My Big Batty Not-Wedding: Cover Art, and Some Things to Note

Hello, deer pony readers!

To those of you who only recently started watching me: hello, hope you find the experience enjoyable. If not, no hard feelings.

Those of you who've been tracking me for a while may know that I've been dabbling in vector art and Synfig animation. You'll be pleased to know that while the Synfig thing still requires a lot of work to be called a finished puppet (the articulation on the hind legs is a nightmare), the basic mechanics of it are in place, and at the moment it is mostly a question of just drawing everything and then moving on to rigging, if I ever want the thing to move.

Why do I bring this up, you ask? Because the side effect of getting vectors ready for animation is that you get a whole library of assets to work with. Like, say, muzzles with different expressions, base shapes of the legs and body.

Basically, stuff that can be used and reused. For a concrete example, once I traced Scootaloo it was pretty easy to get Rumble done.

Doing everything else is still... iffy.

I like to think I'm getting better at it, but when I struggle with just drawing a smile or wider mouth, or even *shudder* moving a face to a new perspective without any reference... yeah, that's a horse of a different colour altogether, right there. Still, it's a decided step up from the bust shots I used to use for this sort of thing, and there is some recycled material in this. Rumble was based on the Scootaloo vector (or the other way around, I can't quite recall), his companion is based on filly Fluttershy, who was vectored from scratch and quite messily, since she won't be animated, ever (I hope, otherwise I'll have to start over on her). And I've gotta be honest, it is a lot harder to do this without any references. I mean, progress just stops if I don't have lines to follow, which is not a good sign. I think the costumes turned out okay, but the props like flowers and the Night's Eye badge, it's not quite up to snuff yet. I guess once I get the pony prototype somewhat presentable, so it can move and talk, I'll have to learn how to draw to do any original stuff. This'll do for cover art, though, no? Just a few details, won't even be seen at thumbnail size. Might shift things around a bit, depending on feedback.

But anyways, that's the art side of it, you're probably here for the fic side of things. As you may have guessed from the title, this is the current cover of My Big Batty Not-Wedding, which is the working title of the sequel to Blue Moon Bloom. If you haven't read that story yet, spoiler alert.

The fine-looking young gentlecolt is, of course, Rumble, and the girl he's next to is called Stella, of the House Malpertuus. They're dressed in ceremonial clothing because the story involves a ceremony, obviously. It's not a wedding, I assure you. The story revolves around the cultural clash between ponies and rousettes (they hate being called 'bat ponies', because they don't want to be associated with that animal. 'That animal' being ponies, not bats), mostly caused by Rumble deciding to do a bat ceremony. That's the shortest I can put it.

And, oh yeah, it's in the Quorum Sensing 'verse, so not only is there a clash of cultures, it's seen from, among others, the perspective of a pony who's recently become a changeling. There's some back and forth on whether or not it's better for rousettes to mingle with ponies, if they should still call themselves ponies, what makes a pony a pony, things like that. The relevance to Scootaloo is, of course, that the way ponies feel about the rousettes is a pretty good indicator of how they're likely to react to her if they should ever find out the truth. I wouldn't call it angst, but expect Ponderloo, and a mentor moment with her aunt Vinyl, because why the hay not?

Basically, what I'm getting at is: if you wanted Blue Moon Bloom to be all about Scootaloo, you're probably going to want to sit this one out. Hers is but one of the plots in this story. In fact, if it hadn't taken as long as it had to write and edit and re-edit and re-edit ad nauseam (seriously, this week is round ten or twenty, at least), I wouldn't have even published the first. But people like Quorum Sensing, and I can't work with the Second Skin 'verse anymore, so there. This will conclude the worldbuilding for Quorum Sensing. If I ever write any more sequels, it will be with all this set up.

So, to be clear, I want to warn everyone again that the focus of the final story is a lot bigger than just Scootaloo. There's Rumble's plot, Thunderlane gets some background, Rumble's family gets their say on how their youngest son is joining in rousette traditions... it got a little out of hand while I wrote it. It's closer to Flight Camp in that regard: Scootaloo's condition is put into perspective by, well, something worse than what she has, basically. Depending on public response, I may put up some of the reasons behind my decisions, but I do urge everyone to at least wait until the story is published from start to finish before you warm the tar and grab the feathers. Maybe I'll give her more attention in a future fic, but there's no plans for that right now.

Anyway, I digress again. The tl;dr version of it is: here's the cover art I'm likely to use, the title of the next story is most likely going to be My Big Batty Not-Wedding(*), Scootaloo does get her moments, but not like you might expect, and I'll probably publish right after I publish the Button thing I pitched in my last blog.

In the meantime, I do have one question for the fans:

Stella's a noble among the bats. She's a young aristocrat, dignified. So, knowing that, should she have the cute batty earfuzz or not? I haven't decided yet. What do you think?

And, more generally, what do you think of the cover art? Good, bad, anteater? Feel free to drop a comment.

Peace out, y'all.

(*)No, really, it's not a wedding. They're only kids, after all, and marrying children is illegal. What they're going to do is totally legal, so it's not a wedding. That's how the rousettes see it, at least.