The White Snake

The snek just wants to be a friend but the purple one keeps screaming at him.

This art piece has been in the works quite a while. I think it still needs some polishing, but if I keep tweaking it, it's never going to be ready. So here it is!

I have no idea where to start when it comes to the story behind this picture. Let's just start with the fact that this is the first drawing I did completely without pen and paper. I bought Wacom Cintiq at the beginning of last December and soon after I got used to it, I started drawing this. So it only took... five months. Yeah, a lot has happened since then. I haven't had much spare time time in hands, so I've been drawing this whenever I can. Surprisingly, the picture hasn't changed a lot worse in my eyes during that time period. Sure, there are some anatomical things I'd do differently nowadays, but those are just minor things. Besides I drew Twilight's jaw four times all over again and the snake got completely overhauled just a couple of weeks ago, so I've been updating my handiwork every now and then.

This picture is full of experiments. I made so many new brushes and tried multiple new things with it and yet, I managed to keep layer count as low as 240! The only big major thing that still keeps bugging me is Twilight's coat. I wanted to give her a soft looking coat, but I never managed to make it look right. It either looked too detailed or not detailed enough. I'll get it right one day. I just have to keep experimenting.

The background was a tough one and I think it still needs some polishing. I can see it doesn't fit in quite like it should, but I'm not quite sure what is causing that. The mountains turned out to be my best ones yet, thanks to the new brush I created. The foreground grass was an absolute nightmare! I made it all over again at least five times. It's still missing that right kind of highlighting, but I never managed to make it look quite right. I even radically changed the actual background. My original plan was to draw the entire Ponyville next to the woods, but I had to tweak the perspective so much that I had to ditch that idea. I'm glad I did that, because it would have required so much time and the flow of the picture would have changed radically.

Even though the background was causing so much problems, the most difficult thing was the snake. I completely drew him all over again not too long time ago. One would think that snakes are easy to draw, but you know how it goes: The more you think about it, the more difficult it gets. At first I wanted to draw as realistic snake as I could, but at the end I decided to give him a pair of really long teeth. They just made him look a lot better. There were many other problems while I was drawing him, but I can sum it all up into one sentence: Fuck you scales.

In the end, I'm really happy how this one turned out. I actually managed to finish something! Too bad that while I was working on this, I managed to make at least four new sketches, which I want to turn into actual paintings. Sigh...

I hope you like it. Have a wonderful day!


EDIT: Removed the experimental yellow tint, which I forgot to take off before the final save. Now the colours shouldn't look washed out anymore.
EDIT 2: I Uploaded the full-sized A4 picture. Now you can zoom in quite a lot if you want to.

My Little Pony © Hasbro