Custom MLP: Alicorn Twilight

This was a rush job for the same friend that I made Hedy Lamare for. At the time of posting this, I have yet to see the episode of MLP:FiM where Twilight turns into an alicorn.

I started with a basic Twilight model. Since this was a rush job, I couldn't remove and re-root the hair, which also meant that I couldn't repaint the entire body. That meant that I had to paint the wings to match the existing color as closely as possible.

I removed the head, and pulled the tail out through the body. I made armatures for the wings out of heavy stainless steel wire and heavy aluminum flashing. I sculpted the wings on top of that, mostly following the tutorial found here: [link] . One thing that this taught me is that it's easier to sculpt things that look complicated than things that look simple. These wings look much better than the wings on Luna, but I had not practiced in between sculpting them. Though, my technique and methods did also improve in that time, and I am confident that I could now do a better job on Luna too.

I normally just use five colors of acrylic paint: white, black, blue, red, and yellow. Everything else is usually just mixed from these colors. Unfortunately, I could not get the exact color of the plastic used for Twilight (though Hasbro couldn't either, Twilight's head is made of plastic of a slightly different color than her body); if I got the correct hue, the saturation was always too low. So, I had to buy the closest few colors of purple paint that I could find, and was able to mix a decent match from that.

I bought a very cheap beginner's airbrush for this project. I've wanted one for some time, just to get an even coat on the bodies of ponies. It took a little bit for me to figure out how to get it to work satisfactorily, but it did work quite well in the end. It would've been a nightmare to have to paint those wings with a brush, and I think the fine details would likely have gotten filled in.

I'm very happy with how this pony turned out; I think it's probably my most impressive looking one. After sculpting those wings, I want to try sculpting a pony completely from scratch next.