Grimsane: Decent insight; normally in the show the horn comes out right from under Twilight's Highlights (yay a rhyme), but since this is more realistic than in the show with it's cartoony oversights I think you're absolutely right. I think perhaps I'd fix the horn to come out of the hair a bit lower, between where I had it and you had it, and it'd probably look a lot better than how I have it now
Blumukee: Fair enough, those mockups should've gone in the "doodles" thread then

I'm still hesitant to give this its own thread, so I'll post the next "idea" or two for the direction of this here, and then once I finish polishing Twily's face and then actually start pushing with the hair, I'll start a thread for more C+C and then ask for ideas for a background. Hopefully I'll start that thread tonighy (though, I guess I said those exact words *yesterday*... so we'll see) As for the buffer, I decided to instead just "widen" the dither buffer and give it multiple patterns instead of just 50/50, so that it's a lot smoother looking (at least to me)
per http://code.google.com/p/grafx2/wiki/KeyboardShortcuts , Ctrl+S isn't bound to anything by default anyway.. I thought it could be 'spline mode cycle', but no .. 'i' and 'shift+i' for spline and spline-mode-cycle, 's' and 'shift+s' for stretching and distorting the brush. I've learnt something useful today 
Sounds like I should go bind it right away, then

Grimsane: You will do well to keep in mind .. "there is no such thing as too much pony"

(second largest fandom ever, BTW... losing out only to Star Trek. Also quickest growing ever. Brony World Domination GO!
)
But you still have yet to do some pony pixels

As for you "cannot have too much pony", by extension you cannot have too much Twilight Sparkle.
Oh, and finally, somewhat of a lastest update.
Sorry for the zoom, again. Another hardware/software tech forums I frequent keep egging me to scale things 2x when I post it for them, and for some reason I keep on posting my pixels there before here still, even though their suggestions are pretty crap (or, they just say, "yay ponies", "ew ponies", or "wow that looks like it's made of pixels") I'm on a device now where I have no way of scaling it down... so I'll have to post it 2x

(don't hit me) I *can* make the promise however that I'll only post 1x scale after this one, since I'm lately realizing (yeah, silly me, I should've realized this immediately, I know) I should bring everything here for starters since you guys give amazing tips... and the tech site doesn't. This isn't quite where I'm at right now, but it's what I had as of last night:

I've changed the green colors since then (to be a bit more saturated and therefore look like a glowing light source more), and the purple+blue dither has been removed again (the area in the outer layer of the pupil; dithering it was ugly I realize now and both made the eye look flat and messy no matter the magnification.) In addition, I've improved some of the dithering pattern since then, and started using the purple highlight color as the "darkest" shadow shade in some areas that still need some depth and detail (like the area between her ear and the lighter shades in the face, which is pretty much just a single, boring color right now. And, of course, still need to fix the horn. Based on the C+C I get today I'll update this tonight with what I have now (sorry again I can't upload/show it) and start a thread for it.
EDIT: I just realized that this step of the edit made it more detailed and "polished", but I guess also takes away that "clean" feel Ai mentioned. I'll admit I may have gone a little overboard with some of the dithering... but what do you think of the direction I'm going with this, style-wise? I already know that "dither it more!" is not going to be a suggestion, but I'm wondering if you think I should go more with the super-clean version I had before, the one in the middle with a slight dither, or the one I have latest (with a little bit of dither taken away here or there)?
EDIT2: I noticed that most of the crappy dithering that's making this look like I went overboard is actually in the eye,sso I'm considering reverting to the old one again and just adding a lsight bi tmore dither as opposed to what I have now.