Misterfan

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

Your first drawing was really good. Its only faults were its roughness of line and pose, both of which are more than justified on a sketch. Since then... You've been creating your own proportions and anatomies for your ponies. That's fine if you want to make your own style, but a unique style alone doesn't justify praise for a drawing. You need to stick with the established pony style (the proportions, skeletal structure, and cheats), find another style, or refine your unique style into something more aesthetically pleasing. I WANT to give you better, more detailed, more useful criticism, but there's honestly not much I can say about your ponies because I don't know what you're trying to do. Metaphorically speaking, my criticism can't help you hit your target if your target isn't visible to me.

I finished the colouring. I'm sure there's more I could do to improve it, but I'd like to move on to a new drawing:

I've done a test colour: She's still missing her cutie mark and I'm not really happy with the shading, but I'm still blown away by how well this turned out.

I'm not sure I understand your meaning.

Please excuse any small errors you find. I'm not practiced enough to perfectly draw the ponies every time yet. This is the new reference I made for side views of pony heads: I'm not happy with the eye or the snout, but it shows how the heads are constructed, which is the important thing. And this is the new reference I made for side views of pony bodies: The head is 4mm, the chest is 2mm, and the flank is 3mm. The distance from the base of the skull to the center of the chest is 2mm. The distance from the center of the chest to the center of the flank is 4mm. In other words the head and chest are in a 2:1 ratio and the chest and flank are in a 2:3 ratio. I'll post the leg references when I finish them.

What I'm currently using is pretty naive and covered with notes so I can correct for mistakes I made when I started. I'll redo them tomorrow and scan them.

I did a fair amount of drawing, too. I have a page, which documents the proportions of the head, chest and flank, another, which documents the construction of the head, and several pages dedicated to the proportions of the legs and how they move. Having those as references speeds up my drawing time considerably, but they're imperfect. The hardest things to figure out were the front legs. Unlike real horses, the FIM ponies have extremely articulate shoulders, which sometimes "break" their anatomy. For example, take a look at this picture from the show of Bonbon (and Lyra) sitting: Bonbon's shoulder is sitting really far back and pretty high. It's not super noticeable because her neck is bent forward, so it's hard to understand its position on her body. The solution I figured out 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. Considering these aren't real horses I can accept their more flexible anatomy, although it took a while to figure out how it worked.

I've been a fan of the show since the beginning of the second season, but I haven't participated in the communities until now. A couple of days ago I saw an impressive speed paint, , which inspired me to try drawing some ponies. I took a ruler to some official art and figured the proportions and shapes of the ponies so I could draw them myself.Here's some line art of a Twilight I'm working on: I was surprised how easy it was to make the hooves look right with the pen tool. Drawing them by hand on pencil and paper is annoying. And because I hadn't used Photoshop in a long time I ended up with this after I tried to turn the path into a selection: I'll be colouring in the Twilight line art and hopefully I'll be doing some more ponies soon.