Well, somebody had to get that ball out of the muck. Maybe Roland's experience in Slopper Practice has leveled up his skill, and allowing him to march right into the almost knee-deep pond muck to retrieve the errant ball. But there is a price to pay for causing someone to have to wade into the goo. Somebody's going to take a hit, and it seems he's confident he can fire that mudball at whomever he targets, with a high degree of accuracy.

Refer to the previous pic in my gallery for a fuller explanation of the the effort that resulted in this pic, as there's a bit more to it than what's going on here. Well not all that much--just a lot more text than I thought I'd use. Suffice to say, this depiction of Roland is a demonstration of confidence.

Or cockiness. I haven't decided yet.

This depiction was actually hard to do, since I had spent so many years depicting this character as always being off-balance, being thrust into situations he sees as beyond his ability to handle, but managing to barely avoid disaster. Needless to say he hasn't felt like this in a long time. Well, he's going to eventually become the focus of the roving eye of some comic storylines I have in the pipeline, so it'd be in his best interest to raise his appeal.

This is a re-draw of an earlier pic I had started work on last week for a livestram, but my tablet got wonky for some still-unknown reason (pointer would jump halfway across the drawing surface whenever I touched the stylus to it, leaving some parts of the canvas un-reachable). The issue sorted itself out somehow, but by then I had stopped work on that pic, which had Roland sitting atop the ball, his feet and legs still slathered with mud up to his calves, but this time looking over his shoulder at the trail of muddy mess he left coming back from wherever that ball was. I might still complete it (it's fully flatshaded), but for now it sits in the project folder for this and the previous pic.

Technical: I actually managed to stay with cel-shading this time. That's all that was called for, so nothing new to report in terms of artistic techniques, although I learned how to employ clipping layers at the shading stage, so there's that.

Digital drawing done in Clip Studio Paint EX. 22 layers, including dialog balloons, 8.57mb .CLIP file. part of Project ID# 496