LOTG: Song Li's Story

"Legend of the Goddesses" headshots, segment 8: Song Li's story.

Main
1: The Old Gods
2: Discord's Story
3: Soledad's Story
4: Celestia and Luna's Story
5: Kolassa's Story
6: Early Years of Equestria
7: Okapiopteryx's Story

This one's a bit odd, the story of an alien dropping herself into a college environment, and then a war... this story was hard, because it's the most recent one chronologically and so it had to be the shortest, and yet I'd come up with so many characters and ideas... I had to learn compression.

Yao Xing
A glimpse at the male of Song Li's species, so a sorta-kinda preview of what Song Li herself looks like under the mask, at least in the broadest sense... where I got the inspiration for the species? Just tryin' to be alien and yet "pony" at the same time.

Tron
And now we come to "The Tines", the quartet of Song Li's closest friends. Designing deer as characters was one of the most fun parts of this story; deer have been added to canon as animals, not people, but I think I've caught a glimpse of some expanded universe stuff where they were a genuine civilized race? I dunno, I never let myself catch more than a glimpse of EU stuff.

Dustin
Again, design for these four was quite simple: just taking the real animal, which I know intimately well, and keeping it true to both itself and to the MLP aesthetic. The exception was Tron, who was more stylized, but for most of the others, I was quite strict. I had a struggle with drawing this particular headshot: no matter how hard I tried, he ended up looking snooty instead of stoned. I still don't think I succeeded at the stoned look, which is remarkable, considering how easy it is to accidentally make a character look like they're on drugs...

Boomchukka
Best. Moose. Ever.

Airball
The four Tines were inspired by the taxidermy heads in my grandpa's basement. He's got a lot of deer on one wall, and another wall with an elk, moose, and caribou on it. That influence is most prevalent in the third horn in the middle of Airball's head: when I designed him I thought that all caribou had that, until my grandpa told me it was a unique feature of his caribou, causing me to work in a reference to it being a "freak horn", as he called it, in a later chapter.

Minister Giorgi
My fondness for wildlife of all sorts extends to creatures that aren't with us anymore, and I love integrating extinct species with their modern-day relatives. The Minister here, therefore, is a megaloceros. Very difficult to get his entire head into any shot, which is all part of his charm. The silver-blue coloration is to emphasize that there's somehow something different about him.

Jules
The deer folk of Westeroceros share a border with the griffons... at the end of Season 2, when I conceptualized nearly this entire continuity, we'd only seen two griffons: Gilda and Gustave. So I had some fun messing with what was different about the two of them to create a larger population. Jules, as an insane lieutenant who uses a lot of knives, took some design cues from Larxene of the Kingdom Hearts series.

General Brandeberg
For the redraw/redesign that most of these headshots went through, I looked up Gustave (and the other male griffons who had appeared in the background since then) and found that I didn't particularly like their design, but I tried it out anyway... and I found it actually worked. Outside his base appearance, I wanted him to have kind of a Ziggy Stardust vibe, a little bit of Shakespeare, some of the Gargoyles aesthetic, just totally eccentric - and the less-refined appearance of male griffons actually made that work better.

Grapple
Long ago, I drew lots of dragons who would exist in a big fantasy universe I was creating. One of them had ropy tendrils dangling off the corners of his mouth which I thought made him look really scary and dramatic. My grandma immediately giggled at the picture and thought it made him look Texan. That perception wound up being the basis of Grapple's characterization (though almost all of that was removed from the story 'cause there were already too many characters) and I didn't really change anything about the original "Texan" dragon's physical appearance when designing Grapple, just added more details to make him fit the MLP aesthetic. (And yes, the fact that I actually needed to make a character design more detailed to look like My Little Pony shows you just how little drawing skill I had before I forced myself to start doing my own MLP artwork.)