Custom Manes - Applejack and Crystal Rarity

Crystal Empire editions of Rarity and Applejack, custom styled.
(The download is straight from the phone-camera, so it's huge with a lot of detail.) ==>

Rarity (...iz best pony)

I'm actually quite proud of this one - I haven't seen anyone do a crystal hairstyle on a brushie Rarity yet.

I didn't follow any styling guides for her this time, but used a horizontal-flipped version of [link] as a reference. The part behind her ears is just a result of about 3 hours of fiddling with the hair until it ended up in a place that I was happy with. I doubt I could reproduce it, either (for the sake of making a guide or such).

But in short, for the hair behind the ears, I separated the hair along the midline, and took the left side, plus the top half of the right side, and pulled it to the left. Then the bottom half of the right side made a separate piece. There's an elastic hair tie on the large left side. I twisted the right piece a bit and curled it under itself, then wrapped the left piece around it a few times and sort of secured it in place by tucking it under itself. Finally, I dipped that portion in boiling water and let her dry face down. (I was almost devastated thinking I'd ruined it with the water dip, since it lost all the fluff and was just a stringy skeleton of itself - thankfully when it dried it did fluff back up a bit and I was able to tussle with it to separate the clumped parts... but it took a while.)

The bangs/forelock are are just a standard roller-curl with a drinking straw and a couple of bobby-pins, wetting it in warm water before curling.

For the tail, I wrapped a piece of paper around the tip of it to slide the bead on, and then re-wrapped it with the elastic from the packaging. Then for styling, it was brought around in front her back right leg and then under the body and curled around the back left leg and secured in place to dry. Finally I fiddled with the elastic a bit to give it that gravity-defying lift.

I still need to paint her saddle, similar to what I did with AJ's hat. (But not the same colors, of course... that shade of brown should only be used for accents!) I'd also like to add the streamer earrings as in the picture.


Applejack (my 2nd fav)

Followed 's styling guide, for the most part. I couldn't get the "bulbs" in her hair to stick quite as well as he does. I did remove all of the tinsel from her hair, as frou-frou isn't really her thing, heh. Whereas with Rarity, I kept as much as I could without really messing up the styling.

I do intend to make her red hair ties consistent. Just need to decide on which I like better, and if the elastic band, I need to find a 2nd one.

The hat is the one that was included with the figure, but painted. The out-of-the-box color is a fruity light teal sort of color. Definitely not her thing. I had to cut the ear holes longer and angled more toward the front to make it sit farther back on her head, and also added the circular notch in the front. Then finally painted it with the various acrylic colors that you see (the brown was a mixture of red/yellow/green, until I got it to a point I was satisfied with).