<3

I'm happy with how this turned out.
Much more complex than anything I've drawn before.

The idea to make this group picture wasn't planned to coincide with the show's end earlier this month, but it is quite a fitting picture for it.
MLP FiM has made a big impact in my life, and I am very glad it did. But it doesn't stop here.
I will continue to enjoy that universe for many years, and create much more art of it.
Thanks MLP, for all you've given me. I'm forever grateful. <3

And thank you too, for viewing my art!

This would've taken a lot longer without the help from some residents of the MLPDrawingSchool Discord server, so thanks to them as well.
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[Artist's log] (Just my thoughts and explanation on this picture, you don't need to read all this.)

A while back an idea suddenly came to me for a group picture, so I roughly sketched it in a nearby notepad.
Then weeks later I found myself sitting down to put my full focus on creating a finished picture of that sketch.
After I did the sketches for all the characters, I started to try making them all look like they all fit together into one universal perspective.
This is when things started to get harder.

I realised that I'd never really paid attention to perspective before now. None of my finished works had ever included more than one character, so I hadn't needed to think about how to believably place multiple into the same scene until this picture.
I'd already set a goal for myself to finish this within two weeks, assuming that would be just enough time.
Getting the perspective right took one week, and I was still at the sketch layer stage.

The following week I put even more time in each day as I started on the lineart. Usually I spend far too long with a picture getting it as neat and tidy as possible. Pixel perfect sometimes. It drains my energy and enthusiasm and despite wanting to have things look as good as possible, I decided that for this picture I should not fixate on making it perfect, but just "good enough". This goes mainly for the lineart but it could also apply to the entire thing.
Therefore.. I managed to get all the lineart done in a much faster time than usual. Afterwards I realised that despite it not being up to my regular standard, it still looked fine to me. Which was quite uplifting. Helped me to learn that I really don't have to obsess over it to get a good result.

Shading next. I'm getting better but I still need to learn more and get more experience. The same goes for lighting.
Speaking of lighting.. this was my first time drawing a magical glow and I think it turned out nice. This part didn't take up that much time, although I'm sure I can get faster at shading.

Finally, before calling it done I put a simple background behind the characters. I wasn't going to at first but I figured that even a simple background is better than no background.

Thought I'd actually get it finished in two weeks, but the final parts took a bit longer than I expected.
Also since I put much more time and effort into drawing for the second week, it exhausted me and the following week was much less productive as a result.
Technically it's been almost 4 weeks since I started, but due to that and other things I'm going to say this took almost 3 weeks.

A picture with one character can take me about 5 days to finish. Here I've created a picture with 7 characters, jumped in at the deep end with perspective (by learning it while trying to use it in a completed picture) and added a magic effect for the first time. I'm a little surprised how quick this was made.


Overall, I'm happy with how this turned out and eager to continue to learn and create more art of MLP.
Oh and I'll try not to leave large gaps of time between posts moving forward.