March 3, 2013 by Misterfanwank