Yes, I have been watching Balloon-Quilava streaming, and it has given me a fair amount of inspiration. One of the biggest things is making and saving custom brushes. Before,when I made a drawing, I'd always have to figure out how I made an effect before. I didn't know that one could make a bank of tools to use. Now, I sketch with the #2 pencil, ink with my official inking pen, and shade with my official shading tool! I also have an official grass pulling tool, that also works for blending the sky and making my water effect. Probably will come in handy to make fur too...

In short, I'm learning to use Corel Photo-Paint much more completely!

Inking has really changed for me. I don't have a Vector tool in Corel to make the smooth curves I like, so I have to go a section at a time and make copious use of the undo button...

To be honest, only six of my last fourteen drawings were made completely from scratch before posting them. Half have recycled elements, and five have been sitting in the archives of my computer for over a year. I just got around to finishing them / posting them.

But, the new toolset I have definitely makes the process far more painless! =^^=

That's where I have to give you credit, real media is a lot less forgiving than what I'm doing here, and making it work takes a lot of practice! =^^=

Now that I think about it, The entire bouncy bounce series with Espeon and Umbreon were done with MyPaint. The pony and absol pictures were done in Corel. So you can see the tools differ there...

The background and shading just looks fabulous here! I wish to know how you did it... :3

thank you kindly! It was actually rather simple! =^^=

The water is a gradient fill, I blended it with my "Grass puller" tool. Basically, a smear brush with multiple points. I swipe horizontally with longer random strokes.

I did the same thing with the sand / dirt on the banks, only this time following the direction of the shore. Base color was laid with the chalk tool, but I probably could have used any brush, filling in random earth tones. The black you see is actually my ink lines that "bled" past the mask. This is really obvious on the tree trunk. Again, I colored that with a few shades of brown, and then blended that color with my grass puller, following the direction of the bark.

Finally, for the grass, I colored a few shades of green and raked them up with my grass puller tool. Short strokes for stuff further away, longer strokes in the foreground. I also used long strokes for the reeds the ponies are hiding behind. The big black blob is again my ink for the sole shrub that appeared on that side of the water. I was tempted to blend that in a little better, but it seemed to make a nice frame, so I left it.

If you could see what I did, it is all pretty simple, but it yielded some decent results, thank you, again! =^^=

If you have a digital art program, look into what kind of smears they have in the toolbox. Start experimenting!

Hmmmm, it looks cool and does seem simple. That is quite nice. :3