My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - Page 551

Ok, the last one went well, we can only hope this goes just as smoothly. In this weeks spotlight I'm moving toward what I originally intended the focus to be, looking at fairly underground or unknown artists and hopefully getting more people interested in looking at pony art.

This week the name in blue is...


Kohtek is currently my favorite up-and-coming artist. His/her gender isn't on DA, tumblr, or personal tumblr so I am just going to say 'he' for brevity. A look into his gallery shows that he doesn't really have a consistent style like Rai does, so I'm going to approach this a little differently. I'll still try and tie every piece together (everyone has at least a little style), but this will be more gallery-esque.



Oh hey, look! These are pretty consistent. My favorite of the above is the first one, which I'll explain why a little later. For now, lets talk about lines. I want you to look closely at the linework of every pic I put in here, because that's about the most consistent thing he has. Now whether its from a lack of practice or intentional I don't know, but his lines vary drastically in thickness. At some points the line even vanishes. For awhile I looked at the lines, trying to see if there was ever any order within the madness, if there was any pattern or sense of intention on when the lines broke. This mission was somewhat successful, but still doubtful, 'random' maybe indeed be the style of line. This doesn't stop me from trying! I'm just gonna throw all the speculation out there and see if it works out, its entirely possible that everything I'm saying is implicit in the way he draws rather than actively sought. I believe that he uses his lines to give varying depths to the objects, and here are my reasons for thinking so. If you look at the curves that are convex direction (ex. the wing tips of the left wing) you see the most frequent diminishing lines. There are also other small places, like the front of the forelegs, that almost always remain thin as well. I'm sure its easy to see that the lines don't really need to be in these pieces because the rendering gives an adequate distinction between each object, but this method of giving more solid definition to the shape of the object is very aesthetically appealing to me. It almost feels like a type of line art calligraphy, where there will be consistent angles that have different thicknesses to give a feeling of fluidity and depth to it.



Here we see a clearer calligraphic model where her back is drawn with very thick lines relative to her facial features and the left side of her body, so while it is entirely possible none of this is intentional, I think its unlikely.

If there is consistency in the linework, there is almost none in the facial structure (and to a lesser extent the anatomy as a whole). The proportions and position of the muzzle, mouth, and eyes varies fairly often. Honestly, this is to be expected of someone who is experimenting. We all look at the face and recognized facial structure more than anything else, skeletal structure is much less recognizable than how artists draw their faces. I think this has something to do with how each section of the face is forced to react to the others. The size and the angle of the muzzle has a large influence on how the mouth is going to work, luckily ponies have a fairly short muzzle so the mouth isn't constrained as much as it is on actual animals. In the picture above he uses a larger muzzle than before, and you can see how it effects the facial structure. The jaw line is much more prominent and her slight smile is much more noticeable.



Screw transitions, its time to talk anatomy! Let's see...stylistically the proportions of legs to body and head are simple and fairly close to the show, but sometimes the bone structures are different. I decided to use this pic because it is one of his most recent, and I really like the way he drew the ponies on their backs. He gives a cool shape to their undersides that isn't traditional jelly bean. The closest stlye I can think of is how Slugbox (no link >_>) draws Cteno Phorae or some of SmittyG's (a lot of his stuff is saucy) work. It is actually only in this instance where he uses this straighter and tighter shape for the bodies and faces, in everything else he uses rounded pretty standard round lines.

Oh, and don't look at the lines; nope, those totally are consistent with everything else...shut up.

And then of course, there is the rendering.



He has used three different types in the examples above, but I enjoy his softer shadowing (like in the RD pic) and think its what he does best. The other two are just progressions on the spectrum from softer to hard, the title picture uses harder edges on the shadow but still uses a rounded brush that gives it an intermediate look compared tot he other two. His third style is a lot like MysticAlpha where he would use hard shadows and then hash them in certain areas to dictate where the 'lighter' shadows are. He does them all very competently in my opinion, but both of the pieces featuring RD have the type of shading I think he is going to decide to stick with.

So by now you might be realizing that there is not really a cohesive idea here. That's because he probably doesn't have one, he seems to be drawing a lot of inspiration from other pony artists. The reason I am taking my time to talk about him is because I think he has great technical skills, and because of his relatively low output and rapid change of style he as gone by unnoticed.

As for commissions, I'm not entirely sure. I doubt he is doing them as there is no indication of it. For more, check out his DA page, which is here

And for good measure you can have another pic of two ponies with shades.


((I'm not sure exactly where I want this series to go. I'll figure that out later...))