This image marks the first time I've done something that's quite familiar to MLP fan artists: vectoring. The image you see above is the first time I've brought a character pic to completion as a vector image. While I've digitally inked other pics with Inkscape. I've always left the coloring to a more conventional application. What prompted this was a two-year-old con sketch that I decided to color, but needed a character resized. The "problem" was that the character was already inked with a brush, showing a wide variety of line weights. Tracing it the way I had been doing would have made too much of a contrast in inking styles between the two characters, so I elected to trace the outline of every brush stroke. As imposing a task as it sounds, it actually progressed fairly quickly. I was actually having fun with it. The character can now be upscaled and fit back into the original with no loss of quality. Seeing as the process went so well, I tried it on one of my FA:U sketches and this time, kept going till I had a color image.

The thing about coloring in Inkscape, besides keeping your colors on a seperate layer, is that all your flood fills won't perfectly fill all the enclosed areas. The fills are actually vector shapes that you'll need to tweak so their borders fit behind the ink lines. The program tries to fit these shapes around any lines intruding into the enclosed area, but since the inks are on another layer, sometimes one just has to edit the shape so it passes under these lines rather than butt up against them. I devoted some time fighting with Inkscape's method of producing gradient fills on Cynthia's hair here, but didn't have the patience to shade the rest of her that way once I got the process working. The only involvement of my raster editor, Micrografx Picture Publisher was to add attribution text and my logo (on reflection, I could have done those in Inkscape too) then output a smaller JPG than Inkscape's PNG bitmap, which at 177K was a little larger than I like for web posting.

Pencil on bristol, inked and colored in Inkscape. Original SVG file: 979K

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Original description of sketch version, now moved to scraps:
I did a number of "complete" sketches at FA:U 5. Unfortunately none were commissions. I seem to get no action at this particular con. On the other hand, I did get a number of "for me" pics done.

This image of Cynthia was a speed test I undertook when the announcement came that there was one hour left in the Friday edition of the Dealer's Den (the Artist's Alley, housed within the 'Den, closes at the same time). The lineart took 30 minutes, and the shading, another 20. If you're looking for a relatively quick commission from me, online or at a con, this is the kind of artwork you might specify. Inking over this sort of shading makes only a trivial difference in delivery time, should you desire.

The title refers to the use of a number of contrivances employed on the shortest of my characters to exaggerate her height. First, we have the very short shorts (I erred a little in not making them low-rise). Then come the high-heeled thigh boots. As a color pic, expect these boots to be colored shiny pink, as I took the inspiration from a scene at the 2:40 mark in this video preview. It's not clear at this point in time whether I'm going to have Cynthia depicted going "deep, deeper, deepest", but this is what she'd wear if she did.

This pic will be moved to scraps once the color version is posted. I don't expect there to be a backdrop unless I cobble up a generic one to stick behind this and the upcoming pieces.

Pencil on bristol, minor cleanup and rotation in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10