Prepare to engage the enemy. (Patreon)

This is a commission for Bernard Doove  that I've been posting development art related to it for awhile. Well here's the finished piece. 

     Princess Twilight Sparkle combined pony/griffin strike force prepare to engage changelings force that have the capital of the Crystal Empire under siege. 

    It's funny how even after all these decades of doing this I can still discover things that I've never encountered before in a picture. For this piece Perspective was a major factor, and I spent a lot of time on this piece trying to get all the elements to feel as if they were in the same space.

    Originally for this piece, Twilight had this large arrowhead desk instead of the rather traditional desk strap mounted to Observation Deck. I designed the desk and laid it out separately on its own piece of paper.  However I had carefully transferred all the perspective lines to assure everything was in the right perspective and size scale. 

    However when I transferred the desk to the main working surface everything suddenly looked out of whack. At first I thought I'd screwed up on the perspective either in the main drawing or when I was creating the desk. After many frustrating hours of double checking and hair pulling I came to realization that I had accidentally created one of those M. C. Escher style optical illusions. When the desk was there it made the deck look completely funky. So no matter how much I liked the desk it had to go. So that's how that very traditional desk ended up on the deck. 

   The piece is 13.5"x 26" it is primarily colored pencil, with a little marker pen, technical pen, and white gouache on Strathmore 500 series vellum finish Bristol Board.