About the MLPDS

Welcome to our little community! We're all about drawing ponies, and helping you to have fun while doing so.

There's a Discord server, a subreddit for critique, and this site which has all kinds of drawing guides and tutorials to help you out.

Getting started

So you're getting started with the community?

• Our YouTube channel has a whole lot of critique livestreams, all still useful today.
• Our Subreddit is a great place to get feedback on your artwork.
• Our Discord has a bunch of other artists to chat and hang out with and more!

If you're just getting started with art then we have a whole set of tutorials that can help out. See our Guides section for advice from many different pony artists, and Challenges that force you to stretch your artistic muscles.

Some history

We've been around a fair while, going from Reddit and IRC to Discord.

Here's a short history written by Living_Dead:

Back, just a few weeks after season one of MLP:FIM had wrapped up and the hype vortex was growing I was looking around Google Plus for some folks interested in ponies. I came across a call that had two folks drawing ponies. They had created a call to discuss how they were dissecting the screenshots from the show because they wanted to learn to draw ponies better. At this point I had not actually given much energy to drawing so this was all new to me. I ended up joining a few more of their calls and started drawing with them.

It was a few weeks later that one of the members, Rankao created the subreddit MLP Drawing School. I learned they were looking for a person to help with a little CSS so signed up to moderate. At first I just helped out with running the subreddit and setting it up while they helped users out with critique.

It wasn’t long after that I, a person with only a few weeks of art experience, was asked to help critique a few pictures. At first I thought I was not ready and had nothing of value to add so I shouldn't be the person helping them. They however saw it differently. They pointed out that I could use the critique as a chance to work through the problem myself and see what answer I can come up with. I can then talk them through my thought process and hopefully something in that mess of words would help.

Turns out they were actually right. I was able to use this conversation with a few artists to reinforce the few things I had learned up to that point and direct me to the gaps in my knowledge so I knew what to work on next. This kickstarted a 12 year journey into art creating and this being heavily involved in this community.

Over those 12+ years I have made some amazing friends, drawn a crazy amount of horse art, gone to cons just to meet up with MLPDS members, critiqued thousands of pictures, created with a few members 300+ hours of youtube videos to provide critique and so much more.