Alright, since nopony seems to be doing it, then I guess I’ll give you some of the art advice you need. Now don’t take this as gospel, because I’m still a novice artist.
You can see my art here:
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Before we begin, there’s some things I want to mention.
I recommend you do the drawing tutorials at Draw A Box, it takes you from the basics of drawing all the way up to the human figure. Just click the following link and go to the lessons tab:
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I recommend you get some kind of drawing tablet if you haven’t already. It is impossible to do any kind of good art with a mouse, you need to be able to use the full motion of your wrist, arm, and shoulder while drawing and a mouse just constrains you to using your wrist.
A lot of artist recommend the intuous
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I however use a Microsoft surface pro 3
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The kind of tablet you get really depends upon what is comfortable for you. And if you’re underage or can’t afford a tablet, save your money and get one. I swear to Luna your art will improve 10-fold once you get a tablet.
ok, moving on to your art.
First and foremost, your anatomy needs a lot of improvement.
When it comes to drawing anything,be it ponies, humans, animals, or any organic figure, you need to start by drawing a circle with a cross hair or some kind of shape and crosshair to build from. It should look something like this:
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The reason for this is because the circle you draw if for the character’s head. The size of the circle determines the size of the head, and later the sizer of the entire character, and the cross hairs help you determine what direction the character is facing and where all their facial features will go.
you can see from this tutorial different mlp heads in different directions with facial features drawn from a circle with a cross hair
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When it comes to drawing human anatomy, there is this thing called “7 and a half heads” which basically means an adult human is 7 and a half heads tall. So if you want to draw a human you’d take the circle you just drew for the head and take 7 and a half of those to get your height.
This picture shows head measurements for humans of different ages:
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When it comes to pony, they are 3 heads tall. So you’d take the circle you drew for your pony head and take 3 of those to get your height.
You can see what I mean from this picture:
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Now here comes the tricky part. I;m still having issues figuring it out so bear with me.
You can see from the last picture that a pony’s body is made of circles too. The tricky part is that even though the torso section is a head tall, the body circle can be anywhere from 1/2 of a head to 2/3 of a head, depending one your style. MLP’s show style is typically 2/3 heads tall to give that chubby torso while 1/2 will make it look tall and lanky like the above picture. Also depending on your style, the back circle should be slightly taller than the front circle in the torso, and can be either overlapping with the front circle or spaced a bit from it. Show style has them overlapping, but you don’t have to if you want to draw in a different style.
Hooves are probably the trickiest part. Hooves and muzzles are what I have the hardest time with because they have this nice easy line then it has this sudden sharp curve. Your instinct it to draw a sharp point but you need to train yourself to do an organic curve. That’s there the first lesson in draw a box comes in. It will help you get used to using your whole arm while drawing. But back to hooves.
What I know about hooves is you draw these almost skeletal like lines where you want your hooves to go. They are basically there to show you where the joints are on the hooves, the areas where it bends, so you can know how to draw your curves for the hooves.
You can see these links for a visual
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I can’t say much beyond that, because I myself am still learning.
Now, onto facial features.
Going back to this image
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Like I said before, the cross hair helps you determine where all your facial features are going to go. Notice how in cell 2-1 the muzzle is at the dead center of the cross hair and the lips are below it for a frontal view. The eyes are spaced off to the sides from the middle point (and depending on your style will lie somewhere between the middle or bottom of the eye). The ears wrap around the head and usually converge on the horizontal line.
One thing you’ll need to practice is drawing the facial features and head at different angles. It’s kinda difficult because you’re treating 2-dimensional space as a 3-dimensional object, but it’s all about practice.
As for manes, a good rule of thumb is to draw the mane as one continuous line behind their ear/ If you look at this pictures and follow the lines for their mane, they seem to continue behind their ear.
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That should give you enough to start with. I’m not going to go into coloring, shading, perspective, or anything like that yet because you need to practice the basics. Also too because I’m getting tired and this is already a lot of information for you to process.
Basically just take all the information I gave you, watch some speed paints and sketches on youtube, and practice practice practice!
Hope this helps.