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Wheee! I'm finally here again with another nice shaded drawing. This time it's Barb! Yes, I've always liked Spike genderswapped (yes, yes, and aged up), so I've wanted to draw her for AAAAGES. Years, even. I did do it once before, in 2016:

And I was rather pleased with how Barb turned out at the time, but... eh. I've been wanting to do her justice, so I... just finally got around to it I guess, with a very different take on her compared to my 2016 rendition. I just... suddenly felt like drawing her chubby. I honestly can't remember why that even occurred to me, but I love the results so much that it's made me totally rethink my headcanon of the dynamic between Barb and Elusive (and others). She looks so soft! I went for a bit more of a cartoony style than I usually do for anthros, and I really like how it turned out. I think I'm finally learning the balance between cartoon and realism with anatomy that I've been trying to find for so long (see also my Randomons drawings ). I think the colours and shading turned out really nicely, and the shading works well to accentuate her curves.

With the lighting, I intentionally called back to another, even older anthropone drawing:

I still enjoy the aesthetic of the dim, dusty library, with the beams of light trickling through the window and the dust motes flittering about. That pic is probably still some of my best environment lighting. So what's the difference here? Well, it isn't mostly brown, for one thing. It's also the library in Twilight's castle as seen from season 5 onwards, which had come out at the time, but I wouldn't see it for another 4 years. (And I partly did this instead of the Golden Oaks library again because unlike in 2016, we're now living in a post-season 8 world, and so if I was going to age Barb up I'd have to add wings, and if I was going to have Barb/Spike with wings then... well, it would just feel silly not to be in the show-accurate library! ) But perhaps most pertinently, I actually drew it myself!! Yes, no more stock vectors for me. And of course, the figure sitting in front of that backdrop is much more pleasing to the eye. (No, not just in that way.)

This was also an attempt to be a wee bit looser with the sketch, which I did in Krita on my laptop (as it seems I do with most drawings now) before moving to Photoshop for the rest. As a result, she feels nice and expressive, but I would have liked to make her head just a little bit smaller. By the time I figured that out (this took me 3 days to draw), I'd already done most of the shading so it was like, oh well.

Here's the sketch, which I think turned out super cute as well! Also, an early sketch. I really struggled with the face up to this point; on the right is the main sketch as it was, and I just could not figure out why it looked wrong. So I traced the face off my reference image of Spike (top left) and added the Barb elements to try and see what essence I was missing. Then I redrew it in the style I wanted (bottom left) and that worked a lot better, so I sewed that head onto the body I had and worked from there.

You know, it's funny. This is the 4th MLP artwork I've made since coming back from that big break from MLP, but still since coming back I haven't drawn a single pony. It's all been dragons, draconequus...es?, and hippogriffs. How curious.

(...Wait a minute... there's something funny about some of those books...)

Description

Wheee! I'm finally here again with another nice shaded drawing. This time it's Barb! Yes, I've always liked Spike genderswapped (yes, yes, and aged up), so I've wanted to draw her for AAAAGES. Years, even. I did do it once before, in 2016:

And I was rather pleased with how Barb turned out at the time, but... eh. I've been wanting to do her justice, so I... just finally got around to it I guess, with a very different take on her compared to my 2016 rendition. I just... suddenly felt like drawing her chubby. I honestly can't remember why that even occurred to me, but I love the results so much that it's made me totally rethink my headcanon of the dynamic between Barb and Elusive (and others). She looks so soft! I went for a bit more of a cartoony style than I usually do for anthros, and I really like how it turned out. I think I'm finally learning the balance between cartoon and realism with anatomy that I've been trying to find for so long (see also my Randomons drawings ). I think the colours and shading turned out really nicely, and the shading works well to accentuate her curves.

With the lighting, I intentionally called back to another, even older anthropone drawing:

I still enjoy the aesthetic of the dim, dusty library, with the beams of light trickling through the window and the dust motes flittering about. That pic is probably still some of my best environment lighting. So what's the difference here? Well, it isn't mostly brown, for one thing. It's also the library in Twilight's castle as seen from season 5 onwards, which had come out at the time, but I wouldn't see it for another 4 years. (And I partly did this instead of the Golden Oaks library again because unlike in 2016, we're now living in a post-season 8 world, and so if I was going to age Barb up I'd have to add wings, and if I was going to have Barb/Spike with wings then... well, it would just feel silly not to be in the show-accurate library! ) But perhaps most pertinently, I actually drew it myself!! Yes, no more stock vectors for me. And of course, the figure sitting in front of that backdrop is much more pleasing to the eye. (No, not just in that way.)

This was also an attempt to be a wee bit looser with the sketch, which I did in Krita on my laptop (as it seems I do with most drawings now) before moving to Photoshop for the rest. As a result, she feels nice and expressive, but I would have liked to make her head just a little bit smaller. By the time I figured that out (this took me 3 days to draw), I'd already done most of the shading so it was like, oh well.

Here's the sketch, which I think turned out super cute as well! Also, an early sketch. I really struggled with the face up to this point; on the right is the main sketch as it was, and I just could not figure out why it looked wrong. So I traced the face off my reference image of Spike (top left) and added the Barb elements to try and see what essence I was missing. Then I redrew it in the style I wanted (bottom left) and that worked a lot better, so I sewed that head onto the body I had and worked from there.

You know, it's funny. This is the 4th MLP artwork I've made since coming back from that big break from MLP, but still since coming back I haven't drawn a single pony. It's all been dragons, draconequus...es?, and hippogriffs. How curious.

(...Wait a minute... there's something funny about some of those books...)