Crashing through the vault of heaven with my determination.

           During last semester there was an idea that had stricken me as I was driving back to Indy after a weekend up in Muncie, make a crossover of two of my favorite animated series, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. The thought had struck me that many of the characters from Gurren Lagann had personality traits almost entirely in line with characters from My Little Pony, both canon and fanon. When I’d gotten back to my apartment I feverishly wrote down the characters that were most like each other from the respective series and realized that I could do an entire cast substitution with ponies in a giant mecha anime. Driving from that I spent many all-nighters screen-capping, drawing and coloring a scene from Gurren Lagann substituted with ponies and eventually this was created, signed, and finished.

            Originally I had thought I lacked the artistic ability to make such a thing a reality, merely postulating with friends how cool the crossover would be and hoping someone else in the vast world of the internet would do it. It wasn’t until that drive home I’d decided I’d take the idea upon myself to do. Despite family emergencies and crappy pencils, I doodled it out on paper over a sleepless weekend and posted my results on the internet, and got a decent review, and thought myself done. Later on I had gotten the urge to dust off my tablet and go add some color and fix all the minor line errors that require finer erasers than I have on hand.

            When I was working on the emblem during break time in a class, a rather eccentric gentleman of 35 looked at my progress so far and commented that my design looked “Damn sexy.” I later learned that this man had done a brief stint drawing for Marvel Comics, so regardless of how little he was to them, that meant a lot to me. When I was finished fully I was getting comments from everyone who’d seen me feverishly coloring over those previous weeks and even thought they may have liked only one or even none of the shows I put together, they did complement me on the effort I poured into it. In the end, I suppose, it was an exercise in getting back into drawing as a whole and learning the various ins and outs of being an artsy type like know full well most people won’t notice those tiny details that you mess up and getting the same amount of congrats overall.

            Seeing as I had not imagined making that project two moths earlier when it was proposed, I have no idea how it may have turned out in the hands of more capable artists. The first limitation was the fact I don’t like making things from scratch on computers, I like having pencil and paper to work on and the freedom of workspace that it allows for, since I’m a fidgety individual I don’t like sitting in a chair for several hours while my ideas come to life. Ever tried spinning a laptop around for a better view on what you’re drawing? Though so. As you look at that image I linked you to, keep in mind I’ve never drawn a mecha that well, if ever, in my life. I like straight lines, but I can’t draw them to save my life, and I never had a sense for where all the little doodlebopers would go on the robot. Over that weekend that I had physically drawn it, my brother had had his first (and hopefully last) seizure, leaving that night to be somewhat unproductive due to the trauma of the whole thing. Next limitation came from the fact I had never really gotten used to Photoshop and my tablet, yet I felt I could do so much more with what I had made, I later manned up and did it anyway once I found a scanner.  And lastly, I did the unthinkable, I posted it on the internet hoping it would do well. Granted the My Little Pony board on Reddit is self-advertised as the friendliest place next to it’s stoner board, it’s very nerve wracking when you don’t know if you posted at the ideal time to get it noticed, nor if you’re going to get anything more constructive than “I leik dis art.”

     In the very least, I hope me and the electronics can get over out various issues, because I feel that if we can set out differences aside we can create much good art. I've expressed this to my computer while simultaneously testing out my new tablet.