No Contest Creations

Artist Training Grounds Alumni group submission for theme 1: catch up on theme from the original training grounds.

Technically I caught up on everything with theme 30 from the original. So I decided to go with a theme where I wasn’t involved in the day itself. And that theme would be number 11: a pony doing a rope trick. Oh and this drawing is keeping in the same method of creation as with the original training grounds: done in a single day and winging it so that I fit the theme into the narrative.

Twilight Sparkle is my favourite pony. When I decided comic pages looked like they’d be fun to do, she was naturally my first choice to center it around. Of course I didn’t realize at the time that creating a work in which Twilight comes into conflict with a super powered evil version of herself would end in me picking on Twilight. A lot.

That said, I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of panel flow, especially since I managed to squeeze a stupid amount of panels into this page. Lots of facial shots in this, so I got to work some more on expressions and I think I got them down pretty well.

This was my Equestria Daily Artist Training Grounds submission for theme 30: Previous Themes.

Any previous theme was valid for this one. So a handful of us decided this means we should do all the themes. It took a ton of preplanning, but I managed to fit every single theme into a single 5 panel page AND continue the narration. A full list of the first panel in which a pony fulfills the condition of a theme can be found after this little blurb. This was a really long, exhausting endeavour and, as usual, ponies in the distance are really hard to detail and not have them look like blobs. I was feeling a little off that day too, so I had to erase and redo a bit more than I anticipated, as well.

This was my Equestria Daily Artist Training Grounds submission for theme 28: Draw a pony cooking.

Went for a bit of a goofy setup here as I wanted to do a gag with cooking ending catastrophically, but also continue the narration. This expressions in this one are some of my favourites in terms of both how fun they were to draw and how well they turned out.

I decided to put these two together because part 1 is a single panel with no dialogue and part 2 has the dialogue that would describe it. Part 1 also crosses into grimdark territory, so it’s only a click through.

Warning: Part 1 contains blood and some gore.

Part 1
This was my Equestria Daily Artist Training Grounds submission for theme 25: Draw a pony drawing.

This was the product of a bad pun and my imagination crossing a line. To elaborate, the bad pun of an opponent drawing blood and my imagination pondering how the arbitrary scars I added to scarred Twilight came to be. To put it frankly: my muse is a bit of a bitch and I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. I debated whether or not I really wanted to post this one, but that would simply be avoiding the issue. My drawing skills are such that even though the drawing is a single detailed panel, the drawing isn’t as gruesome as it could have been. This is also not the most gruesome fanart I have seen and I’m pretty sure some people would see this as pretty mild by comparison. But for me, the thing is, this was personal: I was drawing it, which made it ten times worse. I actually felt sick to myself while drawing and I think that emotion transferred itself into Twilight’s expression. Anyway, this is a type of graphical style I am unlikely to revisit in the future.

Part 2
This was my Equestria Daily Artist Training Grounds submission for theme 27: Draw a pony in a dungeon in the place it was banished to.

By now I had decided that I needed to get over myself and continue with the narration I planned out. I decided to leave the rest of the potentially grimdark finale to the failed Nightmare Moon fight as a quick blurb in text so that I could cross back into Dragonball Z/Sailor Moon/etc. level of “everyone’s made of iron, so that huge blast of energy leaves just a scratch” type of combat physics. This one was overall a lot more texty than usual, but I wanted to do it as more of a flashback told after the fact type of deal. I’m kind of unhappy with how the debris turned out in the second drawing, but otherwise I thought this turned out quite nicely. I was also happy to be able to retcon Dashie’s line to scarred Twilight (first seen in Twilight vs Twilight part 5) to not include 20% cooler.

This is my third submission to the DA Artist Training Grounds group’s third weekly theme: draw a pony under the effects of poison joke (pollen causes silly effects rather than being deadly). I was a little shorter on time tonight, so this is a quick less than an hour sketch (and it really should have been sooner, but I was sucking pretty hard at doing the wings for some reason). This is my second time drawing Scootaloo and the first time was long enough ago that I forgot that her tail’s a bit of a pain in that if the proportions aren’t just so, it starts to look really weird. Anyway, a second Cutie Mark Crusader victim has been claimed and now every time Scootaloo tries to fangasm over Dashie, she ends up dissing her idol! The horror! The horror!

Only 8 panels today! I’m getting better at not crowding the page. XD

Anyway, this is my second submission for the Deviant Art ATG third weekly theme: draw a pony under the effects of Poison Joke (for the uninitiated, it’s a plant whose pollen causes weird joke-like effects instead of being deadly).

I actually had to draw a few pieces of background here (gasp!), so here’s to the third time I’ve drawn some background for the comic pages! Anyway, not a whole lot of dialogue this time around, for a change. Lots of action and I think I’m getting better at portraying it. Those who have seen episode 24 may pick up on a little something extra. 😛

Nothing too tough here, just a lot of pony as usual. I’m definitely getting neater when I draw fast, though, so I’m happy with that.

This is my last minute on a whim submission for the DA Artist Training Grounds week 3 bonus theme: draw Phoe in a Gala dress. For anyone not in the know, Phoe was the one organizing the original 30 themes and galleries for the original Equestria Daily Artist Training Grounds.

This is something I really wish I had time to colour, but I decided to do it on a whim when there was about 90 minutes before the deadline. I’m not really sure what a good Gala dress looks like, so the goal for me was to make something resembling a pony dress and then make it as ornate as I could possibly manage in the allotted time. I think I just ended up making something very large, but simple. I went for a very soft, cloud type of look wherever I could. I’m a big fan of sashes with large ornate bows, so I threw one of those in there too. I added the… uh, whatever the transparent cloth in the front would be called because the dresses in the show tended to shy away from putting stuff there and I wondered how it might look. Aside from that, it’s backless in order to allow her wings freedom of movement. I wanted to do something fancier with the hair, like maybe braid the long part, but I couldn’t get it figured out and didn’t think continuing down that path would be a good use of time, so I left her hair pretty close to the way it’s normally depicted. I thought about a tiara or something like that, but I didn’t really know how I’d fit it in. I also knew I wanted to add an earring, but had no idea what design I was going for. The flowers are totally improvised and I’m actually pretty happy with how the earring turned out.

UPDATE:
Wow, colouring this was a real learning experience for me. There was a ton of trace work to be done, since even though I didn’t sketch out anything ridiculously extravagent, the dress was still large and detailed. I also spent a lot of time debating over colours. The main part of the dress being teal was about the only thing I was certain about from the get go. I even had to adjust Phoe’s colours. However, doing fashion on a whim seems to work on for me, because my first choice for the time: silver, went pretty well with the teal. So much that I decided to use silver as my secondary colour for just about everything on the dress. I had to do several takes on Phoe herself, though. A white coat is almost as bad as all the black coat stuff I’ve been doing lately. While it doesn’t eat the eye lashes, it does blend into the sides of the whites of the eyes that are exposed, making things look weird. I then swapped to an offwhite with a blue tint, but that ended up making her look kind of sickly. I tried a yellow tint next, which gave it a very light cream colour that I thought was pretty nice and ended up sticking with it. The hair took an extra try because the first time I picked a pink that was way too bright. I almost went with pink irises, but decided I liked the interpretations with the blues eyes better. And for something a little different, I coloured the earring to match her eyes. Oh and the background is lifted wholesale from The Best Night Ever.