This is a commission I recently completed for Sasta of their OC Reluctance. As you can probably tell Reluctance is a batpony. One of the interesting challenges of this piece deciding on what kind of armor to put her in. The client gave permission to put her in one of several different styles I've seen batponies wear in my Equestria dreamscape. In the end I took a common half-armor variant and adapted several elements from an earlier commission to this style.
The other major challenge was creating the feel of nighttime scene without having the entire picture turn to mud. One way I avoided that was by using my shading to define the shape and textures and distance of objects in the picture. For the sky I used all horizontal lines. The stonework was executed with mostly short, coarse vertical lines; where on Reluctance they I rendered her and her armor with smooth evenly spaced lines that helped define her against the sky.
The image size is roughly 9"x 12" on Strathmore vellum Bristol Board. I used a 0.5mm mechanical pencil with 2B and another with 4B lead to render it. Overall time from start to finish was roughly two and half hours.
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