Greetings. This was the pic that I found to most stand out from today's Drawfriend on Equestria Daily, and I wanted to provide some feedback.



Every so often, I come across pictures accompanied by the same feeling I get when I look at a perfectly drawn circle. Everything just looks as it should, as if it were drawn by a machine rather than a human. However, while a machine drawing can be imitated by an artist, it cannot be perfectly replicated, and one can always find the human variability after looking closely enough.



I'm a big fan of character portraits, particularly ones involving only one character on display. While dual-character portraits offer the chance for contrast and duality, a single character focuses the message of the picture and creates something of a visual case study of the character in question. Starlight's alter ego here has the body posture of a model. Not like a supermodel, but more like the kind of model one hangs clothes on to see how they look. She won't be winning any awards for interesting pose, but the value is held together by a strong silhouette, and the angle provides a non-linear line of action when combined with her quadrupedal stance. Personality-wise, I don't think I can say much about her from her pose and expression alone, though there are things I could read from her costume. However, since the costume design was taken straight from the show, I won't speak on that aspect other than to say you did a good job recreating it. Your color choice does well to hold the picture together, and your color palette easily passes the grayscale test as a result.



With no obvious light source, you adopted a subtle style of shading, only really using shadows to create a sense of depth. On the one hand, the effect does wonders for creating that illusion of realism, particularly with the glasses and the way the clothes hang on the body. On the other hand, with the background so monotone, it's difficult to say how the shading actually fits here. The way the shadows fall would suggest a light source coming from her front, but the void of grayness she's trapped in doesn't support the idea. Naturally the picture could be taken to the next level by plopping her down into an appropriately colored landscape, though if simplicity is your aim, I imagine a mild gradient would be in order at the very least to suggest some kind of light to contrast the darkness.



As a drawing, the form of this piece is immaculate. The curves of the ear, head, body, legs, clothing, and tail are all quite impressive, and the shading technique you used looks natural by itself. The shape of her lower mane looks the least refined due to the somewhat dull shape combined with a small coloration problem. There's a lack of contrast between the outer part of the hair and the inner that steals away some of that sense of depth. The eyes are a little mismatched in proportion as well, though I do like the style of them.



This is a simple and stylish picture that would be terrific to represent Snowfall in a Dungeons and Dragons book for MLP-based adventures. I would call your new coloring methods a success and encourage further experimentation with them. Make the most!