Artist’s notes

I’ve never done a fusion character before, so naturally I decided my first one should be a six character fusion. Yeah.

So… Tempest is a rather unorthodox Mane 6 fusion, which was exactly what I was going for. When most people consider the situation, their first thought is a gorgeous alicorn named Harmony who is a painfully-colored rainbow of eye-bleeding colors. It can be done well, but it will certainly never be original. I, instead, took a more circuitous route. I sampled each of the Mane 6’s mane colors (I used red for Rainbow), recorded the hue, saturation, value, red, green, and blue values of all six, and divided each total by six. I then used the numbers I got out of that to- with a little alteration to make the color more pleasing- this pale periwinkle what-have-you color. I went through the same route with the body and eye colors, and I chose the wingtip color by picking a shade of green I thought would go nicely (because yellow+blue=green/ie Fluttershy+Dash). Additionally, I didn’t try to Frankenstein each of the six pony’s manes into the design; I opted for a more typical alicorn flowy-mane, with hints of the other’s manes thrown in. Twilight in the lock of mane under the ear on the neck, Applejack in the hair tie, Rarity in a slight curl at the tip of the mane, Rainbow Dash in the spiky bits on the forehead and top of the tail, Pinkie in the little floof on the inside edge of the tail, and Fluttershy in the long tail tip <del>totally not mane extensions</del>. For the cutie mark, I decided against the two incredibly overused marks- one features Twilight’s pink star in the middle, with her friend’s marks replacing the five white stars, and the other is the gold emblem containing the six stones of the Elements of Harmony. As Tempest isn’t actually each individual pony- which each individual element and cutie mark represents- but a single entity, I decided the Tree of Harmony would be more fitting for a cutie mark, since it alone is all the elements combined.

Now that I’ve explained my choices in her design, it’s time to explain Tempest’s character and her name!

So, while most people picture a Mane Six fusion as a perfect balance of all the Elements, creating a single, perfect being, what I see is the combination of six ponies whose flaws we’ve seen time and again. They aren’t perfect. While Tempest is the combination of the power of the Elements of Harmony, she is not the embodiment of them- she’s the embodiment of the ponies that bore them. She is a pony with more strengths than any other, but she also struggles with many more flaws. She is among the most conflicted ponies to ever exist in Equestria and has a potential for good greater than that of Celestia and a potential for destruction greater than that of Tirek. When she can maintain balance within herself, she is the ultimate being of good and her coat and mane take on brighter shades… but when she succumbs to any of the many flaws within her, she becomes a being of mass destruction more dangerous than any other. In this state her mane and coat take on darker, grayer shades and her irises glow white-blue.

Tempest’s greatest wish is to simply be at peace with herself. She doesn’t want to destroy or aid the land; she simply wants to be alone.

That’s about it. Hope you like it!

I did this for :iconearthsong9405:‘s little prompt <a href"earthsong9405.deviantart.com="" j…"="" wytiwyg="1">here.</a>