Kyouhen Learns to Paint!

[Kyouhen]

Greetings playgrounders!

This is a blatant theft of Thanqol's thread! I blame him for the idea!
*cough cough*

ANYWAY! My little introduction paragraph thing. So I love doing artsy things. Something about reaching into the void and pulling out something pretty to look at has always made me happy. For a while I toyed around with things like Photoshop and 3DS Max and found that I was pretty good with them, and loved building and painting my little wargame models. So I eventually decided I wanted to get into animation, and decided that during high school I'd take as many art classes as I could. I applied to several colleges for art and eagerly waited for their responses.

Unsurprisingly I was rejected by all of them. As good as I may be with other mediums I can't draw to save my life. Around that time I largely lost interest in artistic pursuits and found other things to occupy my time. Then I got bitten by the pony bug and found myself needing to make pretty pictures again. I found I could make really good vectors, but those took far longer to do than I care for and have largely gotten bored of burning a full day just to make one image. Managed to hang in there for most of the Equestria Daily Artist Training grounds, but don't really have the time for that now. I tried to get back into drawing but pencils refuse to bend to my will and I actually hate working with them. No fun at all.

Then I remembered my paints. My glorious, glorious paints. A medium that obeys me and is pretty quick to work with too! So now I'm going to start one of these threads myself and follow Thanqol's example of "One painting a day, no excuses". I've even recently built a handy little paint set so I can do some quick work wherever I happen to be.

So playgrounders, I'm looking to you folks to help keep me on track and help me improve. Any suggestions on what I can do better will be massively appreciated. I'm likely to paint mostly ponies, as I tend to do better and work faster when I'm working on a project I have fun with (who doesn't?) and those adorable little equines have thoroughly taken root in my brain. It's entirely likely that I'll end up painting some other things, and I'm probably going to toy around with different styles while I'm at it. I think I saw some challenge thread kicking around that I might sign up with too, just to keep a steady stream of ideas rolling in. After all, it would be a real shame to have this thread die due to an artist's block.

And so, without further ado, Day 1 (~60 minutes)
(Warning, contains tiny spoilers to MLP:FiM Episode 13)

Spoiler

Show

Piggy Pie pigging out on her favourite snack. Overall pretty happy with this one. The cloud could probably have been done better, but I didn't feel like digging up a reference for it. Her back legs are a little off too. (No references for pose either) I probably should have had them tucked in towards her belly instead of sprawled out like that, not quite sure. The yellow for her cutie mark is off, and I probably should have mixed a lighter shade of brown for the chocolate. That and I probably should have used small lines for the rain instead of big globs. What do you guys think?