Auto-imported from (2407459)

Owner: bluet0ast
Gender/Species: Female/Alicorn
Name suggestion(s): Twilight Aura, Andromeda, Pyxis, Prismatic Spirit

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For my shipping grid adoptables

Okay, so I was asked to make a female alicorn in her early to mid-teens, who had a more pastell-y coloration, with a white marking on her face. I was specifially asked to reference the buyers headcanons regarding Twilight and Rainbow when designing her. A "soft spoken kid who just wants to be a perfect princess but oop that's kinda stressful for a kid."

Now, so far that all was perfectly alright. I wasn't sure how to do a pastel color scheme, since my own tend to be either focused on a dark-light contrast, or grey-saturation contrast. I do a lot of contrast. But I'm not as used to just pastels, so I decided to wait with the colors and start with the body shape first this time.

Since she's a teen, I tried to give her a body similar to my other teens in my nextgen 'verse, with thinner legs and bigger head and eyes. I say this, because the show's ponies are so babyfied that if you didn't know my usual style, I can see how she'd look adult-like here. It's not the intention, she's supposed to be about fifteen.

She's got a curved horn, cloven hooves and a leonine tail because that is what both Twilight and the other alicorns have in their headcanon. They also usually give their wings "thumbs", which I wasn't sure if I should replicate or not, as it's just a stylistic feature of the artstyle. But decided to try, because why not. After trying I can say that, it does not look nearly as good in my style as in theirs.

For the mane, I thought about and tried different braids (because braided rainbow colored hair looks really good), but I couldn't make it give the impression I was going for (stressed out, yet trying to make it look nice). Then I thought -what if she tried to mimic Twilight's manestyle, yet didn't have the time/energy to actually maintain it at Twilight's 90 angle precision? So her tail has grown out and curled slightly at the end, and isn't evenly long anymore. Her bangs have also grown out unevenly, and is flopping into her eyes a bit. She also has some parts sticking up due to being shorter than the rest. (Also, a visual shorthand to show that the mane is slightly messy). She used to have slightly longer mane on the side of her bangs, but it got so long she looped it back and clipped behind her ears (Katara-esque). And the rest of her mane is just slightly uneven, slightly messy, and with some bits that keep falling on the wrong side of her neck.

I then started to think about the color-scheme. As I said, I'm not as comfortable with pastels as I'd like, so I wasn't able to just have an idea as quickly as I usually do. So while I was doing that (cough procrastinating on doing that cough) I thought about the markings. See, their style is a lot more realistic in terms of fur than I -variations in fur color, white socks and masks that aren't completely round and symmetrical, you get the gist. So I tried to mimic that somewhat? To start with, they wanted a facial marking like their Twilight, so I added that. I thought it would be more interesting if it wasn't just a plain mask, so I also added a star forehead marking. Before you say anything, that is something horses often have, though not as symmetrical as this probably. I then connected the two, because I thought it looked good.

Their Twilight also have socks, so I decided to give her that as well. But as I was making them, I looked up what irl socks look like for inspiration, and was reminded of how much I like the way it look when some of the legs have white markings and some don't, as it sometimes causes the hooves to be different colors (the hoof being light, as the white marking also affects its coloration). So I decided to add it here, just for fun =)

For the rest of the fur, I tried to make somewhat realistic darker and lighter portions -so darker towards the muzzle, ears and the legs, the tail is darker colored, and I added a dorstal stripe. I don't know horse coats, I just try to mimic what I see when I look up references.

…At this point I could not put it off any longer and had to start picking colors. Okay, so pastels. To start with, let's just give her a pastel version of Rainbow's mane, and see how that looks, and then tweak it from there. For the coat… Twilight has some recessive light grey from her mom I can use, which also works with Rainbow's blue. Oh, blue eyes would look pretty against the silver…

…ok, I'm gonna have to try that again, this time without just remaking uunicornicc 's Lucky Wish.

…

How… how do I do this again? Everything I tried looked either awful or like a ripoff.

And that's when I realised I was stuck. It's not just because I'm unused to pastels, it's because I sometimes get into a… headspace? Where I can't do something unless it fulfills X impossible criteria. So I have to leave it for a while, which in this case meant working on the other customs. (You'd be shocked how often I just leave laundry half-folded because I suddenly get stuck in a space where I can't allow any creases at all. And then come back some hours later and finish when I'm out of it)

When I came back to this, I decided to go with one of my old solutions for finding color-schemes I like, one which I haven't used in a while. I got one of my old chibi base sets things I made long ago (15 ponies on a page, each part of them on a different layer so I can just bucket tool them) and modified to match important parts of this design. And then I brute force ideas. Grab all the pastels, and slap em on, no erasing allowed. Looks awful? Just move onto the next blank slate and try something else. After a while, I picked the ones I liked and grabbed elements from them and slapped onto more blank slates. (I have 45 chibi pastel ponies on my computer now. I'm gonna be honest, I don't know what pastels are anymore, I've looked as them for too long. Is this even pastels I have here??) Until eventually I have an idea that is, not perfect, but in a direction I like.

So, the explanation why I chose what I chose. I wanted a rainbow-ish mane still, because I like manes with a lot of colors, and very few parents lend themselves to that as well as Rainbow. I didn't just want the color-wheel-like progression that Dash has though, that's one of the things that made her look so similar to other designs. But I liked the yellow to purple progression on one of my chibis though, as well as the light blue accents on some of the others. So I thought it'd look nice to add blue/aqua stripes like Twilight's to the purple bit: which yes, looked good and gave just a bit of variation from the usual rainbow. It was a bit too much details though, so I removed once instance from the mane, and just had it in the tail and bangs. I then tried to add gradients. I like gradients, I use them whenever I feel I can get away with them. In this case, their Twilight has a slight gradient from dark blue to purple in her mane, so I had my excuse. Except, in this one case. It doesn't look good. I try several versions, but nah. The non gradient just looks better to me here? I've been betrayed. I did add glitter, because that did look really good, and adhered to the headcanons of the other alicorns

For the coat I actually kept to the silver-blue of the original idea, but with a lot more contrast between the light and dark areas, so she's almost white on the lighter parts. It just looks good to have a neutral coat when the mane is so colorful.

For the wings, their Twilight has a gradient effect while Rainbow has rainbow feathers. I guess I did both? Orignally the bottom part of the wing would just be alternating light and darker blue, so that she'd inherit her wing coloration almost all from Dash. But just for fun, I tried to see if gradients were back on my side, and I thought it looked good enough that I decided to keep it. Also added some glitter to the feathers, because pretty.

Then for the eyes, I tried so many different colorful options, most of which looked… fine actually. Pefectly alright eyes, many of which were very nice. But I then tried to give her really dark eyes, just to see what it would look like. And gosh, I liked it. Twilight has dark purple eyes, so I can excuse this. Really dark purple which looks black unless you're up close. Pretty, and stands out against the grey and rainbow.

It also gave me an idea for a mark. I knew I wanted her to have a star, but I decided to make it black. Or, rather, so dark green and purple it looks black. With stars inside it, like it's a window to space. The star shape, I tried to make look like a combination of Twilight's star, and a compass rose. She's trying her best to be a princess, but under a lot of pressure from it, right? Wouldn't it be fun if her mark also represents guiding people, thus putting even more pressure on her to live up to that? (Well, fun for us, not for her). I also planned to add a sonic rainboob-looking circle around it -ties to Dash, looks even more compass-like, and looks a bit like a stellar corona. But then I tried to move its angle up just a bit, to make it look more 3D3. And realised it looked like somehting else a bit. So I angled it even more. Now, it's still supposed to be a sonic rainboom, …but also represents a crown. Put all the pressure on the child.

As for the names… if you follow the same headcanon as I, that Twilight is passed from mother to daughter in her family (Twilight Velvet → Twilight Sparkle), then something like "Twilight Aura" could work. It seems to almost just be me though, so that option isn't as serious as the others. If you want something space/astronomy related, then "Andromeda" is a fairly common yet very pretty name (and she was a princess, so bonus), and "Pyxis" is the name of a constellation of a compass (tying back to the mark). "Prismatic Spirit" ties back to rainbows again, and sounds like a compromise name Twilight and Dash would make.



That was a lot, but I think I'm done. Thank you so much for the donation, and I hope that you like her!!

Upvotes at import: 12 | Stars at import: 5
Posted previously at: 2020-07-25T10:06:11 | Posted previously by: Mildgyth