There’s so much to think about when making a pony: colors, species, appearance, name, talent, hobbies, life story… Let’s step back and start from scratch. A good place to start would be the species of the pony and the color palette–we’ll establish some personality along the way. For colors, I recommend colorpalettes.net. You can always change colors later. For species, the big three are Unicorn, Earth Pony, and Pegasus. There are other species in the MLP world, but this is a basic pony guide. Bat ponies are also a common choice if you’re feeling spooky. There are hybrids, and of course, Alicorns, but it’s generally a good idea to save trying those kinds of characters for later, because they can become overpowered and conflicting pretty easily.

So here’s a color palette I’ve picked, and since I don’t have a lot of them, I’m going with a unicorn character. I’ve begun with an outline of her body. How a character looks is important, as it’s the first impression someone gets of them. Their expression/eye shape and hairstyle tends to reflect what people expect the character to be like (though it’s best to not always judge a book by its cover). Here’s some examples of characters from the show:

She’s going to be the mascot, so we want her to look friendly and fun. If she were a model or royalty, she might have longer hair in a more complex style; more manual labor might mean hair cut short or tied back. I see a lot of pegasi with wind-swept hair styles, which makes sense since they fly a lot. For hair colors, you can do stripes, single colors, or even gradients. Ultimately the style is up to you. The goal is something unique that fits the character, but isn’t too over-the-top. Markings are not often used in the show, but if you’re drawing in a different style, they’re fine. Just try to use them sparingly and make sure they don’t clash.

I started with a soft, neutral grey for her body. I like to put some markings on my characters, so I gave her some pretty simple ones that I wanted to try out. I liked the dark purple on the top palette, but it was too dark in comparison. The blues looked nice as hair colors, plus I also really liked that red and wanted a stripe that stood out/separated the locks of hair. I went back and forth between the three yet-unused colors on the bottom palette for her eyes, and decided on the peachy pink since the green didn’t contrast enough and the darker pink was a bit too close to the red in her mane. I always make hooves on my characters, so I matched them to her eye color.

Because she’s a unicorn, she’s also going to need a color for her magic. Usually I just make the magic color match the eye color since the show often does that, but it’s not a hard and fast rule. Try to pick a color that fits well with the pony’s color scheme, or has good contrast like the eyes if it’s a very simple palette. And there, we have our character!