[Art] My Little Player-Character
MLPC: Unicorn Wizard
A while back, on my last business trip, I doodled a few "pony adventurers" while at the airport and on the plane, and had the paper sitting in my computer bag for a while. I was setting up a "new" scanner, and had to scan something to test it, so I figured I might as well scan in the drawing. Plus, hey, Koogrr came to visit (yay!) while on his trip to the States, and was showing a bunch of MLP-inspired videos to me and Gwendel, so it seemed only appropriate.
I realize the pose for this one is pretty much the same as my Crystal Unicorn drawing from just a bit ago, but it was the first in line, so I traced it in Illustrator on a break, did some quick coloring, and came up with this. I had several frustrations again with trying to get Illustrator to do what I want it to (Why must so many functions be handled with the SAME TOOL, based on where I happen to click, and in what order, and whether the object was selected before I clicked there, etc., etc.?) and I found myself waxing nostalgic for, of all things, the old CorelDRAW and Fontographer vector graphics interfaces. (There's something to be said for being able to deliberately select a tool to let the computer know that I'm going to manipulate the entire object, or JUST a single point at a time, rather than having the computer "guess" - wrongly - all the time. Plus, with this high-resolution screen, it's hard for me to land the stylus on EXACTLY the right pixel at times.)
Here's what I have so far, and I have a few other pencil sketches I might try to convert to Illustrator, of other "MLPCs" - a knight, rogue, priest, minstrel, valkyrie, hunter (it's a mystery how he uses that bow!) ... plus some NPC types, such as the "mysterious stranger" (wearing a cloak), and the zombie pony. I was thinking about perhaps turning these into figure flats at some stage, making some slight color variants, and pony-type variants (e.g., with or without horn or wings). It's not a high-priority task, however, so it could be a while.
To minimize the problem with accidentally selecting/redrawing objects underneath, I used far more layers this time around than with the Crystal Unicorn drawing. To get the shading effects, I just used the pencil tool and created light grey shapes that I then set to "Multiply" on the transparency control. This probably isn't the best way, since it will "multiply" the outlines just as surely as it'll darken the solid fill areas, but it was quick, and it made the character look a little less "flat" than my earlier pony illustration attempts.