[ (05/04/2025) Number 85 in the 'over 2000 views club']
Commission for  backlash

Roscoe is canonically a barefooter. While this might seem redundant for a furry character, it's made a point since the other characters in his social circle aren't. They all went ahead of him across this muddy field in footwear that really isn't suited to the task, and now Roscoe gets to snicker at their various shoes laying mired in the sticky ankle-deep mud. Like he says, "you can't lose 'em if you didn't wear 'em".

Technical:
At first I thought there wasn't going to be anything really groundbreaking about the tactics I put into this piece, but reality has a way of messing with assumptions. I felt that the layout of the pic didn't lend itself to flat-shaded backdrops, so I began doing highlighting and shadowing of the backdrop trees. Looking for some kind of shortcut to this led me to superimpose a stock photo of a treeline on the image, then trace its outline on the actual backdrop layer. Placing the photo under the backdrop layer allowed me to (kind-of-sort-of) render the light reflecting off the many leaves sort-of facing the light source. It did give the trees something of a three-dimensional look, which I'm grateful for.

The mud-mired shoes were a bit of a different story. I actually drew those out digitally during one of my irregularly-hosted Tigerdile streams a week or so ago, using an outline of Roscoe's leading foot as a form to draw them around (yes, that's my tactic for drawing shoes--draw the foot first, then draw the shoe around it). Each of these became a sprite-like floating object surrounded by the backdrop color of the mud. Since the shoes were to be depicted partially buried, I copied the objects one by one, and posed a duplicate copy above each before cutting it into the shape of the splatter on the portion of each shoe that sticks out of the mud. The lower portion was painted to blend into the backdrop highlights and shadows of the surrounding mud texture (a bit of a long-winded process since the backdrop uses multiply/screen layers for its texture and the mud objects were just painted on a single layer.

In a late change I re-drew Roscoe's pants to reflect a change to convertible trousers--these have zip-off legs to convert them to shorts, which is what the character is usually depicted wearing. I surmised that maybe he wore something different owing to the rainy weather that made the field such a mess, then changed back into his usual attire, sticking the zipped-off legs into his backpack after the weather cleared and warmed up.

Pencil on bristol, inked character in Inkscape, colored in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. 19 layers, 181MB at original working image