Nightmare reign

When t comes to the quality of the art, this is both a well-drawn piece and also very dynamic. Most of the pictures I have critiqued, have, for the most part, been fairly static images, pictures of characters standing around and doing very little. That’s no criticism against them, but it leaves them rather uneventful. This picture however has a lot going on for it, and yet despite that it never feels cluttered or difficult to follow, which is a hard thing to pull off.

It’s clear from this image that this is supposed to be a distressful situation, and that comes across very nicely. You can tell the kind of fear that the white pony has just from the look in her eyes. I’ve often given great praise in the past to pictures that have managed to make me feel an emotion of some sort. And this picture certainly succeeds at that, giving off a real sense of oppression and impending danger, not to mention sympathy for the white pony.

The art quality, as I’ve said already, it well-done and manages to not only capture the style and colouring of the source material, but portray it in a very fluid and exciting manner. From the destructive backgrounds to the image of Nightmare Moon gloating above the ponies, to the Shadowbolt in the foreground clearly about to do some harm, this could very well be a screenshot for an action scene.

If I had to say one negative thing about the picture, it would be that the image of Nightmare Moon was a bit too dark for me. In fact I had to really squint my eyes to know it was her at all. I know that was probably intended, as though to make her come across as this figure of darkness, but it’s just a nitpick for me and not a real negative point.

In terms of originality, I have seen both numerous pictures of Nightmare Moon and of the Shadowbolts. However, I have rarely seen the two together in the same picture, particularly a picture with so much going on. As such this is, to me at least, a fairly original picture.

All-in-all this is a very well-drawn picture that impresses me not only in terms of it’s quality, but in it’s ability to draw me into the situation it’s portraying. The artist should be proud of what they’ve accomplished here.