Some ponies playing poker, because why should dogs have all of the fun?

Anyway, I bowed to pressure and set up a Deviant Account webpage for this fan art stuff. I think most everything there has been shared here, but you're welcome to take a look if you're interested:

http://harwicks-art.deviantart.com/gallery/

They're admittedly fun to draw, and here's the thing... If I do some Parodyverse artwork then some 7-30 people see it (judging by the page counters) and I get 4-7 comments about it.

If I draw some ponies with my free time, it would seem that tens or hundreds of thousands of people see it. In the 24 hours since I first posted that poker picture to my gallery, it has been visited over 18,500 times, the larger version of it has been downloaded over 3000 times, 1700+ people have added it to their own Deviant Art pages and 237 people have left me comments on it.

In order to even find their way to my gallery page, people would have had to have seen the picture elsewhere on the internet and clicked through the credit link back to my gallery page. I have trouble imagining that even 10% of the people who have seen the picture go so far as to do that. It was on the front page of the main fan site Equestria Daily, which sees a few million hits a week. It's been reposted to a bunch of message boards, is being passed around social networking sites like Tumblr (and likely others which Google doesn't search) and generally popping up in all sorts of odd places online.

So it's being put in front of a lot of eyes, which is good for my ego. Since I already have a paying job drawing stuff, feedback and fan response is the best thing any hobby drawing can offer me. Pony fans are a huge, ravenous artistic community. There's an insane amount of original music, animation, video games, artwork and stories based on ponies, seemingly just because they're likeable and, ultimately, why the hell not.

As a result, I seem to turn out a new pony drawing once a month. Don't know how long that will last, but I'm enjoying myself.

Just sayin'









But seriously, that's great you get so much feedback on your Pony art. You're a talented dude who deserves all the accolades you get.

Well done!

I can't say I really like the style of the ponies though (not specifically your versions, but the overall style in the genre). I'd prefer to see AJDiller ponies in his own style. It is a perfect homage to the well known picture, however. Good job!

And you should sign your work yes. Particularly as it is being passed all over the internets. There are two pony rumps in either corner just waiting to be branded with an AJDiller brand.

Next up I'd like to request Al B. Harper about to be eaten by a Cthulhu Mythos monster. Other EEE members optional.

Al B.

I see this as largely sitting halfway between the show and what I tend towards... Keeping very true to the design while going with a completely different shading and rendering style. It's my job to match set styles on most projects, and I actually enjoy the challenge of it (provided I like the style of the original artwork.)

In general, though, I like the fact that those ponies are nothing but faces, really. No hands, no feet, no clothes... Just come up with expressions, throw some hair on top of the head and you're good.





You know what, I think this is the first one of these that I've forgotten to sign. I like to keep my signature unobtrusive, and most of the time people would never notice it. I only ever bother to add it just to be able to point it out to someone if I need to say "no, seriously... I drew that."

On a tangent, I like that Deviant Art has a very simple system in place for claiming copyright of the work you post. You check off the boxes you want to reserve the rights for (commercial use, reproduction, whatever) and when your work is posted they attach the appropriate Creative Commons copyright to it. All of my stuff in that gallery is free to anyone to use non-commercially, though they can't claim they created it themselves.





Start writing the story, then we'll talk.

Thanks, I appreciate that. Of course, drawing existing television characters is fine and all, but the community-created Parodyverse characters still beat them.

...and that picture is absolutely gorgeous. So where next? The Last Pony Supper? Pony Gothic? Pony Descending A Staircase #2?

It's been done. I was thinking something more challenging, like a pony version of a Piet Mondrian or Jackson Pollock.

The writers of the show are obviously comic book fans. Aside from the show creator doing Supergirl/Batgirl shorts for Cartoon Network, there are a bunch of obvious nods to geek-centric things like Spider-man, Batman, Hulk, Star Wars, Star Trek to more obscure stuff like The Big Lebowski. So it's a safe bet that many of them have been reading comics over the last two decades.

The show is definitely written to be more than all-ages friendly, especially the first season which was made under Educational/Informational standards that outlined stricter censorship and more ridged story structure with the moral outright recapped at the end of each episode.

And yet the older fans find a ton of subtext in the show, and I don't think it's (just) their obsessive nature filling in things that aren't there. Just as Kurt Busiek started a trend of reexamining classic silver age stories and injecting more depth and modern storytelling styles into the spaces between panels in the somewhat simpler narratives of the 60's, so too are the writers of these simple happy pony tales leaving openings with hints of bigger, more complex stories than they'll ever get into on the show itself. Only instead of injecting new interpretations into older stories, they're preloading the hints of such things into scripts as they're written.

I think it's a shift that has come from the influence of the years of pop-culture remaking childhood favorites into entertainment for an increasingly older and more sophisticated age-range. I think the writers see where the openings for more complex interpretations would be, and that the older geek audience has been trained to see those hints as well.

And so, to my little cousin and nephew, Pinkie Pie is a zany, lovable, "crazy" character while myself and a large percentage of older fans see Pinkie as funny and lovable but tinged with a bit of sadness because she's not just zany... she's literally insane, and her constantly upbeat attitude is something of a coping mechanism.

The thing of it is, they know better than to ever take away the lovable, zany character the kids see and love in favor of a darker, more complex version. The hint is there for adults; a little peek behind the curtain before it's closed up and never mentioned again. Comics seem to have forgotten how to toe that line, and have robbed too many characters and stories of their innocence in the process.