Next-to-last of the commissions I did at Anthrocon 2011, this one for  Stalbon, involving  Miateshcha's character, a salamander who can't get enough of listening to Tamara's baby. (PS: it's his fault she's pregnant--turns out he's been doing a lot of knock-ups lately :D ) Meanwhile, all Tamara can think about right now is her aching back.

Technical:
2011 you say? Yes, like "Cassandra", this pic was done at a time when most 'Alley participants relied upon the commissioner to provide scans of their work post-con. (well,actually most of them still do, relying on cell-phone or digital camera photos in the interim). The originals for these two could not quite catch up with a scanner (cue 'forever alone' meme) until this year's Anthrocon, which by then I had gotten in the habit of carrying a USB flatbed scanner and a netbook to run it, resulting in the highest-quality scans to my specs right there at my table. And it was so, that the originals were located and brought back to me at the con, and now you see them in their Micron-inked glory. I think time has been rather kind to my 2011 skills :)

But there can always be improvement. A scanner set to greyscale doesn't always capture inks perfectly (I do this because a pure B/W scan tends to be full of jagged lines and speckles where the lines weren't pure black). Having seen many con sketch scans that came out on the faint side, I made sure my inkwork got the high contrast it deserved, That usually means a round of digital linework cleanup, a process that was formerly a long-winded and imprecise one until I realized that I could just magic-wand the white areas of the pic and then reverse the resulting selected area.

Most digital artists know this as "lock alpha" or "preserve alpha". For everyone else, this means blocking off the transparent (white) areas of the pic so that paint operations only occur where there are lines or color. My newer applications, Krita and Clip Studio Paint have functions especially for this. But I was using my ancient image editor and had been working this all backwards for years until a particularly rough session of magic-wand-not-quite-capturing-lines led to the above realization. Beyond that, I fixed minor errors in the lineart and performed some minor enhancements (such as restoring the webbing between his right-hand fingers).

Pencils inked with Microns on bristol or copy paper. Edits and enhancements done on Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Single-layer scan, 8MB bitmap.

(*I had the tigress' name, but I forgot where I wrote it down.)