Brony Mecha For The Win!

I recently talked about a special commission I was doing for a charity raffle, and while that raffle just closed the other night I still have pics to share!  You may recall that the last shot of the Celestia Mk. III was looking just about done right?



Turns out that the general consensus was that it needed more punch to it.  I went back and added in some more details.  The difference is astonishing:





So how did I end up thinking that top pic was done?  My original intent was to paint the mecha up AS the ponies themselves.  If you've seen pictures of the new My Little Pony you'd see that the characters have a primary color with one or two secondary colors.  With that in mind I went ahead and tried a minimalist look, which as you can see above didn't work so well.  Stylized was the way to go, and that's exactly what I kept in mind as I painted up the Luna mecha (which I call Brony 2):





Now that looks sharp!  I was really happy with how Brony 2 turned out.  I pretty much got the colors just the way I envisioned them, which isn't always a thing that occurs.  I'm sure you've noticed that there's a couple of symbols on each.  All the symbols were done free hand.  The Solar Empire symbol on the Celestia Mk. III looked like it would be the more difficult of the two from a theory perspective, but after painting both it turns out that the Lunar Empire symbol was the more difficult one.  I have no rhyme or reason for why as both symbols were equally complex, but I can say I spent twice the amount of time on the Lunar Empire symbol.  I feel that both turned out reasonably well, and this was a bit more challenging than my normal freehand, so yay for advancing my skills!

The raffle overall was a success, having raised a little more over its goal.  Congratulations to Erin and to Squeeky!