I've always thought that trees of this general perspective would call for a trunk of a very exaggerated size. Hey... that canopy is gonna be covering massive parts of screens or is ridiculously small otherwise.

Sorry for uploading a 30-min painting here 

I'd prefer to post more quality stuff but I'm trying to treat pixel joint as a place for more original material and less fan material. Plus... I got stuff to do.

I have never really painted traditionally, at least not at this level where anything I've done in high school isn't really much.

I noticed the sharp contrasts in the eye from the stock photo, but I would start wondering if the contrast would be so strong that it starts looking noisy :I

 wut

Gotta be careful to not trip over the mistakes of other artists when following tutorials. The leaves are generally very similar in size but that is incorrect due to the fact that not every leaf is going to be facing the viewer.

 I think it's very convincing on the surface but applying AA could probably get you a more smoother-looking gem for those who look at pixels a little more closely. 

 Might have something to do with how I originally meant this to be on dA and adjusted colors to look good enough there. I just stuck this at PJ without second thought.

The composition is a bit cramped but the expression and her immature design made me smirk. 

Take a sociology class and you'll figure everything out.

(Or should I type out a mini essay to explain exactly why the pony thing happened?) 

I recognized it as a carrot from the preview image :D 

 You don't have to get it. It's mostly an unexpected change to Western culture where it's suddenly okay to like this stuff.

A mdeditating pose with a balanced composition. I like. 

Heavily referenced a piece from Kiwinuptuo, haven't you?  

People say that knowing art history does help people do better art, though I'm not one to say much more than generic advice when it comes to how helpful it is. At the very least, I have a feeling that knowing some of this stuff makes me more conscious about my own artistic decisions, and maybe see less seemingly random, senseless artistic decisions I see people make. If you're deviantART based, I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.

 

I totally think it needs to be more formally written down somewhere. It's useful stuff to know. 

So... while different art movements were mentioned, is there a place where it's more formally written down?

I am really enjoying these little guys. Only thing is that I am not sure if the 1px-thin lines on the 2x look as out of place as I think they do. o_O 

 Eh, there are a couple of non-pony stuff I am paid to do but they aren't quite ready to show. SOON.... hopefully I can get more variety to whatever I post on PJ.I just post whatever I think turned out well, which happens to be mostly pony stuff. My non-pony tends to be practice stuff that i don't think has the sort of polish to post on this site. Maybe on dA but I treat this place as more formal.

Heh. The foreground reminds me of M.C. Escher. Not sure if intentional but it's kinda fun anyways. 

Hmm. Dither-smoothing.  Makes her look very, very fuzzy.

Very old school.  

IMO, it is probably because the cheek to our right appears to have more volume than the other cheek. I don't do enough anatomy homework so take this with a grain of salt though.

http://fav.me/d393ikq 

Don't forget to cite your sources.

At some point you'll want to spend time drawing trees and using RL trees as references to get good with trees. Tutorials only gets you so far, unless they explain some of the thinking behind their artistic decisions.

Yesssssss Legend of Zelda!