Blog to Review
Inkblot
Ask Inkblot follows Inkblot (could you guess?) as she recovers from a brief run in from another universe and a major injury. She works at the quills and sofas, but she does a lot more than assume the title of a simple clerk.
Art Quality
Inkblot has a semi-sketch style with shading that closely follows Hatching. The outlining and lined shading compliment each other very well, and it's overall appealing. Though, as seen above, there have been a few faults in the anatomy. The eyes seem too flat, and the face is too far projected from the skull which makes it seem a little off.
HOWEVER, it seems this has been cleared up in the most recent posts
The bodies make sense, and you can easily see how they function. Also, the dialogue fits well in the picture without taking too much room. It is clear who's saying who, and the action dialogue is easily understood and appealing. One note, though:
You do have a tendency to make the heads too big. If you were to draw a circle over the chest and the head, they should be about the same size.
Over all art rating: 9/10 (note: I can't deal out 10's willy nilly. Sorry :p))
Story structure:
The story is a difficult read. It's hard to tell what exactly what's going on. There wasn't much of an exposition of the characters either. I mean, we only know the most about the characters from the most recent posts, and we only know this through trial by fire. They're in some sort of action that's caused by... well I'm not exactly sure. You started this side story in between the main one that don't seem to correlate. But the story fails to match up well - the setting and objectives change. And too add, the story only flows well in the most recent posts, but without a clear exposition I don't know what's going on.
You did mention to me before this is due to some cross of universes. I'm going to tell you now - cross universes are a poor literary crutch unless you completely understand what alternate universes are. On the most basic terms, a universe is a continuing series of events. An alternate of that universe would have something in the past that has changed. Without clear understanding of what happened in the past that makes the two universes differ, it doesn't make sense. I know you haven't established that completely yet, but if you do it makes for a poor story
Overall story structure: 3/10
Characters
The characters in the story as I've understood are Inkblot herself, The Valkyries (Scott & June, the blonde couple), Tweak (Nightmare arc), Wintergreen (Nightmare Arc), Davenport (Inkblot’s boss and owner of Quills & Sofas), Chrono Dive, and Feathermay. Now it's clear that each one of these ponies have distinctive personalities, which is good. However, only a few of them have distinctive objectives - Scott & June. They have some sort of goal which they impose on everyone else. Out of all the characters, they seem the most well written. However, Inkblot, who's the main character, is kinda there experiencing it. It's fine how you're doing it, but she isn't contributing to the story. She only tells us about herself and how she feels, but she doesn't quite do much. She's far too static to be a great character. The other characters are even more bland. Static is fine for a minor character, but they don't seem to be contributing much or well to the story. Though, this may be due to the unclear story telling during the beginning of the blog. The only characters that has had reasonable actions are Inkblot, Scott, and June. However, this is all during the more recent posts, so I expect that future updates will follow the quality of character that has been made.
Overall characters: 7/10
Accountability
As a moderator, you do well interacting with people. I see you on a near daily basis even. Through your mod blog, it's clear that you're alive, and you take a reasonable amount of interest in your followers.
However, being off and on for months at a time is less than decent. During the most recent period, it was about a week between updates. This is actually very good. But then it dropped again. Not only that, there's so much time between the two parts of the story (Before and after the nightmare arc) that it's difficult to understand and keep up with the main arc.
Overall accountability: 6/10
Overall accomplishment
You told me your main internal purpose of the story was to simply tell the story of Inkblot. So the only way to judge this is to consider how well the story comes across. And I have to say it doesn't come across clear enough. I expect that it will get better, but it's simply not an easily accessible read.
Your exterior purpose aside from pure self fulfillment, however, was to progress your art skills and story telling skills. Both of which have gotten significantly better. From your first post to last, the amount of progress is stunning. The art's amazing, and the clarity of what's going on is substantially better.
Overall: 8/10
Overall judging rating: 33/50
Suffice to say, that's still pretty good. Since your the expedition critique, you're automatically the standard. But a 2/3 out of a perfect score is a good standard. And as I said in the disclaimer, don't take it seriously. The rating is based off my personal opinion. I still say you have things to work on, but I am expecting great things in the future.