Origins of AJ's Hat

"Moar hat, pwease?"

I had this idea for a long time, but didn't start until now because I wanted to make it look relatively nice.

Please comment and bash (constructively) as much as you can. The more I know what's wrong, the more I can learn from it.

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Since people have been commenting on AJ's nose and mouth:
I've gotten a couple of comments basically saying that either AJ's nose or mouth is too humany (in a nutshell).

I did a little bit of research, and from baby cakes (which is really the only episode where we see an extended amount of baby ponies), that's basically the way the mouth is. The nose, on the other hand (or hoof if you like) is different; it's less "humany", and more like the older ponys' muzzles. However, when looking at pictures of filly Applejack, the nose is more human, and the mouth is more integrated in the muzzle; it connects to the nose at the top, not separated like I drew. I guess what happened, is I combined the two because I drew the original Applejack picture based on filly AJ, but I went and kind of looked at how the mouth worked off of baby cakes. And this was the result. So, I guess technically, I wasn't really wrong, the show was inconsistent, and I happened to pick the two humany elements.

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What I Learned This Time Around

1. I have terrible spatial intelligence and visual memory. I have trouble envisioning something and drawing it just from my head. Hence, drawing things at different angles while still making it look the same is really hard. That's probably why AJ's hat was so annoying since it appears in quite a few panels, but at different angles, and I didn't have very many reference pics to go off of because the hat isn't shown very often except in it's standard position on top of AJ's head. I like getting reference pictures to see how things look in a certain pose, drawing based off of those, then changing and fixing it until I get what I originally wanted. I usually end up changing it so much that it looks nothing like the reference pictures (which is good because otherwise, it would kind of be like copying), but it's easier for me to start with something and figure out how to change it to look better than to make something just appear straight from my head. This could just be because I'm still kind of new at drawing, and it's just something that I have to work at and will get better with over time. Maybe as I practice, I'll begin to notice patterns, how to make something look like it's supposed to at a certain angle etc. Hopefully, that's the case.

2. I have to practice shading a lot more. I don't really know exactly where to put shadows; I just kind of look at it and see if it looks right and kind of guess based on where I imagine the light's coming from. On a positive note, shading makes everything look a lot better.

3. Like always, be more organized with layers. I was pretty good this time around, but sort of lost it towards the end.