Mix-up at the Grand Galloping Gala

It’s been a while sense I redesigned my ponysona, and I think it was just about time for me to do just that. This time around I thought it was time that Mix-up should look dapper for an upcoming gala that I was imagining him to be invited. This was an interesting piece to work on, as I wanted to gauge how far my current digital art skills stand now, compared to the last three years that I have been practicing on it. My hope of this project was to trying to find a faster, more efficient, way to create smooth rendering curves on my character, in which that the brush strokes wouldn’t show off as much as they usually do and try to make it a more realistic feel of drawing.  I used several different methods to do this, as I tried to harmonize them together in which I had hadn’t managed to integrate them very successfully up until now. Even then, I think I could have done a better job at it, but at least it went a bit faster and cleaner than most this time.

 This took me about 20 hours to do, and the most difficult part was, as usual, the wings, which isn’t easy trying to align all of the feathers right to make it look good. This time around, I decided to go as much in detail in drawing out the figure, by starting with from a simple sketch and do a more detailed drawing over with layers. I haven’t done this method in a while, sense usually I immediately jumped into the coloring and start sculpting the shape without a detailed plan in mind on how I should go about it. It was fine for a while, and it is even encouraged by many of my sources, but I thought that I really needed to go back into the basics in drawing, and adding the colors after the line are was fully completed. I also wanted to restart using extensively the Selections Tool for the shadings all the colors, which helped a lot in saving time. For the clothing, I think I did a good job a representing the folding the fabric and the seams to give them a sense of the material to the viewers. The mane and tail has caused me some trouble, as I still have a lot of trouble rendering convincing long hair styles.

For the clothing, I decided to go with a brown tailcoat with gold trimming and red cuffs, a double breasted vest, red bow tie(as a nod to the red scarf he’s usually drawn with) and finally red sparts on the rear legs. For the extra touch of detail, and adding some ridiculousness, I added horseshoes to my OC , which I thought it was hilarious to me in my mind. All in all, I think he looks dashing for a social event. I did consider adding a top hat to him, but I felt he was better without it.

The background was the last thing to work on, again, which after finishing my ponysona, I did a quick sketch for the glass murals where fun to do for me. Surprisingly, after studying the images of the Canterlot Palace design in the show, I noticed that the architecture of the interior is rather simple, with luminous lighting and very spacious corridors. What stand out the most about the design that I notice are the numerous glass murals that peppered the walkways everywhere, which despite their simplicity add a lot the atmosphere to the place and my mind easily create its own narration to them, even if it doesn’t depict an actual story.

I drew Royal Cesar because I always loved his design despite the drab colors scheme that I felt there was a lot of charm and class to him. I loved drawing Cesar, a semi realistic design, strutting around with his head high like he owned the place like the typical snootiness the people write about the rich, noble, ponies of the show, always made me laugh.The Guards at the doors are actually flip copies of the same model. The scene itself was still fun to do. The mare with the near transparent green slick dress was fun to do and I think I managed to bring out her femininity. Doing the dress was somewhat difficult to find the compromise with showing the gradient of the folds of the dress and its transparency as the merging of layers always created weird results; I will have to find better methods to produce that sort of fabric effect.