#ponyguru custom

[ponyguru]

hey!! saw you dyed some g3s and g5s-- do you happen to know how g4s take dye? thanks!!

Hi there! Sorry for the delayed reply!

I DO know how G4s take dye - imperfectly, since their heads and bodies are made of two different materials, sadly! You can even see it straight from the box, a lot of them have subtle shade differences between heads and bodies! It's frustrating as a collector AND artist, twice the fun!

I'll do a little light scrolling, I know I dyed some G4s over my time in the last ... decade! My very first attempts were with regular Rit Dye, before dyemore even existed, so of course they faded kind of weird!

I did a pile of brown Pinkie Pies like a year or two ago -

... who faded really weirdly a year later! Puce? XD

This was my earliest attempt with yellow and green using regular Rit -

You can see more of the orange/brown gal here, especially the head/body issue.

And I eventually finished her (years later!) to make a Dalgona Coffee pony, Frothy Frill!

And then I used Rit Dyemore to make a custom from one of the darker brown ponies above! Sweet Splash!

And I made my chocolate bunny from the same group, Isomalt! She isn't quite this dark anymore, this photo was from when she was finished pretty shortly after their dye bath. I should get a picture of her now!

They're all out of order, but hopefully it gives you some frame of reference! The biggest problem with dying the G4 toys is the different material used for the body and head; but if you can pull the darker piece out first and let the lighter-colored piece (usually the body, since it's harder plastic and thus harder to penetrate with the dye) boil longer, you can mitigate some of the mismatch just by trying to eyeball it to match, like I did with the group of brown G4s above. It's imperfect, plus dye can fade unevenly in the intervening years! The only real 'fix' is to just dye them all black, but even then I've gotten different shades of black! Aaaah!

Anyway, if you want to see more of my ponies and in-progress works and such, you can scroll through my custom ponies! I try to tag everything (WIP and finished) with #ponygurucustom although some have slipped through under the #ponyguru+custom tag, LOL! You can click this link too!

I hope that helps! It is always fun going through my old custom posts! The nice thing about never selling anything is that I can just go pull them off my shelf and see how they aged!

Thanks for the fun question, @trans-phoenix-wright !

[ponyaday]

10/17/22 - unnamed Halloween 2020 pony (custom by @ponyguru)

[fullmoondaggers-art]

Fanart of Tyto for @ponyguru !! I needed an excuse to draw galaxy things and ponies, so I jumped on that beautiful boy ;w; I hope you’ll like it !

You can find pics of the custom here!

DeviantArt | FurAffinity | Tumblr | Picarto | Youtube | Twitter | Ko-Fi

[vampyrefay]

Question does anyone reconise this custom? It was in a lot of ponies i got from value village (i think a collector either left the hobby or passed away given how many ponies there were)

Theres no signature but shes really cute, i'd like to fix up the wonky stripes though

@ponyguru @agendercadence @yodawgiheardyoulikeponies

[lilsweetcakes]

I wanted to do a top brag post for 2016 like @ponyguru did so here is mine. :) 1. Argentinean Masquerade. She was a reward for doing so well in school back in the spring. Even though I still had a month of school left, I managed to get straight As in college for the first time. 2. Argentinean Whizzer. My most recently added to my collection. Bought under the same pretenses as Masquerade. But I was going into finals instead (once again A's) but I was so happy to receive her since when I found out about Nirvanas a few years back, these two were my most wanted. 3. Greek Skydancer. Birthday present to myself. 4. Peruvian Confetti. Back in the summer I was looking to buy a common Confetti for my collection. Oddly a really nice white one was running for more than these yellow Peruvian variant. I love her color scheme (reminds me of Trickles) and mostly her eyes. 5. Mexican Firefly. She was a birthday present from @mexicanmlp and was sought for a long time. Firefly was a fav as a child and a rainbow haired one is even better. 6. Brazilian Moonstone. She's busted up and a work in progress for rehabilitation, but omg I was so excited for her. 7. Italian Moonstone. I always liked the alternative Moondancer pose for Moonstone. It gives her a different feel to her. 8. Mexican Baby Blossom. She was a surprise from @mexicanmlp. I live her chubby slightly stout pose that you don't see with the common Baby Surprise mold. 9. Fan custom mold Genie. I was a fan of the Sparkle ponies as a child. I also always a fan of Genies. I live her symbol and color scheme and had to have her. She is the first custom I've own. 10. Seaflower. I always loved everything about Seaflower. Her symbols and color scheme, being beach/sea themed. She was harder to come across on ebay for something too expensive. I found her in a seriously skanky lot that was perhaps the worse smelling ponies ever. They were caked with rust and dirt. I managed to salvage her and I am happy with the result.

[ponyguru]

It was so hard to keep these guys under wraps for the weeks I was working on them, but here they are! The first place winners at the #ponyfairwest custom contest, the What If Pony Rainbow! I’ll be unpacking them soon for detail photos, but for now enjoy my quick video from @mylittleponyfair !

[ponyguru]

Bouncy Bones is here to celebrate Halloween!! She’s getting into the “spirit”! 😜

[ponyguru]

Behold! The lovely Pretty Pumpkin Masterpost - for real this time!

I always like to do a post-custom discussion, because I figure that people enjoy seeing my process, and I of course love talking about my ponies!

Pretty Pumpkin was a pony design I came up with, a bit on the spur of the moment, for the coloring contest in 2020. (The lineart is by Shaiyeh on the MLPArena!) The pony was shown with pumpkins flying around her, and so I added those to her symbol! She won first place in her division, and I fell in love with her design. Purple is my favorite color after all!

This year, as usual, I left things a bit to the last minute, but I knew at the start of October that I wanted to make a Halloween pony! So I made my first foray into dip-dying nylon hair. I didn’t set up my boil pot of dye like I do for ponies, because I’ve heard that you can dye hair much more easily than pony plastic. But after my first black dye came out brown, I decided it needed to be hotter, so I boiled some water in the microwave, which did the trick. It’s not perfect (you can see her hair is a bit brown IRL), but I’m still very proud of it! I got 99% of the colors I wanted, and for a first try, that’s not bad!

(More custom rambling under the cut!)

Her mane was from my stash of old DH hair (who I don’t recommend to anyone anymore) in two shades of yellow; I used two full hanks and a half hank of Lemonade and Golden Delicious, and only had around a quarter hank left over! G3s take a lot of hair! (Especially if you love to give them long, flowing locks like me!) I widened her tail hole a bit, too, since it seemed pretty paltry.

I used some new paints for this, specifically the orange pumpkin and the black liner, and it made a huge difference. These are miniature paints from my local gaming store, and they gave immediate coverage without having to do ten million layers - hence, my tiny lines are much neater. They were only around $5 a bottle, and I highly recommend them!!

I can’t remember exactly where Pretty Pumpkin’s base came from - I found her in my big box of G3 baits, already stripped and dehaired, ready to go! I’m only disappointed that I forgot to get a pic of my dyed hair before I rerooted her!! Or even post-reroot pre-paint? Good job, me! I did find a few in-progress paint pics, so I included those! I try to remember to take in-progress shots, but I so often forget, or get wrapped up in the painting.

I had a bit of an adventure with the paint - it said it would dry in 2 hours, and 48 hours later it still hadn’t set!! So I had to set her up with a hair dryer for about an hour, and that did the trick! But that was a fun little panic-inducing snag, right before Halloween!

She was painted in one night, in a 11pm-3am mad dash, so I could finish her in time for Halloween! She still needs to get sealed, so I’ll share some pics once she’s truly, truly finished!

[ponyguru]

Lookit! It’s freakin’ bats! 🦇 It’s freakin’ Batty Pony! 🤣🦇🦇🦇

[ponyguru]

Meet Kelby, the Easter egg pony! Kelby is a gentle soul who loves art, tending to his garden, and all things spring! In the springtime, you’re likely to find him dying eggs, or setting up an egg hunt for his friends!

Kelby was a fun experiment for me; I had done a few rounds on dying ponies, and I thought, you know what? I've done so many solid colors, I want to make some gradients. In fact I want ALL of the gradients! I did his original dye job back in April of 2020 at the start of the pandemic, and dying him felt very much like dying Easter eggs! Dipping just the end, or the side, to get fun stripes!

Most of my ponies have the traditional pony themes, meaning that their symbol will reflect their name. For Kelby, I went for a more 'macro' symbol versus the 'micro'; instead of having an egg on his hip, his entire body represents an Easter egg! Many eggs have nice simple painted stripes, or little dots, so I went for both. And, since he's for my own collection, lots of little stars, because I love stars! I wanted his center stripe to have a very painted/handmade finish, so I made sure to include brush marks, instead of neatening it up. His eyes are original from HQG1C, but I added an extra highlight and glossed them. They just looked so nice on him!

Kelby is a name I found while searching for springy names, it's Gaelic and it means 'farm by a spring,' or a fountain. Kelby was made on a HQG1C Frost base, and because his original hair is polypropylene, it doesn't take dye very well. But his mane took on a very light lavender tint from the final purple bath, and I couldn't bear to cut it off! His tail turned half-pastel, half-dark purple, so I swapped it out - and conveniently, one of my HQG1C purchases came with a free hank of blended nylon/saran hair, and it was exactly the right color to match his mane! Then I accidentally made his tail hole too big, so I had to use the entire hank to fill it in.

Painting wise, Kelby should have been one of my fastest ponies, but figuring out how I wanted to paint his symbol took months! He was finished in December 2020, and I saved him to post before Easter!

Also, I found my only G1 piece of eggy merch to pose with him - an egg cup!

[ponyguru]

Writing pony melodramas be like: 😘🥰🌙🌟✨

[ponyguru]

Sometimes, my self control with dye takes a vacation… 🤣

[ponyguru]

Here she is at last ... Marie Antoineigh, in her full glory!

WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD! Only read further if you’re prepared for artist babble!!

I already posted most of these photos on my Instagram, but I like to have a more full ‘breakdown’ on my Tumblr, simply because IG isn’t as friendly a format for the more informative posts, imo. (Plus, no line breaks!) Marie Antoineigh was created for the 2021 TheDollPlanet rerooting contest, and won first place in her category! She also was featured on the front page of their Etsy! Her hair is done in their NP Fluffy in pink and white!

Marie Antoineigh (obviously based on Marie Antoinette, with a punny name suggested by a friend!) started life as a very sad, stained Pony Bride, with her hair shaved down to the skin, a rusted and lobbed tail, a chopped-off neck plug and Sharpie stains everywhere, notably around her eyes. I didn’t get a true “before” photo, simply because with my impulsivity, sometimes the only choices are ‘start now or start never’, so I try to minimize how many roadblocks are ahead of me.

I took a photo of her after her rehair, but before the styling, so you could see how thick and poofy her hair was, and try to illustrate a little step-by-step of how her hairstyle came together. I knew some of the basics of how a Rococo hairstyle should look, but because I didn’t know if the hair would curl in time, I didn’t want to rely too heavily on curls, so I incorporated more braids than would probably be period accurate. I actually used a Gibson girl technique for the body of the hair, creating a ponytail that would cover up a square of Styrofoam (stabilized in the head with a straight pin), with another ponytail on top to enhance the volume. I love reading Instagram hair tutorials, so I attempted some ‘teased braids’ to frame the front of her bouffant. I left some hair loose at the end, so I could French braid it into the bouffant, and added a lock of the solid pink to twist into a bow, which I also learned on an IG tutorial. I figure she’s not Marie Antoinette exactly, she’s Marie Antoineigh, and so a pony version of a royal could have more liberties with her style. Her hairstyles often featured pearls, so I strung pearl beads onto thin jewelry wire, which gave me more control where I draped them. I also kept a hank of hair loose in the front to curl it on top of her crown, which is a ring, secured in place with two thin strands of hair tied at the back of her bouffant. Her tail is done in two braids, one large four-strand and one mini three-strand! 

(Painting is “Portrait of Marie-Antoinette de Habsbourg-Lorraine (1755-93))

I originally planned to have a more stereotypical crown next to a slice of cake, but I realized that I should use a reference for a French crown. Unfortunately, the paintings I found of Marie Antoinette online didn’t feature any crowns, but I did find a beautiful jeweled headpiece in the painting above, with the typical feathers and pearls to accompany. She is also often painted with roses, so I added a frosting rose to her cake. And because she’s a royal, she gets the extra luxe treatment; a symbol on both sides! I also gave her a heart-shaped beauty mark to cover a particularly obvious purple dot on the side of her nose.

Marie kept her original eyepaint, as you can see in the top comparison photo; I used white speckling paint to cover the stains around her eyes, which reduced them to more of a lavender eyeshadow, and then painted a lacy pattern over it. Her original symbols were removed, and repainted with the cake-headpiece symbol.

I think that just about covers all of it! But I took a million photos, so just for kicks, I’ll include those below the cut! Thanks for reading!

This was my first composite photo, I was going to use this as my entry ... but when I emailed the organizer to ask if a composite photo was okay, she told me that someone uploaded 16 photos! So I added even more photos!

(^This is the shot I decided to use for her primary photo!)

Okay byeeee!

[ponyguru]

One thing I want to get better at this year is posting more WIPs of my art! You know that bad habit, most of us have it, where “it’s okay for my friends to be imperfect, but if I am it’s a crime”? Oftentimes I feel like my art needs to be 1000% finished and perfect before I post it, so I go months without posting any of it! If my friend asked me, I’d tell her that people would want to see her process, and that even unfinished art has value! Maybe people can learn from her WIPs! So why can’t I say that to myself? In that spirit, here’s mine! These guys are basically finished in this shot, but this is before sealing and hair styling. You’ve already seen the batty pony; who are the other two you think? 😜 #mylittlepony #mlp #mylittleponycustom #mylittleponyg1 #hqg1c #mylittleponyfriendshipismagic https://www.instagram.com/p/CJpWMVJAjTX/?igshid=c9c3ph0cbkeu

[ponyguru]

Is it bad that I am considering just making custom Halloween ponies until my motivation comes back, because it’s been in the floor for months now

(I have people waiting on me for ponies, it’s a problem!!)

[ponyguru]

I suspect the reason why I can’t put my finger on why my owl pony looks ‘off’ to me is that, for whatever reason, he’s not lining up with the vision I had in my head. But I never had any real vision!! It was just, ‘ethreal, half-lidded owl pony who is a boy.’ 

I also wonder if this is that artist gap thing they talk about, when you can SEE what you want to make, and your technical skills aren’t lining up with what you want, so you’re left feeling like a dummy who can’t make art. 

HMF. I’ll keep working on him. He’s gonna have Tuxedo Mask Eyes*, or I’ll die trying!! 

*I mean he won't look EXACTLY like tuxedo mask but he needs to look like every boy a shoujo heroine wants to fall in love with you feel me