I couldn't touch the sun

I swear, ever since they added the "more like this" feature, deviantArt has become a black hole, on the level of TVTropes. I set out to close down those couple dA tabs I have left open, and while I'm deciding whether to save one picture, I see some cool thumbs in the corner...

3 hours later, I have 72 dA tabs open, a dozen more Celestias in my favorites list, and it's friggin' 2AM. It's downright dangerous!

So, having been freed from the intense gravitational pull of deviantArt by Firefox crashing, (surprise ) I go to bed and watch the newest Lindsey Stirling video. (yeah, going to bed doesn't mean cessation of web browsing when you have a tablet ) Having spent the last several hours inundating myself with Celestia pictures, I get the idea that it be really cool to show her in a desert for some reason. All that bright washed out desert footage getting to me I guess. I also figure it'd be neatly ironic for her to be shielding her eyes from the bright sun. Finally, I noticed that most pictures of Celestia out on dA make kind of a big deal out of her mane. In my previous depictions of her it was just kinda a thing that had to be there for there to be Celestia in the picture. Anyway, I figure this is a good opportunity to indulge my complete lack of hair-rendering ability, and try to make something mildly interesting out of the Best Mane. I've gone with an actual "hair" look, (by which I mean I just do the same diffuse lighting I do on everything else and make it look like a big hair shaped clay blob) with some desert wind, rather than the ethereal portal to the stars look, even though that's what I actually imagine it as, because it wouldn't make much sense for it to be blowing about in the wind.

Anyway, I sketched this out then and there, and promptly went to sleep. Then I spent pretty much all of today rendering it, since it's Saturday, and I was scheduled to go to a large gathering filled with people I didn't know and where I could sit around inconspicuously drawing instead of being interesting.

This is an experiment in a lot of ways. Keeping in mind this was all done in sketchbook as usual, I tried something new with the metal. It kinda worked. I'm not sure how I feel about this piece. Maybe it's not "done" yet, but I've spent a whole day on it, so I'm putting up what I have.