Another milestone, only four months after hitting 2000 pageviews, I now have 3000. And all without posting a single adult pic :) I can only wonder how fast the pageviews will mount (heh heh) once I get around to adult art :D

Thanks go out to my last seven watchers, who all appeared the week leading up to this pic

So we have 3000 hits, three characters, and three very messed up pairs of Converse Chuck Taylors, as our threesome (clockwise from upper left) Roland, Tatiana, and Cynthia, rather blatantly play in some wet cement poured for a street rehab project. This "venue" was chosen as "street concrete" isn't (usually) as closely guarded as a sidewalk, since it will be blacktopped over anyway. A similar project near my neighborhood years ago showed much evidence of local kids (and some not-so kids) venturing across the surface before it had solidified. One trick aspect of these sites is that the difference between a pour that will support your weight and one that won't is only a few minutes--which means the pour on one side of the street may hold your weight, but you'll sink right in once you step on the pour right next to it, laid down only a few minutes later (yeah, I have some long-buried footprints somewhere in the neighborhood :) )

Production Notes:

--I never inked this one. At least not on the original pencils. I thought I would save time by trying out digital inking for the first time on this one. A characteristic of this project arguing in favor of the tactic was the size of the characters needed to fit them all in the scene. Many details would be obscured if I brush-inked them, and rapidiograph pens promised significant cleanup work once scanned. Digital inking allowed me to capture small details in the pencils and produce lineart that needed no cleanup. The procedure required some work-arounds, as Micrografx Picture Publisher doesn't have layers the way PhotoShop does. Basically I turned the entire scan into a semi-transparent floating object, and traced the lines on the blank base image "behind" it using a straight-line tool (you can barely make out the effect on some of the curves if you look closely, but shrinking the image from its original size hides much of that quite nicely).

--Another first I learned from the "How to Draw Anime" book that dealt with Flash illustration, the shadows of the characters are derived from their silhouettes. Not having the individual figures as seperate objects (as one might have in Flash) required me to create masks of each character in order to seperate them from the backdrop (a tricky and time consuming job with Roland, since he intersects so much of the background lineart), paste them into a blank image, fill in the entire character with a shadow color, then re-import them into the original image. THEN, I had to make floating objects of each character anyway so the shadows would sit "behind" them, skew and squash them equally (again Roland was trickier because he's standing next to a vertical surface--with holes in it no less).

--It was then that I figured out that I could make more convincing shadows if I made use of a MPP feature where you can create a mask from a floating object (the shadows) and simply darken the mask (hiding and later discarding the shadow object)

--I've resigned myself to the fact that my inking technique staggers all over the place like a drunken sailor. This time, it's heavy outlines with fine interior linework. Roland's linework is uniformly heavy since I got the idea to confine heavy lines to the exterior after I finished him. Whatever, he's a guy--he's entitled to look heavier :) (even though Tatiana outweighs him)

I call myself saving time by digitally inking this pic. The truth is I got lazy at the flat-color stage, and only finished the piece once I saw I was 7 hits from the 3000th pageview :) If anyone wants to see the sketch and digital lineart it spawned, I can always stick them in scraps.