Emblems 101: Snouts, Grins, and Masking

So, you may recall the simple, 5-shape silhouette I showed in the first installment of this series. Let's see how we can do a little more with it.

First, we can add an outline. MLP being a flash-based cartoon, it has a lot of bold outlines; as a general rule these outlines will be a darker shade of a pony's main color. The simplest way to do an outline is to just slap the quarter circle or grin emblems on and free scale them until they fit. This, however, begins to take a huge number of layers if you have a shape which is at all complicated. There are a lot of shapes which you can't gracefully outline with them anyway, like our buddy the wind sock.

So, what to do? As I alluded to in our previous installment, you can get a good outline by duplicating a layer, then having the duplicate on the lower layer be slightly larger and a darker color than the one on top. Here's an example:

4 layers, and we've gone from a silhouette to a passable snout. But, what if we want to really show some emotion?

As you can see, masking lower layers is pretty important. There's a half-circle to mask part of the eye and represent the movement of the cheeks into the grin; the snout and smile are both masked as described above. There's one part which didn't make it into the image; a small which windsock used to give some curvature to the exposed part of the grin.

Anyway, hopefully this is all helpful. We all need awesome emblems.