A little something I decided to squeeze out just before my trip to FWA

Those of us who live in places where there is actual winter know of this one. When the freezing temperatures finally break, the frozen ground thaws out, and athletic fields with wide expanses of bare ground become sloppy, muddy messes. Some amongst us choose to walk through them anyway, like Roland here just did, and is now presumably looking to see if anyone is watching before doing it again, wearing some cheap soccer cleats for traction while making "interesting" footprints in the slop on this foggy morning.

Hmm. I haven't done many horizontally-oriented pictures in a while. With Roland sitting off-center, this one looks like it could serve as desktop wallpaper. Maybe.

This pic was sketched out during one of those rare lunch hours that wasn't filled up with assorted errands. Then it sat for almost a month, till I finally reached some vacation time just prior to my trip to FWA. As such, no real skill-stretching discoveries here, just an attempt at rudimentary fog effects, and a refined effort at making one of my male characters a little more visually interesting. Originally drawn in the same get-up as in "Complicated Enough?", I changed the cargo shorts to track pants, since he's not one of those who try to live in shorts through the winter. The shoes are based on the real-life Champion 'Striker' cleat. At $25, they're cheap enough to play in the mud with, being made of synthetic leather they'll clean up easily, and it's no great loss if they wear out prematurely from being used as street shoes rather than their intended purpose. I may keep drawing him wearing these for awhile.

Digitally traced pencil scan. colored in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. 3 layers, excluding text and attributions, 129 megabytes at original size. Project ID# 233

[315-03/26/18]
[433] Added to VCL 09/15/2019