Soapbox time!
Fire Streak had bunch of quirks for me personally whenever I would vectorize him, including:
- Being the (albeit very distant) second-most prominent male Wonderbolt in the fandom
- How you could take all the frames he appears in from all the episodes, and you still would not find:
- A full rotation of angles/perspectives of his mane/tail
- His cutie mark
- His eye color (until 2017, whereas this was made in 2016)
He was also an appreciated instance of a fanon name being adopted as canon in both the show and the merchandise.
Since I considered most of my “works” being outright “tracing into free reusable resources” rather than what I’d consider “art”, the lack of official reference material for even just a couple aspects of his design both eased a bit of pressure to be “show accurate”, and also forced me to…*gasp*…be an artist. Backgrounds and even soft shading were usually daunting for me, but I considered this piece special enough to add both of those.
Between that, his general obscurity (even compared to many of the other subjects in my gallery), and me generally liking his design, he would become both my favorite to vectorize and my favorite to see others draw and make content of (ergo, pairing him with Soarin’ in the various Pi Day images I’d do). It’ll sound weird, but I treated vectoring Fire Streak as though it were a special occasion since he’d need that little bit of extra effort to do. As such, this piece was in the top two favorite things I ever made, enough where I’d have prints made every so often and give them out to friends or anyone who appreciated my art if I knew I might meet them in real-life, such as at a pony convention.
As proud as I was of this piece, I never thought it’d be noticed or enjoyed beyond the little but very appreciative niche I was accustomed to, so seeing it get featured here was a huge and pleasant surprise that I never expected in a million years, let alone nine. Now I’m curious what the selection/voting process that led to this looked like…or at least, I kinda a process for featured images existing or being mentioned, but could not find it.














