another show style ref for mcsfit featuring another sick starlumi design <3 much love into this piece, as with all others!
used this base by the amazing SelenaEde, as always, for reference. i prefer selenaede because her bases are so consistent, and it makes making these refs uniform so much easier. on top of an insane selection of different bases!! i know, or at least i think, selenaede isn't active anymore but if she does ever stop in & see this, just want her to know her pixel bases were & are such a god-send fr ...

btw, does anyone have tips or rules they use to figure out the highlight colors in the iris for mlps? you know, the typical two color highlights? my general consensus has been this:
- start with the "true"/base color
- take a darker version of the base & blur it to add essentially a shade color. sometimes it's darker in terms of being more vibrant, or more desaturated...
- one highlight color is always an almost-white, or at least in 90% cases, so i just run with that
- but that pesky secondary highlight color... how do you decide what it is? i find it's completely random. sometimes this color is used to give the eye extra colors, so blue eyes might have a green or yellow highlight... sometimes it's a not-as-dark-as-the-shade-color-but-darker-than-base... what i've been doing lately is i just draw it, then use color filters in-program to edit the hue & etc until i find something that's good. i'm not sure what the logic for this color is though because it seems to vary, i think both within the canon show & in the world of fan art.