@Background Pony  
Some 15 year old girls have quite the natural knack for art. But this kind of ‘hairy wing’ is actually something you see a lot in high school age anime fangirls. There have probably been a thousand wings likes this drawn onto Sephiroth fanart.
 
It’s because the artist sees the human body every day, so even when they aren’t making a conscious study of anatomy, they have some instinct for what looks right. But most people who don’t go out of their way to study it will never see a bird’s wing any other way except as a blur in flight or folded up close to the body. So they flail at it–‘lots of feathers, right?’ But of course, no, there’s primaries attached to the ‘hand’, secondaries attached to the ‘forearm’, only tertiaries attached to the ‘bicep’ in some long-distance seabirds, then the coverts for each set of feathers, etc, etc, and every bit as bad as human anatomy. It’s sort of funny, because once you start looking, you notice that many professional artists can’t draw animals very well.
 
People who haven’t yet learned better think they can just do whatever and say ‘It’s not a realistic style, don’t criticize it’. But you gotta start from the real object when you cartoon it down and simplify it. There’s a real, serious skill of distillation to make a cartoon that really works. People who think they can just do whatever are really putting down the skills that a great cartoonist has.

@Dale  
Honestly I get what you mean, since you obviously know a lot about this, and I can’t speak for the artist. It just looks like it took a lot of time. Do you really think it looks like it was “gussied out of a 15-year old’s sketchbook”? Because even for a critique that seems a little harsh. But I don’t know, I’m just going to stay out of this now.

@Background Pony  
Mentally, yeah.
 
She has the patience to do all those feathers (which are themselves shaped wrong, too–feathers have leading and trailing edges), but not to learn how to do it properly. Why? Because like this she can claim that it’s /supposed/ to be this way and thereby declare herself immune from criticism. If she tried to do it right, someone would be able to do something other than heap effusive praise upon her. Therefore it’s actually easier to just keep doing this, because she already knows how to do it and can get all the praise she wants without trying.
 
Every time I hear ‘It’s just my /style/’ in that tone, it’s been a cover for bad habits from an artist who can’t take anything but gushing praise. Especially when, like in this case, the artist cites the cartoony original when defending an intricately detailed realist work.
 
This isn’t actually as time intensive as it looks. She’s making good use of filters to get some of the look here. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that whatsoever. They are tools and they exist to be used. I’m just telling you not to misunderstand the actual effort level here.
 
So yes, this is laziness. It’s mental laziness, because doing it properly involves doing the wing from the bone structure out and drawing in feathers that connect to specific bones in specific ways. She’s never done that, and apparently she’s not willing to learn. And so it makes what would otherwise be a beautiful piece look like someone gussied up a sketch from the back of a 15-year-old girl’s school notebook.
 
Anatomy is always the foundation for any artist, no matter what style they draw. If you’re going to do details, drawing them objectively wrong just makes you look stupid. Defending it just makes you look petulant.

@Dale  
… You think this artwork is reflective of a lazy person?

@Background Pony
 
“This is just my style” is an excuse used by weak artists to stay lazy.

@SeraphimDawn  
Sorry, wrong user!!

@Dale Maybe if you actually visited her DeviantArt page, you would see that she wrote about that in her description. This art is stolen, you know

@SeraphimDawn  
Maybe if you actually visited her DeviantArt page, you would see that she wrote about that in her description. This art is stolen, you know.

Looks like this
 

It looks like one of those old illuminated church paintings.

I linked her to wing anatomy tutorials last time, but it doesn’t seem to have taken.

@PaskaNaakka  
Saint Basil’s Cathedral

That is alot of feathers. O_O

sigh  
It’s art like this that makes me utterly hate the real ugly world we live in.

That Canterlot reminds me of that pretty church in Russia, can’t remember its name though.