Rainbow Dash

This is one of those things where you're just kind of sitting there like .......... when suddenly you burst from the shade with your pencil grenade and exclaim BY CELESTIA, I AM GOING TO DRAW. And you put on your super serious face, and by celestia, you draw.

And then you spend way more time than you initially planned and have no idea where the past three days went.

Seriously though, I totally leveled up while drawing this. Many things were learned! I will list them here, because that is what I do.


First of all, I learned that it's perfectly cool to have a project that takes longer than one drawing session. Even some of my more “complex” pieces of “art” were all done in a single session. This was about as spontaneous a thing as you can get though, so without a deadline or anything like that requiring that I get it done on time, I just kinda meandered along through it, adding and changing things basically at random.

For instance, originally I was just gonna be done with it, but then *Acceleron pointed out a greivous error. Now, I have this thing about changing lines more than I really have to — it's work, effort, and I have bad experiences with accidentally smudging the hay out paper when trying to erase darkened lines like that.

I did some practice faces off to the side first to see if I could even figure out how to make the muzzle look better, then worked up enough courage to erase the muzzle and try again. Thankfully, it went just fine. Turns out I'd been doing erasing wrong the whole time anyway, so I figured out how to do that correctly too. Hint: it helps to keep your eraser clean, and be firm when erasing.

I'm still not 100% convinced I got it right (*GiantMosquito's tips on concave curvature of the muzzlebridge, for one thing), but while correcting issues is one thing, going OCD over having the perfect lines is unhealthy. So I left it at that and moved on.


I also learned that you can do this cool thing called “making minor corrections.” It's where, instead of like just spamming lines everywhere like I do now, you go back after the linespam and add little tiny bits of graphite here and there to make everything look super extra special nice. It's literally nothing more than tons of small nudges here and there, but with all the minor adjustments, it makes the whole pic look really amazing afterward.

And on the note of linespam, I discovered that what they say about having to draw tons of awful drawings before you can get better is totally 100% true. ~Arcum89 introduced me to linespam a good while back, wherein you drop down multiple instances of the same line to form a single cohesive line, instead of doing just one, or feathering one out, etc. This is good because it keeps you moving, instead of focusing too much on one thing at a time. Double–effective when used in comination with thumbnailing.


The mane style was also something I decided to have fun with. I get a lot of inspiration from sketchy–style art (~mx55's “What does everypony do?” for instance was a majour inspiration here), due to how few lines are used to make interesting visuals and such. It's similar enough to how I do things that it's worth looking into, so I tried it out with the mane here, and I can honestly say it's probably the most fun I've ever made drawing a pony's mane.

One problem with self–teaching yourself to draw using canon material is you tend to try and stick to the prefab material — in this case, simplistic blobmanes. While it's good to have a base to work off of, it's really easy to forget that half the point of drawing is to do it the way you feel like doing, not just copypasting characters off the screen. ~FoxOFWar keeps reminding me of this, since it's pretty easy to forget sometimes.

Just having fun and dorking around with the mane here was great fun, and it finally clicked for me that, hey, I can do this whatever the heck way I want! It's the difference between intellectually knowing something, and really knowing something, you know?


Anyway, what I learned about how to have fun (don't laugh, it's tough to figure out when you're used to not having fun ) also applies to the area of coloring! As you can see, this pic is colored. But it wasn't always so! Originally, I just kind of dropped down a sketch on paper that happened to look really good compared to what I usually output, so I figured I'd darken it and be done with it. But no, that wasn't good enough.

Without any deadlines or outside motivation, I, entirely on my own, felt like doing more. That's happened only like a few times before, ever, so it's a completely new feeling to me basically. I went back and corrected a few issues, like the afforementioned muzzle glitch, some eye stuff, neckmane band count, etc. Sometime during then, I decided I wanted to color this.

AND SO I DID.

Except I don't have colored pencils or anything other than really old markers, so what I did was basically filltool Rainbow here with dark pencil shading, pop her into paint.net since I'm cheap, and color her in.

You can see the progression from linework to the filltooling, then finally the additive layer color mask on top, used to produce a fake colored pencil effect. It wasn't as hard as I figured it'd be, since mainly it was just slowly moving the brush around to add color in, but a few things took some effort to get right, like the eyelashes there, which I had to add in after the fact since I totally forgot them when actually drawing her. Whoops. Always something, right?


I made a couple other errors when drawing this too, not just the eyelashes. Again with the muzzle, I don't think it's as good as it could be, but I'm not really sure how I could make it much better, given the slight downward tilt of her head there. Her head in general also looks kind of slanted or squished vertically, which is actually a product of my terrible inability to start drawing in a good spot on the paper. See the top of the image there? That's the edge of the paper. I started with the muzzle, so that the whole thing managed to end up on the page without having to clip out of her mane or ears or anything is some nice luck.

I'm also not entirely certain her mouth is correct. I want to say it can be positioned or angled better, but I'm not really sure. *??* Who knows.

The last majour problem that really bugs me is the specular on her eyes. Normally I just throw it on there since I don't know how the math for specular reflections works, but I'm convinced I got it wrong here, and I didn't really think about it until after I had filled her in with pencils, so it was too late to go back and change at that point, baring more digital editing which I didn't care to muck with. Need to look into that.


Couple other things I feel like pointing out, which aren't issues but things of note, is that the expression is pretty bland, which is due to me not knowing how2face. Originally, Rainbow was gonna be bedroom eyes–ing, but then I liked how it looked as just sort of a smile, so I went with that instead. I don't have a whole lot of experience with making ponies look like they actually have emotions, so this is my first real serious foray into that.

Also, I am SO HAPPY with her ears. omg, you have no idea how much I completely suck at getting pony ears right. I was ECSTATIC to see how well this turned out, especially given how I didn't really put a whole lot of thought into it at the time. I mean it's not perfect by any measure, but it looks so much better than what I normally do (and really, so does the whole pic), that it's just really really inspiring to see that with actual practice, I can make something that doesn't look entirely hideous.


Now I just have to remember everything I learned. That's the hard part!

Anyway, so yes. This is Rainbow Dash. I like her, she's a nifty pony, so I drew her. Yay!