Last of the commission work from FWA, this project, which only found a name right before delivery stars  miateshcha's Corbenna, a weasel and soccer player. The aim of this project was to depict her in a state of complete exhaustion following a game. Presumably, it's a hot day and the rigors of the match were such that it's all she can do just to dump a squeeze bottle of water on her head once she's reached the rest of her gear in the bleachers. A sudden thunderstorm would be welcome right about now, but alas, none are forthcoming (really--the cloud photo that makes up the sky in the backdrop are from a day with no precip)

Technical:
At first glance this seems to be a simple composition. I went out and photographed some concrete bleachers (Van Courtlandt Park, if you're from NYC) to derive a backdrop to pose Corbenna against, and after trying out a few poses, came up with one that properly depicts her state of fatigue. Come to think of it, the composition was simple. Thinking back to the the last commission I had as "homework" from FWA also took an inordinate amount of time. Maybe it's that time of year that jinxes things, throwing bouts of overtime and 6-day workweeks at me right up into summer. Feh. Anyway, once most of the requested elements were in place, I chose to add a couple of extra objects--the duffel bag was simple...the box of bottled water wasn't. Added digitally, as was the duffel bag, I chose to make the unlabeled portions of the bottles transparent, which became a couple of hours of masking out curved lines and puzzling out how to color 2 and sometimes three layers of label fronts and backs visible through the upper halves of the bottles. I'm sure there's a better way to render this--I just haven't figured out what that way is yet

Pencil on tracing paper inked with Inkscape. Colored in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Original file size with layers enabled: 191 megabytes.