Owner: Lunafea
Gender/Species: Female/Unicorn
Name suggestion(s): Hummingbird Hustle
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For my shipping grid adoptables :)
For this one I was asked to make a female unicorn with the suggested name "Hummingbird Hustle", who has shiny alicorn hair
So, since I have the name Hummingbird to work with, I unsuprisingly decide to see if I can work that isnto the design itself. Now, hummingbirds are stereotypically very colorful, so it shouldn't be all that hard to incorporate Dash in the design. But Blueblood is a bit more difficult. I looked through different species, and many do have brown and white feathers, but not really bright golden (that I could find at least). So I decided to give her the colorful hummingbird colors in mainly her hair, so she could inherit the coat and blue eyes from her dad. I shifted the coat a bit more towards cream/gold as well, so better tie to Blueblood's color-scheme. Using the hummingbird colors in the mane also works well, since I'm gonna give her shiny hair, and hummingbird feathers are strikingly iridescent.
For this I didn't base on a particulat species, just using some common/striking colors found on various hummingbirds. Green/aqua iridescent seemed very common in mane species, so I wanted to inlude that. And just looking at images of hummingbirds I found so many of them were of Anna's hummingbird, it seems to be a very popular species for photographers. I don't blame them, that pink is gorgeus. So, I added pink as well. Lastly, I added some blue -it's not the most common, but it made a nice transition between the green and pink. I thought about adding more colors, to really make her rainbow-y, but decided against it; I was gonna use color gradients here, and that was gonna add more to it automatically.
For the body, I went with a small and thin look -hummingbirds are known for being quick/really fast wing flapping and being tiny. So it would make sense that this character is small and kinda hyper. Zipping around fast, even if she can't fly like her mom. (It's also a reference to just how many calories a hummingbird has to eat per hour to not die from starvation. Their metabolism is crazy)
I decided to give her a short and wild manestyle, as I thought it looked nice with the smaller frame, and it made sense if the character was a bit hyper for her to have a windswept look to her. The tail I let be longer, and I also gave her these long ribbons tied to it. Some hummingbird species have really interesitng tails; really long tails, or just a few long feathers sticking out, with interesting shapes. So the tail here references that a bit. Another reason I made the mane shorter; from what I can see, hummingbirds tend to not have extravagant crests as much as fancy tail-feathers, so her mane is short while her tail is long and with ribbons.
Said ribbons I made golden actually, as I thought it looked nice and tied back to Blueblood's color-scheme. As for the actual mane colors -the gradients I decided to go with were just yellowgreen→bluegreen, aqua→blue and orange→pink, nothing that had too many in-between colors from start to finish. It makes them look interesting, while not being so colorful that it becomes too much to have both color gradients and multicolored stripes. And some sparkles, gotta have sparkles.
For the mark I decided to go for a hummingbird, to noone's suprise. It's not any specific hummingbird species, just the general shape of one, colored with the same gradients as the mane. I decided to give it a lightning-trail, to both indicate speed and to hint to Dash's mark. I thought I might be done… but decided on just a few more details I thought were fun. Technically. she is a princess, even if I have portrayed her a bit more as Dash rather than Blueblood here. So since she's not really fitting the royal/noble stereotype of the show, I gave the hummingbird a crown and a more cheeky expression with its tongue out. =P (They're on separate layers, just tell me if you want the mark without them and it's no problem ) I just thought it looked cute and fun
And that was all I had to say about this design I think. Thank you so much for the donation, and I hope that you like her!