Rarity plot and tail practice

week #I, day #dunno: draw Rarity.

So I've decided this week will not just be “fight the laziness” week, but also anatomy week! Wherein I lern2 do shapes, because circles are hard and I hate them.


What we have here is Rarity's plot. I tried this angle on the ~Trixingno gift art sketch I did, and failed miserably, and in the chat today a lot of ponies were complaining about how complex Rarity's mane and tail were, so I decided to do two things here: practice plot, and show an example of why Rarity's tail is not, in fact, all that complicated.


First, the tail.

When completely colored, it's full of gradiants, extra lines, and is generally very complex–looking. Take all the extra floof away though, and you have this very basic set of arc segments. Those arc segments intersect at specific points, forming the tail.

If drawing her tail is hard for you, just ignore the overall shape and focus only on the arcs, one single line at a time.

Also, a note on anatomy: notice that the tailbase is a cirle or oval situated just above her rump. The tail comes out of the spine, not anywhere else.


Next, the plot.

This angle is sort of rare in the show, since usually we see the 45 degree turn style or straight–on view, so I used a ref of Twilight in that stance to see how it'd work, seeing as the last time I tried I failed all over the floor.

I think the extra line works in this case. Ideally, the perspective would be shifted so her back is facing us just a little more, and the extra line itself may need to be a bit shorter. My intent was to have her facing away from the camera, with her whole body using the same perspective as her back half, but the distance between her fore and rear legs, and the spacing of her forelegs in general, makes it look like her back half is facing away, but her front half is turning towards us slightly, like she's turning to her left to look at somepony.

The extra line then would most likely be better were she turned more away from us, but just a little. That's the perspective I was aiming for, but it didn't work out since I was depending too much on the refs.


Which brings us nicely to our next point! Refs.

I was drawing a floaty Rainbow Dash head when I noticed that I was trying to perfectly copy the ref. I'm not good enough to do that yet though, which is why all my anatomy and proportions have looked so odd.

I was wanting to practice plot anyways so I could redo ~Trixingno's pic, so I nabbed a ref last night and started studying it, intent on learning how and why the lines worked the way they do, instead of just copying them off the screen.

~FoxOFWar mentioned learning why lines work instead of just copying them earlier today too, so that pretty much made up my mind on choosing this to draw.

Anyway, I'm gonna see about trying to do less exact copying, and more using refs as referential material instead of things to trace, so that should be interesting at least.


All in all, I definitely want to at least try to finish this, since it's a good base to work from. Could practice getting the head right at least, though it'd likely end up ruining the whole picture.