I have a screencap icon that would work well, cropped from a larger version of this one:

This would be more G-rated than the current icon, which I think is still acceptable (if a bit suggestive), but I don't have permission from the artist to use it yet.

Which one would you prefer, and if the current icon is better, could somepony get permission from the artist?

I do love that pic by kejifox, and I know at least two authors have used it for their clopfics already, so I doubt he'd have an issue with it being the group image. That said, I tend to gravitate toward using show images whenever possible for my own stuff as a preference, so I'd probably lean more towards using the cropped screenshot.