 (this page's content courtesy of R. Korol) you may have noticed i'm doing all the painting and details before i begin adding hair. i do this for two reasons. first, to protect the hair. i only paint body color around hair if the hair in the bait is absolutely perfect for the finished custom design, and even then i'm incredibly careful to paint carefully around the roots of the mane (there's no reason why you couldn't take out the tail even if the mane has to stay in). the other reason is to protect the paint. hair in a pony during painting could end up getting into the paint before it dries. if it goes unnoticed, it's stuck there, or it leaves a mark in the paint when pulled out, even in wet paint, which you would then have to smooth over. if a lot of hair falls into a painted area, it could even smudge your carefully-painted fine lines. alright, so since your pony is nice and bald, you just have to worry about how steady your hand is for painting on the details: eyes and symbols. in nefermoon's case, she has symbols in several places: the typical rump area, a bracelet, a pectoral necklace and then a little 'tattoo' on her other foreleg. generally speaking, paint one at a time, allowing them to dry in between. more specifically: i use a very fine-tipped brush for the super fine lines, and less fine brushes to get larger areas. the lines in the tattoo, for instance, got my finest brush. the lines in the symbol got a thicker brush, and the bracelet used the same brush i did the body paint with (while the red and blue 'inlay jewels' used the same brush as the symbol). to line up rump symbols, i use a mechanical pencil (.05 mm) to draw the symbol on one side so i have it the way i want it. then i look at the pony from the rear and put two dots on the other side to line up the top and bottom of the symbol.
then i look at the back of the custom from above, and make two dots, lining up the right and left extremities of the symbol (in this case the extremities were on the rounded part of the symbol, not the very top edges).
now, using the dots i marked, i can visualize (or just go ahead and draw) a rectangle that will be tangent to the outsides of the symbol. i then sketch in my symbol. if the symbol were to be solid and have an outside outline (such as the bleurosea customs), i would fill in the whole symbol with black and then add the detail colors in on top of this when it dried. in this case, the symbol is only black and i can just trace my pencil lines with black paint, so we'll look at the other areas of detail to illustrate this.
the nice thing about black outlines is that, if you color 'outside the lines' with your brush, you can paint on top of the outlines again to fix this. if you are going to be physically adding details (like nefermoon's scarab pendant), wait until after you root the hair to do so. now you have a fully-painted, bald, pony. want some hair? great. stretch your fingers out... next step - how to get a crick in your neck...
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