I'm very glad that you like the color. At first I was really uncertain what approach I wanted to take with the color. If I had to pick a single word to describe the final intention, it would be "ambient". It's also lovely that you like the facial expressions so much. I tried to make them communicate as much emotion and intent as possible. Not that through their faces, but the overall body language. Everything about the pair is in contrast. Twilight is very drawn in to herself, with her ears folded down and her tail curled up in a protective fashion. Her posture is bad and her expression is uncertain. There is also the contrast in their mane's and tails, with Twilight being rather unkempt and frazzled. Twilight even has less color depth than Smile Twilight.



As for the ears and muzzle, that's more or less what I've settled on as my pony style. I didn't want to just reproduce the show style. Plus, my overall approach of very delicate linework seemed to work better with something like this. It also came about as a result of trying to think about how they would look in a more three dimensional, "naturalistic" state. I'm still tweaking the overall appearance, but I feel pretty comfortable with this.