No Contest Creations

This is my third submission for the Artist Training Grounds’ week 10 theme: draw a pony sleeping. There’s a lot of them in this one.

Anyway, this is how I imagine a weekly wrap up goes among the ATG.

For those unfamiliar with the ATG admins, top to bottom, left to right: Phoe, Fetchbeer, Argembarger, Kitsuneymg (Kits), LifeSequenceBreaker, Amehdaus, Nullh, Atlur and LunarApologist (Lunar).

Dialogue jokes: I told Kits in the comments for my Tiny Pony, so I’m quoting it back like I promised. Argembarger’s is… somewhat of an inside one. It has to do with his Ask Argembarger tumblr. And Phoe… well, she handled the NATG on her own, so she’s queen of theme wrap ups.

Anyway, I think relative proportions are out a bit, but eh, this was pretty ambitious from the start, so I knew I’d mess up somewhere. I also chose a really weird pose for Lunar, which backfired on me. She somehow looks a bit… aged. Also, that damn poofy hair. And the Cutie Mark. I also tried to have a laid back cartoony look to the props and they just ended up looking pretty crappy. But they get the point across.

This is my second submission for the Artist Training Grounds’ week 10 theme: draw a pony sleeping. This theme basically allowed me to play this page as planned.

*gasp* More alternate reality shenanigans with Applejack watching… herself sleep! Also, oops another cliffhanger. But I at least got to start the flashback sequence. Filly Twilight turned out surprisingly well for how fast I sketched her. The rest is about on par with what the last couple pages have looked like.

This is my first submission for the Artist Training Grounds’ week 10 theme: draw a pony sleeping.

Well, I did it again. “Something simple” became “getting carried away” and ballooned into this. This is probably my best pencil work to date. I used a combination of 2H, HB, 2B and (ill fatedly) 4B.

This is my first attempt at doing any kind of background work. At first I did eraser blending, but I started running into issues where the eraser wasn’t maintaining the right shade of darkness and leaving marks. This got really bad when I tried to mix in the 4B. I ended up using my fingers and the 4B was still pretty blah with that.

Well, some people might take a look at this and ask “what the heck were you doing?” And that is a good question, because honestly, I don’t know. This is my first time ever using watercolour pencils, so there was a ton of trial and error involved before I could actually produce this rather modest looking Twilight.

I only have 12 pencils, none of them purple, so that made things really interesting. Finding the exact right mixture for the lavender will a pretty big pain. Other blends came a little bit easier, but there were quite a few (everything other than the pink streaks I had to blend for). Finding the right amount of water to use was interesting too. I just tapped the brush off the first time and that still made everything really watery. I had also coloured really light, so that sample basically got eaten. When I finally got all the above down, I started actually working on Twilight. I brush stroked in a way similar to when I pencil shade and that kind of gave her some volume, but there’s definitely some weirdness going on. Looking at it again, I also didn’t get the blue-purple dark enough (although I don’t think it’s possible with my current pencils). Anyway, as a first try, I’m fairly happy with this.

This is my third submission for the Artist Training Grounds’ week 9 theme: draw an athletic pony. Fox-E over on the group mentioned I needed to do a “slow and steady” Twilight to counter all the Dashies and Applejacks that I predicted would be drawn. So here’s a Fall Weather Friends Twilight with a twist. The twist being that I drew way off model this time. I wanted to try a change of style for kicks and having seen some other artists trying to do a truer to real life equine look, decided to try my hand at it.

I was a little unsure at the start, but I think I had the overall form down by the end. The different contours definitely made the shading fun (and loooooong). I think I managed to keep her looking fairly pretty, although I also feel her face crosses into a sort of “handsomeness” too that I didn’t intend. I’m starting to consciously swap between my trio of pencils while I’m shading too, which helps with my shading control. Overall I’m quite happy with this.

This is my second submission for the Artist Training Grounds’ week 9 theme: draw an athletic pony. Got Applejack and Dashie both in the same shot and both are being coordinate. Weee.

The original plan I had for the bottom part was actually really boring because it was just going to be one big panel with an expression for each and a ton of dialogue dump. Instead you get a ton of dialogue dump, but with changing expressions! (Yay.) I should place the heads a bit differently, though, since the dialogue flow gets messed up by corrupt Twilight’s head. So if I could do it over, I’d shift corrupt Twilight’s head to the right and regular Twilight’s to the left. Anyway, it’s kind of nice doing pages that aren’t a massive amount of panels since I can experiment, (usually) lay out each panel better and draw nicer looking ponies. Oh and I also get to leave you guys on a cliffhanger (*evil laugh*).

This is my first submission for the Artist Training Grounds’ week 9 theme: draw and athletic pony. Technically speaking, Applejack qualifies on her own, but eh.

Anyway, I really need to stop doing this to myself. And by that, I mean letting my mind get all contrary on me. I was going to do something simpler (for like the 10th time). So I started out randomly sketching out Applejack. And my mind was like “Hey, she should be jumping. And at a weird angle.” Then after that, it was like “You should also shade this. And have two light sources.”

Anyway, I finally broke out my new tin today and used my 2B pencil to do the shading. I think the 2B is going to be what I’ll be using from now because it can easily get the darkness that I end up struggling a bit with the HB to get and it’s far more controllable than the 4B. Overall I’m quite happy with how this turned out, although I’m not entirely sure about her left hind leg and the positioning of some of the shading on her body.

EDIT: I’m an idiot and forgot the tail. One OCD splurge later and now there is tail! Yay.

This is my submission for the Artist Training Grounds’ week 9 bonus theme: draw a tiny pony. And by tiny, I mean physical pencils only and literally drawing as small as humanly possible.

Included is a rather large picture (not allowed to scale) containing my different attempts (yea, I got a bit carried away). I started out drawing bangs, horn, mane, nose, an eye, a blip for a cutie mark, ear, tail, body and legs. That’s for the 0.7cm wide by 0.6cm tall Twilight. My smallest (second from the bottom) drawing, which is as small as I could get it before it started looking like a blob of nothing (0.2cm wide by just a little under 0.15cm high), had me only drawing bangs, horn, body, legs and tail. The right side, which is unfortunately partially covered by my ruler to get a good measurement comparison on the best sketch, actually shows the top barely being recognizable as Twilight and by the bottom, if you know it’s Twilight, you can probably tell it’s her silhouette, but overall it’s probably barely even recognizable as a pony.

Oh and an interesting thing to note: these all look fairly sharp on my sketchbook, but this all looks blurry on a 720dpi scan. If I wanted to get it any sharper, my crappy scanner wants to take an hour or more.