One of Us ... One of Us ...

[rowyn]

The Mane Cast, originally uploaded by Lady Rowyn.

Maybe I should blame terrycloth, because he's the one who got me started watching the show, but no. I blame the_gneech for this one. I watched the Gneech Livestreaming the creation of his last ponypic, and watching someone else draw a pony made me realize what freakish little creatures these guys are. Their proportions are bizarre: their eyes take up about a third of the space on their faces, their foreheads are gigantic, they have these teeny button muzzles that are maybe half the size of one eye, and their bodies are only slighlty larger than their heads. No, really, if you take a typical image from the show, the distance from base of neck to top of head is almost as long as the distance from base of neck to bottom of foot. And yet, somehow, they're adorable anyway.

Since it's an animated kid's show, the characters are colored very simply as well as highly stylized, and it made me wonder how hard they are to draw. Finally, I decided to go ahead and try it.

Answer: DAMN HARD. I spent over two hours sketching them by staring at screenshot references and freehanding copies -- all of these sketches are copies of poses from the show. Copying an image, or working from life, is much easier for me than trying to draw from my head. But even with a reference right there, I struggled trying to make the copy look like the original. My sketch of Rainbow Dash looks like Twilight Sparkle to me and I don't even know why. @.@ Even knowing that the bodies are supposed to be tiny, I still drew them a little too large. It's just ... weird.

In theory, I don't think of fan art as the highest and best use of my creative energy. In practice, pretty much all the art I do is fan art, albeit usually for more obscure fandoms. So, I don't know, maybe I'll draw more ponies if the mood strikes me. I'm pretty sure that drawing ponies is what I did instead of playing more Star Wars: the Old Republic, not what I did instead of writing fiction, so what the heck. It's all good.

Comments

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

They're tough! It's crazy!

-TG

[rowyn]

*giggles at your choice of icons* I feel like I have the Twilight Sparkle seal of approval. n.n

They are a lot harder than they look, though!

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

I had the same problem back when I tried to draw Pokemon fanart. It looks very simple, but in reality it is a shape stripped down to its bare minimum and if you don't get the proportions right the art will always look off.

I think your drawings look really cute! I have only tried to draw a ferret in MLP style, not the actual ponies themselves, because the ponies do look very weird to me with their enormous heads and eyes.

[rowyn]

Yes, that's it exactly -- any little thing you get wrong messes with the whole image, because there's so few details to distract from the error.

I think your drawings look really cute!

Thanks! I'd like to be able to draw something that isn't a copy, but I don't think I'm there yet. Those eyes especially. @_@

I have only tried to draw a ferret in MLP style, not the actual ponies themselves, because the ponies do look very weird to me with their enormous heads and eyes.

Is your My Little Ferret online? I wanna see! n.n

I didn't like the look of the ponies that much the first time I saw them, but they seem to have grown on me.

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

Ferret is here! It's a drawing trying to mimic the style the ferrets in the show were drawn in. Not sure it's successful but I had fun doing it anyway. :D

[rowyn]

D'aww, that's great! Does remind me of the animals from the show. n.n

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Hee. I haven't tried drawing a pony yet. I really ought to get a tablet so I could just freehand something, no muss, no taking a picture and emailing it to myself.

[rowyn]

How is it that you do not have a tablet? They're way cheaper than a dining-room table and you'd probably get more use from one. n.n

It is very nice to just sketch something and not have to scan it or photograph it and then try to clean the photograph up. I have an old Wacom Intuos tablet, not one of the fancy 'monitors that you draw on' like a Cintiq. Even the Intuos is surprisingly natural to sketch with, though. Using Artrage especially, it's in some ways nicer than using a sketchbook, because I can 'pin' references in Artrage and have them right next to the sketch I'm working on, so I can easily see both my reference and sketch at the same time.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

It looks like you eventually got them right -- they look like the characters even without the colors and stuff.

Also, giggle at Flutter-yay. n.n

[rowyn]

Yeah, the characters all have distinctive mane styles, so you can distinguish them even without colors. As far as I can tell, they all have the same features -- eye size, muzzle shape, etc. -- with a few exceptions (Rarity has five eye lashes instead of three, Applejack has freckles). I think -- I'm not sure -- they may all have different *expressions*, though. Applejack looking mad doesn't have the same expression, exactly, as Fluttershy looking mad. That may be a function of the characters having a range of emotions that's typical for each one, and that the type of 'angry' that Fluttershy gets is more stern, while Applejack is more simmering. It's hard to quantify, but I think you can almost recognize the characters by expression, and that's why my Dash looks like Twilight -- I didn't get her expression right. Even though she has lots of different expressions, the one I drew isn't one of them.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I need to get back to doing my "Pony Adventurers" pictures. I did some pencil sketch roughs, and I've been working on "tracing" them in Adobe Illustrator to get that clean vector-art look of the cartoon. (Plus, it'd make it awfully easy to do quick color changes for some "figure flat" options, if I get that far with putting together a layered pdf.)

Anyway, nice sketches!

[rowyn]

The Pony Adventurers are great. :) I see the appeal of doing vector art instead of photoshop for these guys, but vector art is still way too steep a learning curve for me. Eeeeee.