[ (08/05/2024) Number 74 in the 'over 2000 views club']
...As in "over-the-knee (OTK) rain boots" (or wellies to those of you outside the US).

They don't exist, but I expect it to only be a matter of time before they appear on the marketplace. It follows that any time that a particular shoe style becomes popular with the ladies, it immediately multiplies into a mind-bending array of variants on the original idea. And when they've exhausted that well of ideas, combine the base concepts of two popular "looks" and go from there. Being that rain boots have sustained their popularity through a seemingly limitless array of colors, patterns and prints, and now over-the-knee boots are multiplying faster than rabbits, it only seems logical that the two styles collide in the not-too-distant future. And since I draw my characters with clothing items you can see in real life, this time I got ahead of the curve drawing them in something that may yet happen.

(Oh yeah, Tina's boots are the "Jester" by Journee...among other knockoffs :) )

Which is where this pic comes in, poking a little fun at the idea. Most OTK boots have some accomodation to bend at the knee, usually a slit in the rear. But a rubber boot may not have that. Or maybe it will. I'd like to imagine that they won't because that would mean you couldn't wade through knee-deep water without getting your feet wet. Then again, very few of the women who would buy these are thinking about their deep-water utility. Matter of fact, my observations over the last few years indicate that they're only now getting used to the notion that rain boots allow you to walk right through standing water and slush puddles, often without even slowing down.

Technical:
Again, I wasn't going to invest too much in a backdrop. But I wanted these two to look like they were in a store. Then I felt the floor needed some kind of texture, then I shoehorned in some other details. The shading was going to be cell-shaded, but I went into soft-edge shading. And found out that shading using the same underlying color on the Multiply mode layer looked better than just using black. So I learned something new here.

I thought I'd save time by inking the pic using a roller-ball pen on tracing paper (it didn't--but the curves came out a little nicer). The most time-consuming part of this pic was doing the plaid pattern on the boots. Over and Over, masking, vertcal cutting masks, horizontal cutting masks, darkening, lightening and manually mapping the texture around Tanya's feet (because the real boots use a printed 'sock' that becomes the lining, pulled over a foot shape that is clamped in a mold and injected with clear PVC--(thank you How It's Made)). All in all, coloring the boots themselves consumed about an hour and a half. A light application of colored lineart makes the two characters (oh yeah, first pic in a LONG time featuring two characters) stick out from their backdrop, and actually curving the plaid pattern around Tanya's skirt.

Roller-ball-inked (on tracing paper) pencils digitally colored in Micrografx Picture Publisher. Five layers (excluding attributions), 126MB full uncompressed size