First commission of my first time at Furry Weekend Atlanta. You know how certain sea birds can fly into a body of water, literally dive underwater to grab a fish, then return to the surface with enough speed to get airborne? Well  kartonis can do that with mud. Without the fish part though, that would be silly. But much like a touch-and-go landing, only with a less delicate "touch", hence the title.

I found this one while sifting through photos taken during previous con trips, for entirely different subject matter, I ran across this one, almost forgotten amongst the 61GB of photos in my Photo folder (yes, they're almost all backed up--multiple external drives too). Fortunately, the contrast on this photo was good enough that just a few tone-slider adjustments plus a little airbrush work made this presentable for my main gallery.

I believe this is my first time drawing this character. Certainly, before this I had little or no experience drawing four-legged creatures, much less dragons. Fortunately Kartonis had references for his character, but I still had to work out the specifics of posing the character correctly, considering what he was in the midst of doing. Then came drawing in all that flying mud :) I guess the way I draw it, all my mud pictures are complicated. I just feel it more when attempting to color them.

Photograph of brush-inked pencils on bristol, cleaned up and attributions added via Micrografx Picture Publisher.