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Description
As a bit of a gag, I tried depicting the titular character from Kevin L. Anderson's "The Crystal Unicorn" adventure (for Faery's Tale RPG) in cartoony "MLP" style, by request for his daughter, Cerys.

I drew this in Adobe Illustrator, which was a little unfamiliar for me. I've worked with vector graphics before, but it has usually been in the context of making "dingbat" fonts and such, via CorelDRAW and the old Macromedia Fontographer. Even then, it would typically be a case of me drawing something and inking it on paper, scanning it in, applying CorelTRACE so the computer could guess at vectors to follow the lines, and then a painstaking process of removing extraneous vector points & Bézier curves to make the lines nice and smooth.

Here, the process is a little less painful, thanks to a Wacom tablet (I adore Intuos!), so I can "draw" in Illustrator ... but even then, I "cheated" by making a rough sketch in Photoshop first (so I could scribble and erase to my heart's content), and then imported it into Illustrator as a background layer, so I could then trace over it, and clean up the errant points caused by an unsteady hand.

I've tried drawing things "MLP" style in Photoshop before (including a few MLP-themed pony figure-flats for someone else's "My Little Pony / Call of Cthulhu" crossover adventure for Ravencon). Still, nothing beats ACTUAL vectors for trying to replicate the vector-art look of the MLP style.

The proportions aren't quite right for a "typical" MLP character; the default, fairly "squat" look didn't look quite right to my eye, so I ended up using the more elongated proportions of "Princess Luna" for a guideline.

Description
As a bit of a gag, I tried depicting the titular character from Kevin L. Anderson's "The Crystal Unicorn" adventure (for Faery's Tale RPG) in cartoony "MLP" style, by request for his daughter, Cerys.

I drew this in Adobe Illustrator, which was a little unfamiliar for me. I've worked with vector graphics before, but it has usually been in the context of making "dingbat" fonts and such, via CorelDRAW and the old Macromedia Fontographer. Even then, it would typically be a case of me drawing something and inking it on paper, scanning it in, applying CorelTRACE so the computer could guess at vectors to follow the lines, and then a painstaking process of removing extraneous vector points & Bézier curves to make the lines nice and smooth.

Here, the process is a little less painful, thanks to a Wacom tablet (I adore Intuos!), so I can "draw" in Illustrator ... but even then, I "cheated" by making a rough sketch in Photoshop first (so I could scribble and erase to my heart's content), and then imported it into Illustrator as a background layer, so I could then trace over it, and clean up the errant points caused by an unsteady hand.

I've tried drawing things "MLP" style in Photoshop before (including a few MLP-themed pony figure-flats for someone else's "My Little Pony / Call of Cthulhu" crossover adventure for Ravencon). Still, nothing beats ACTUAL vectors for trying to replicate the vector-art look of the MLP style.

The proportions aren't quite right for a "typical" MLP character; the default, fairly "squat" look didn't look quite right to my eye, so I ended up using the more elongated proportions of "Princess Luna" for a guideline.