Because something is about to get clobbered.
This was a strange pose and I’m not sure I got it entirely right. It’s very twisty and odd, but I really wanted to give the impression that Applejack was about to mess something up pretty badly with that buck of hers.
Doing some more stylistic experimentation with the Prismacolors. Went back to trying the borderless Prismacoloring (sketched out with 2H, and then erased the borders, replacing with colour as I went), but relied a little more heavily on the black for shading (partly due to not being able to find a great orange-orange blend… and same with the type of yellow her hair uses… and partly to keep the form more defined). It worked great for everything but the ear, where it worked soso.
This ran me about 3 hours overall.