First out the gate for FA:U's Artist's Alley finds two characters of  TheHotrodHero, 'Sherry' and 'Rachel', a pony and cat respectively, trying on each other's default clothing and having a laugh riot at the sight of each other completely out of their element, Sherry in a Victorian-era summer dress, and Rachel in the overalls, t-shirt and wellies (Hunter rubber boots in this case) of a farmer. This gave me an excellent opportunity to re-acquaint myself with the use of brushes+India ink for inks, doing two full-body characters on one page (and in the subsequent digital clean-up process, re-learning some don'ts of brush inking--more on that later) .

You might have noticed that 'P' word in there. No, the character in question isn't an MLP-derived OC, and I didn't draw her that way. Curiously enough, another past commissioner of mine recently asked me if I could draw MLP-style anthro ponies, to which I had to admit that I hadn't tried to (I had long ago decided that if I was to draw MLP fanart, it would be in canon style), and no one had asked me to up to that point. I offered to play around with the idea while at the con, implying that if it came out out well enough that it could lead to a future commission with MLP-derived anthro OC's. Well, I didn't actually get around to any artwork that wasn't a commission the entire convention--the first time that's ever happened to me (that's a good thing, btw). But as fate may have it, the first commission gave me the chance to see where I stand.

Now, Sherry, as I said before, isn't an MLP-derived OC. But to actually draw one would only require small changes in the way I rendered this character. Underneath that dress, I actually did replicate the leg structure of an anthro pony as an MLP fanartist would draw them, but since this was to be an inked real-media pic that aspect of the drawing vanished as I drew the dress over it. (I did shoot a photo of her body structure before doing so, and might include it as an inset for a future 'Ink&Pencil' posting (I scan my convention pencils before inking now, to provide future material for that feature)

Also, about those dont's when brush-inking. I had let myself get spoiled by digital inking with Krita, Clip Studio or Inkscape, and one of the things I had forgotten with my return to real-media brush-inking was that when rinsing out a brush (ink tends to dry in the brush as you work and causes the bristles to stiffen, necessitating periodic rinse-outs), one really ought to dry the brush thoroughly before dipping it in the ink supply again. Excess water in the bristles will thin the ink, causing it to flow too freely as you touch the brush to the paper. Not only that, the lines you put down will be diluted and dry to gray rather than solid black. This isn't too noticable on the actual piece, but when you scan the pic it really plays havoc with attempts to make the linework a flat black. You wind up re-drawing much of the lineart as a result. Lesson re-learned.

Pencil on bristol, inked with brush+India ink, cleaned up in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Single-layer image, 8MB bitmap.