There are a few reasons I wanted to give Zecora a new design. For one, she is very stylized in the show, with her stripes not really matching how real zebra stripes go; it makes sense, seeing as the show itself is so stylized and chibified. So it would make it interesting to see how I would stylize zebra stripes myself.
 
The second reason is that I’ve kinda been wanting to give my Zecora nextgen character Kinyume a bit of a redesign –I’m not entirely happy with how her markings are currently. Though it’s mainly with her white markings I want to edit, if I were to change her, I’ll probably modify her stripes too. And if I were to give her more realistic stripes, I feel like I want to do the same for Zecora too.
 
So, Zecora redesign it is!
 

 
To start with, Zebra stripes vary from individual to individual, with none being identical. But they tend to also look different from one species of zebra to another. For example, Grévy’s zebra have narrower stripes and a bare stomach, Grant’s zebra has thicker stripes that cover the stomach, and both most often lack the very thin shadow stripes of Burchell’s zebra. They also vary in size and many other aspects I won’t list here.
 
Zecora is stylized, but we can see she is quite small (about the size of a pony) and with a bare stomach, so I’ve decided to headcanon her as being a Mountain zebra. If I’m pressed to be subspecies specific, I’d go with Cape’s mountain zebra as they are slightly smaller than Hartmann’s mountain zebra –but I’d imagine in the world of mlp, subspecies wouldn’t be as defined as in ours because sapient people move around and marry others a lot more than animals do. So I’d think there wouldn’t be two well defined subspecies so much as just… one species with people who have characteristics of both.
 
She’s not an exact match –Mountain zebra have often brown on their muzzle and sometimes dark brown stripes, they are not grey, they have a dewlap… actually, she might have that, we never see her neck uncovered. I didn’t draw her foal-version with a dewlap, but if I’d redrawn this now I might have given her one. But the lack of brown colors and grey coat and grey stripes I decided to ignore; for one, no zebra species are grey. For another, little ponies are rainbow explosions, I see no reason why zebras in mlp can’t be different colors as well.
 
So Mountain Zebra. They have, as mentioned, bare stomachs while the entire rest of the body is striped. Their stripes are thin compared to the other species of zebra, being thinnest on the face. They have much wider and more spaced out stripes on their flanks, with no shadow stripes.
 
Issue one to solve: I am wanting to stylize this, not to draw the actual amount of stripes which would be on a zebra. So I decided to be lazy and forego the thinner-stripes-bit, and just giver her relatively thick (and thus fewer, as each stripe takes more space) stripes. I still kept her stomach bare, and made sure her stripes went all the way down to her hooves. Otherwise I just looked at images for which direction stripes seemed to go where and stylized it into something I thought looked nice ^^
 
Issue two to solve: one characteristic specifically seem to be the thicker stripes on the flanks… but that’s where her cutie mark is. So I could go with her mark being a different color and over the stripes (which is how ponies like Luna seem to deal with flank markings, their cutie marks just go straight over ignorning it), or have her not have stripes there. I really do like how her mark seems to be made out of her stripes, it makes it look more like it’s its own thing, so I went with option two. But then the issue is with her before she gets her mark; no stripes at all there looks very naked. So I decided it would be fun if I went a step further with my initial thought that the cutie mark appears to be made out of her stripes –she has wide stripes on her flank as a kid, but when she finds her talent they change into the cutie mark. This could be instant, like with how a cutie mark appears in a flash of light, but I thought it was cuter/made zebras more interesting if it took some time for them to change –maybe something like a month for the stripes to grow into the mark. So I included her as a foal right in the middle of the process of getting her mark, as her stripes are mid-change :)
 
Speaking of foals, did you know some zebra species’ foals are just a bit fluffy?? Like, some Mountain zebra foals have their tail fur reach all the way up and a bit along their spine, and Grévy’s zebra foal’s manes extend all the way down their spine –they’re adorable! So I of course gave toddler Zecora a fluffier tail than most, just because it’s cute.
 
Zebra foals also sometimes tend to be lighter than they are as adults, with more brown-ish stripes rather than black. I choose to not give Zecora this because one, I’ve already decided to headcanon that zebras can be any color in my nextgen-verse, and two, I wasn’t sure how to deal with that and her grey color –would she be lighter grey? Or maybe yellow-ish? So I just kept her the same grey as an adult ^^^
 
Otherwise, I kept her jewelry, mane-style, eye-color and all such parts –it was mainly her stripes I wanted to try and do something different with. And I think she turned out pretty nice, I’m happy with the result :)