Pedantia

A couple of days ago, my friend Dana posted a picture of her ponysona.

“This is cute and I should draw this,” I thought to myself. So the next day, I did. She liked it and made a closeup of it her Twitter icon, so I’m happy.

It is unlikely I will draw Pedantia again any time soon but as always, I’m ready to do so quickly since I followed my usual habit of making a bunch of Graphic Styles with sensible names. This slightly sped up doing this drawing, and if I need to draw her again then I can just grab those styles out of this file and very quickly start making shapes.

I am especially happy with the “freckle” style. It’s a starfield scatter brush I made ages ago, with the parameters drastically altered to stay close to the path I draw, then some effects applied to make the perfect little circles into slightly-blotchy shapes that mimic both the look of “dots created by Dana tapping her stylus on her drawing tablet” and of “small irregular spots of increased melanin”.

Overall this took about an hour’s work in Illustrator.