Okay, I've never written a critique before, so excuse any blunder I may make.

With the orange and pink shades against the blue background, this piece is visually appealing; a closer look presents a few issues, however. The mouth seems to be slanting to far to the left, and the eyes are a tad too big. The neck is also too long, and the legs too short. The wings look excellent- I don't know too much about them, though, so they could be anatomically incorrect- and the mane and tail look very dynamic. The tree behind Celestia and the torch look very flat, though, and the torches light could be reflected on her coat, as it is reflected on the tree much farther from the torch.

This piece is very original, with a young Tia exploring a swamp- I can't say I've ever seen THAT before!

I absolutely ADORE the way you drew this picture. The crispness of linework and color on Tia against the foggier background automatically makes you center on it first. But one of my favorite parts is the fog- it looks magical. The only issue I have is, again, the tree behind her looks flat.

I'll remember this picture for quite a while, and it's going straight into my favorites. Great job! ^^

Congrats on getting this into ponies plus.

At a glance, this is a cool piece. Young Celestia is there, being surprised at something, making you wanna take a look and figure out what's happening. However, once I stop and take a few moments to absorb everything, I start noticing some potential issues that makes it less believable.

The first thing that I notice is that the shading is everywhere. The highlights on Celestia suggests a soft blue light, but the plant to our right suggests a much harsher, orange, firey light. It is far more logical to have the highlights on Celestia have a much warmer color to correctly suggest a torch's light. Much of the back of Celestia's mane suggests a light source above and behind. The area of her mane right above her face, as well as hair face itself suggests a light source from below. The mist seems to mysteriously ignore the torch light. The foliage behind her with the really large grasses also makes me wonder what's emitting the blue light on them. (Plus, I believe I've seen grasses looking like those but they're much smaller than how this piece decides to show them. Those are some HUGE seeds)

Next thing that starts bugging me is why Celestia's face seems... blurry. This is coming from an artist who gets to enjoy making the crispiest lines possible using the least amount of antialiasing possible, but I believe that the lines on at least her face could have been a lot lot sharper. If that's out of your control, then disregard that. I went on to the download button to see this in full size to see if by accident the down-scaling on this image was causing this, just to immediately notice another thing that just shows that a lot more care could have been put into your works. You can see a light lines around the edges of this vector. I'm not sure how I didn't catch that in the downscaled version, but this pretty much destroys what believability I had in this work.

After noticing that silly mistake which ruins its believability for me, I start noticing that the torch looks pretty flat, and it doesn't look like a real torch. The mist starts looking flat, and the plant to our right starts looking like something unnaturally round and smooth due to the smooth gradient shading used on it. I believe form has more priority than details.

So pretty much, great idea, but a lot more care could have been put into this, especially considering the level of effort I've seen put into the trees on the background as if you were aiming for a level of realism.