Commissioned by  Backlash Also, a play on the phrase "A tough road to hoe ".

Ah, poor Sammy. Well, maybe not poor in the literal sense, but he does seem to have gotten himself in to a bit of a pickle now, eh? Due to some combination of naivete and overconfidence, he has set out to his destination without vehicular transportation in the rain, with an inadequate umbrella. Guess he didn't read the forecast--that light rain was set to become a steady drencher, Oh, and the road he's using isn't completely paved up to his starting point--in fact he's got about a quarter mile of dirt road that isn't even well packed down. So that plus the insistent rainfall can only mean one thing...

Mud.

Now, it's not terriby deep, but it's really sloppy, and Sammy is only wearing loafers. He's managed to get this far without completely losing them, but according to the sign he's still got a long ways to go. Tsk Tsk. Maybe he should have invested in some L.L. Bean boots. But that would have required some degree of forethought. Instead those loafers will no doubt end up completely sunk and lost on this trail of tears. Or are those just the raindrops leaking through that little umbrella that was clearly not designed for a driving rain :D

Technical:
I thought there wouldn't be any groundbreaking tactics in this one. The most innovation was going to be using Krita to do all the ink and paint. Or so I thought.

The subject is on a wet road, which was to be much smoother than the ploughed up hyper-detailed muddy ground I had been depicting. So throw down a base coat of brown and brush on some long, lazy highlights + shadows, right? This time the mud wasn't the most long-winded part of this pic. It was all that greenery back there. I made the backdrop fade into the mist with yet another layer comprised solely of lightly airbrushed white 'fog' behind the character that gets more dense the further up the page. The clouds are a repeat performance of a tactic I "discovered" in "No Joy in Mudville".

The muddy road was something else though. Smooth and rain-slicked, I painted random lighter and darker areas with long strokes of a round brush, switching back and forth between that and a blend brush to feather out the transitions between them (I found this to be much more effective in Krita than in Picture Publisher). Lighter areas melded together into irregular shapes that became puddles by taking on the overall color of the overcast sky, and the darker ones became the mud between the puddles, broken up by the sharp outline of Sammy's footprints. The thing that came out really well was the partial reflection of his legs in the wet ground, that became fuzzier the farther away from the point of contact got.

Original pencil on bristol, digitally inked+painted in Krita 3.1.3, text added in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. 11 layers, 46MB in Krita's .KRA format. Posted via mobile.