The Artist at Work

I've been wanting to do a (best pony) Rarity drawing for a while now, and I was also thinking on doing something akin to a "glamour" or "publicity photo" style of a picture of her as well. Thus, here's Rarity at work in her shop on some garment or another that she can use for personal advertising on wares sold at Carousel Boutique.

Couple of tidbits:
- I couldn't think of a pony pun on the sewing machine make, so I just made it into a Singer.
- Originally there were no clothes rack on the left of the picture as my initial sketch didn't seem to need anything there. It was only while colouring I felt the background was too bare and unbalanced, so I drew an additional filler element that I slotted in there to better fix this issue.
- My initial idea was to make this into a black and white picture for that extra bit of class, but in the end I didn't want to loose the colours (I'll post the B&W version in the scraps folder).
- I intentionally used more muted, darker colours instead of bright pinks, purples, etc. of the series to gain a more elegant feel.
- The fabric in front of Rarity was a real pain. It's my fault for not planning it out very well and fudging the whole thing as I went along. The finished patterns actually came about when I added the magic wand tool and a paint bucket on the already heavily muddled colour adjustments, creating some strips of lighter blue that I finally ended up just running with as a motif. It's still quite the mess, but at least it doesn't make me want to stab my eyes out in how bad it looked earlier (nor have I any idea what Rarity's even supposed to be actually making here).
- The layout of the picture is almost exactly how I imagined it several months back. Knowing me, that almost never happens.

Black and White version: [link]
Followup picture: [link]

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic belongs to Hasbro. Original Characters created by Lauren Faust.