My First Commission: Cloudhammer

A while back surprised me with a message asking if I do commissions. Having never done one before, I was a little nervous, but said I'd give it a shot. It feels weird to get paid for a pony picture.

Anyway, he wanted a cover image for his fan fiction, "In Duty's Name." It's an adventure story about a royal guard captain (the guy in the picture, obviously) traveling with the Mane Six and Zecora to the zebra homeland for reasons I probably shouldn't say here, so I don't give away too much of the story for anyone who wants to read it.

For a single character, this took a surprisingly long time to make. We went through quite a few revisions, first for corrections to his customizations to the royal guard look, then for posture tweaks. Then after the character was done, I made several different background settings he came up with, but none of them ended up quite fitting the idea he had in mind. Personally I think the first background I made looked best, visually, and I think I did a better job on the shading for that one, but it wasn't quite right thematically. So in the end, I ended up just pasting it over a slightly tweaked screenshot of Canterlot on its mountain.

This has actually been done for quite a while, but for some reason I felt slightly hesitant to upload it here, even though he said it was fine if I did. Still, in the event anyone wanted to use this for something, you ought to ask him first.

I'm honestly not 100% satisfied with how it turned out, but I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I'm not certain the shading looks right, especially the bit on his front leg compared to the rest. Still, this was only like my 2nd ever attempt at regular shading, so mistakes wouldn't be shocking. I'm also hesitant to upload a picture with a screenshot background into my gallery, but it's the version he ended up using, so yeah. I could have gone to the effort of vectorizing the entire city, but there wouldn't have been much point to that. Maybe I should categorize this differently due to that background, but eh, the important part's was a vector a least.