The Luminary Ponies are a set of custom ponies that I am working on, sort of. I first concieved of these ponies at the beginning of my freshman year in college. That was the fall of 1998. Obviously a lot of time has passed with little progress. However, my ability to visualize and conceptualize has improved. These sketches were my preliminary moment-of-inspiration sketches, and above is my first example of a finished product. Imbrium changed a bit in the course of the project (curly gray hair instead of straight black) but she mostly kept to the original design (including the sparkly stripe). The project has been slow in the going because to do it I need to find a poor condition pegasus and a poor condition unicorn to swap heads with with matching bodies, or onese I can suitably modify. I know it sounds gruesome, but I customize both resulting ponies. I will definitely do both of these ponies (Imbrium is already done) but I don't know if I will ever bother with the whole set.

I first got the idea for the Luminary Ponies when I was thinking about life in Dream Valley. I got to thinking, there are all these valleys, what about the mountains that must be in between?? I mean there is Dream Valley, Flutter Valley, Twinkle Valley, and others I can't think of, but no mountains! So I decided to make a pony that lived on the mountain, the question was, what pony? Then it came to me, I would make a pony, in fact a set of ponies, so ancient in their wisdom that they each lay dormant on the peak of the eight mountains of Ponyland, and they were there to give guidance should the ponies ever confront something they could not overcome. Yes I know I arbitrarily decided there were eight mountains, but hey, I'm allowed since no one else has yet ;) So thus, because there were eight mountains there were eight ponies. I wrote a little fanfic which you can read about another set of ponies and the creation of the pony universe and the Luminary Ponies came into existence in a similar manner. Ponies had been in Dream Valley and the related Valleys for eons, its just that Cotton Candy, Blue Belle and their sisters were the first in recorded history; there had been ponies for long before them. When the group of ponies were first starting, the moon looked down on them as her children, but as a mother with little control and able to give little help, so she created the Luminary Ponies, a special breed of ponies, Alicorns, with more magic power than any pony before or since, and created them with knowledge beyond their years. They were then named after the seas of the moon and given matching symbols. So far I only have two of them planned out, Mare (from Mar, the latin for Sea) Imbrium, which is the Sea of Rains, so she has falling jewel raindrops as her symbol as well as one on her forehead, and Mare Frigoris, for the Sea of Cold, and so her symbol is a jewel centered snowflake as well as a smaller one on her forehead. I actually got the idea for the names from the moon's seas from Piers Anthony's Night Mares in Xanth, I'm sure that those of you who read those books are familiar with Mare Imbrium ^_^ Hey, I'm a Xanth buff, I had to bring it in in as many places as possible :) Imbrium is obviously done, and though I have Frigoris' head done, she just doesn't have a matching body!