Moonshine’s Body

Part 1 here

Since we got that bait prepped (and thanks for your help with that!), I thought we’d see what’s happening with the paintwork. She’s not the only project I have on the go right now, but we’ll stick with her for now.

Sooo…

After another little trip to the space heater spa, the little blue body got… adjusted.

I have my reasons.

Next thing was to work on her symbol. Normally I don’t show people my mistakes or the things that I’m going to revise, but let’s be honest, we all need a re-do once in a while! I had a sketch of what I wanted, and this was pretty close to it, but it didn’t work for me. There’s just not enough definition and contrast, and I knew I could do better:

So after adding some white paint and breaking out the India ink pens one more time (they’re a godsend, I swear!), We’ve got his, which I’m much happier with:

Sharper, more detailed and eye-catching.

Now she needs eyes. These gave me a lot of trouble; G4 ponies have much less-defined eye areas than older ponies have, and it means that if you’re not careful, your white paint will bleed everywhere. This took three attempts:

Impressive, I know. You can see that once I was happy with the shape of the eyes, I sketched in where I want the iris, pupil and eyelids to go. I don’t want her face to be symmetrical, but I want it to look right. Next the colour goes on (I usually do a dark colour and then add lines of a lighter colour to fill in the iris), and I painted over the eyelids in white. You can see the first line of blue, which will be where the upper eyelids come down to.

And here’s the eyes, almost finished. Looking at them now I’m thinking about going back and thickening up the eyelashes, either by adding more or making the existing lashes thicker, but I’m going to leave it for now and see how I feel after she’s got hair. She’s got some lovely sparkly eyeshadow on… but the eyes aren’t quite finished.

The last step is one that I love and fear, because I’m no expert at adding highlights. They make such a difference in the liveliness of the eyes, though!

I’ll go back and darken up the pupils again; I sealed the eyes before I added the highlights because I knew I’d want a few chances to wipe them off and start again, but you can still see some whitish smudges.

So there we go, she’s painted! When I’ve got time, she’ll get her hair. I’m just using what I had on-hand, leftovers from another project that I think will suit her. Stay tuned!