Since a friend of mine is drawing one of my OCs for the 2019 Derpibooru Community Collab, I decided to draw other people’s OCs instead. I intend on drawing three of my friends’ OCs first and once those are all done, I might volunteer as a helper.
 
The first out of the three is Chrys’ Diamond Dog OC, Sky. I was talking to Chrys over Discord on what Sky looks like and she was helpful enough to give me some general descriptions as well as help me whenever I needed picking out certain design traits (for example, I asked her if Sky had claws on her paws or if she didn’t and Chrys told me she does and then I asked if I should give her front paws big claws or small claws and Chrys opted for bigger claws).
 
One of the big major things she told me was that she wanted Sky’s design to be inspired by a Blue Merle Australian Shepherd. And low and behold, I found a good picture of one that proved to be a great reference picture. Because Chrys loves Midnight Lycanroc (a Pokemon from the Gen 7 games), I decided to use it as a reference as well and gave Sky some of its traits (namely the mane, cheek tufts, and button ears).
 
When drawing her, I was struggling with bits of her design. For example, I was struggling with drawing her snout. But thankfully, I found a nice article by Carlos Cabral on Tutplus about drawing cartoon animals that was a huge help for me and had other nice reference pictures I used for drawing this image.
 
I tried my best to keep her somewhat show styled and keep her design simple. She’s still probably not too animation friendly with all those markings but I don’t mind. I tried experimenting between more complicated markings which ended up looking too cluttered. I also tried experimenting with more simple ones that ended up looking too bare and didn’t really capture the same feel as the Australian Shepard I used for reference. Ultimately, I went with this one and I think it’s a nice happy medium of having just the right amount of markings.
 
There was also quite a lot of pictures here on Derpibooru that I used for reference as well and they are:  
>>1875823s  
(For the paw pads.)
 
>>878185s  
(For the legs.)
 
 
(For the general body shape.)
 
 
(For the eye shape and eyelashes.)
 
 
(Another general body shape reference picture as well as reference for the collar.)
 
You can look at the WIP sketches here, here, and here and the cleaned up linework here. You can see them all, the finished picture, and some of the reference pictures in one album here.
 
Unlike my other recently uploaded pictures, I drew this on Photoshop. I think it helped me a ton along with the fact that I was drew it on a Desktop as opposed to a laptop (the bigger screen really makes a huge difference). But like all of the digital pictures I drew here, it was drawn on the good old Wacom Tablet I got many years ago.