Squiggle-Butt's Day at the Spa

For 's contest to depict Rho in Ponyville.  

One of the goals of the contest was to push yourself, which is the reason I decided to enter. I decided to make myself work on trouble areas that I tend to avoid: backgrounds, odd poses, shading, and hair shine.
I'm happy with my background complexity, it was created by piecing together various show shots of the spa (it is in quite a few episodes, they have so many angles you could make a full model almost). I am also happy with the manes, I looked at various pieces and came up with a lighting method that I enjoy and will begin using in the future. As for shading, Maybe I should switch to cell shading or full gradients; this inbetween of using brush strokes is awkward and often doesn't show up well once I zoom out. As for the poses, I still need to figure out foreshortening.  

I had a lot of fun, and it was very fulfilling to work on improving. I'd like to thank Vulpessentia for hosting this contest. 


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For those of you wondering, I began calling greek letters "squiggles" after one too many homework assignments using them. I can't be bothered to remember if that squiggle is a Zeta or a Xi (seriously, look at them) while doing thermo or whatnot. If the problem only has one greek letter, it's a squiggle as far as I am concerned. 

No-line version of the piece: vulpixelcomments.deviantart.co…. I am still deciding which style I prefer.