It Was Ponies

This piece is... very different, for me. Pretty much all of my digital painting has been done with a strict separation of light and color. Meaning, I'll either do a grayscale painting and color it afterwards, or fill in colors and then shade on a separate lighting layer or layers. Partly this comes from my lighting knowledge having most of it's roots in 3D graphics and partly because just choosing colors seems incredibly arbitrary to me.

Anyway I had gotten kind of frustrated with how monochromatic this piece came out, using that method, and decided to try something different. So, this was done entirely in color, so to speak. Basically the digital equivalent of traditional painting. I'm not sure what I think of the result. It's definitely more interesting, and uses a wider range of colors than usual, but I still feel like it's a bit dull and the character doesn't blend well with the environment, (though... that mane, who knows how it actually interacts with light) giving it a distinctively amateurish look. This was also the first time I ever used textured brushes. Mostly that was because doing the grass was getting incredibly tedious one blade at a time.

As for the scene itself. Well. I recently read Past Sins, which is apparently among the most well known stories in this fandom, and one of the few of that set also generally considered to be of some quality. I had some problems with it, but I did generally enjoy the story, and I really liked Nyx as a character, so I found an excuse to draw her. Anyway, for the lazy, this is Nyx, the partial magical manifestation of Nightmare Moon, after raising the sun, having some personal revelations in the shade (sort of) of a willow tree. I considered actually sneaking Twist in there somewhere, but I'm lazy.