Fluttershy is dating...Soarin'!?

Believe me, a friend I showed this to was just as surprised as Dashie when I revealed this to him.

So you're probably wondering, why "Soarin' Shy". Well I had this ridiculous joke idea of Soarin' running into Fluttershy, the two hittin' it off, and him going totally hippie because laid back surfer dude is only one step removed from hippie. (Oh and quitting the Wonderbolts and declaring to Spitfire that he is going to live among the animals. I told this to and he was all like, "I think SoarShy now and it's your fault?" So then he got excited about the ship and then *I* got excited about it. Then I told this fine lady about this and then she drew this piece of awesome. [link] So yeah I had to get in on it with my own SoarinShy art.

This involved me taking a giant leap with my current digital colouring techniques in My Paint. Instead of using flat colours and then adding on stop to draw "shadow" and maybe blur that I bit, I took a leap into using the Acrylic paints brush tools found in Set #3. Not a lot of careful methodical thought went into this as much as I grabbed the tools, played around with colours and swatches until I found something that worked and then went to town with it. I suppose that's the way to do it in absence of a tutorial. I guess I was inspired by the work of and to move in a more painterly direction, though my skills need to be honed. I generally made use of the less opaque brush tools because they provided more texture and piled it on the strokes where need be. I'm particularly proud of the bushes Dash is peaking under...jesus of all things...because I like how they turned out when I took the tapered kneaded eraser tool from set #2 and just took out little bits to make it more leaf-like. Oh and the shadow on Dash's mane. After realising that doing a shadow for each colour was FUCKING INSANE I grabbed one of the transparent markers from the Concept Design (C_D) set, used black and it was light enough to effectively give a shadow effect. Then of course I took said kneaded eraser tool and whacked more chunks out of it to give it that "shadow cast by leaf canopy effect." Overall I'm quite proud of this since it represents reckless experimentation that turned out relatively well despite its other flaws. Woo.

So this is probably one of FOUR SoarinShy fan arts in all of existence. Can we make this a thing people? 'Cause it needs to be a thing!

Edit: And juuuuuussssstt realized that Shy and Soarin' are missing their cutie marks...

...oh @$%* I'll fix this after get back from my trip.