Some time ago I hit one thousand watchers on this FA account. It was a hard-fought milestone. I see a lot of relative newcomers to FA who have achieved four-digit watcher counts in only 2-3 years. It took me ten.

Anyway, I did a celebratory pic, Thousand Watcher Splash (TWS) featuring my most well-liked character Tina, jumping off a fence into a mud puddle, raising a huge splash in the process. Some wanted to know how deep she went. I figured it was about deep enough to completely sink her Reebok Freestyle hi-tops, and mentioned that I had a sequel pic penciled showing what she looked like after the splash fell. Well. here it is. and it looks like she did indeed drive her Freestyles completely under the bottom of the puddle, not to mention splattering mud all up her legs and getting some up on her cheerleader outfit. As I mentioned somewhere, one of the less-well-known "Rules of the Internet" states that "The more pristine and beautiful something is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt it". Too bad this rule never had a formally-assigned number like Rule 34 (it has been seen as either 15 or 45), as it would certainly provide a base motivation for drawing Tina in these situations (though in her case it's mostly about walking through mud holes with barely adequate footwear), or any of my other characters...

Accompanying and driving my home-stretch effort was this tune (Genre: future bass--use headphones :) ). While giving it one more listen, I was inspired to swap out the first letter of the name, hence "Puddle Jumper" became "Muddle Jumper" just before I posted this.

Technical:
This pic had a shorter than normal gestation period, as I had always intended to re-use the assets of the previous pic to make this one. After all, Tina was to be standing in the same spot she landed in, so why re-draw the backdrop?. To that end, I re-used significant parts of the previous image--the mud, puddle, fencepost and treeline are all ported from TWS, not to mention the mostly-lineless coloring style I used on Tina herself. There were adjustments though. The perspective was a little broken in the first pic, with the ground transitioning directly to the backdrop trees as if it were a hillside. So in order to fix the composition, I raised the treeline and filled in the gap with grass. Much flicking of various shades of green with the oil-paint brush, coupled with a Clone tool and some extra flecks of deep shadow +highlight gave me a full complement of reasonably-convincing-looking grass, and then blurring the upper half gave it some depth. The fencepost was to be lower in this pic than before, so I re-drew the horizontal boards, but the post is the same (with some added lines). Much of the mud is the same as the earlier pic, but I did additional shading and highlighting to further break up the mud texture behind the puddle, giving it some perspective as well.

Tina herself was flat-shaded "paint-behind-the-pencil" style on a separate scan of its pencils. I wish I had done the earlier pic that way--on that one I digi-painted the flats directly on the backdrop, so in order to re-use it here I had to cut out the jumping Tina from that one and fill in the holes in the treeline object before exporting it to the new pic. Oh, and since the highlighting wouldn't port over (it being just a light-colored flecks on 'transparent' black), I had to re-paint those in. Once I had Tina looking decent as a flat-shaded image, I magic-wanded the blank backdrop, reversed the selection and copypasta'd her into the new image as a floating object. Now I could use this object to make additional masks to convert into multiply/screen silhouettes to perform highlights and shadows without having to do anything to the backdrop, which retained its own set of highlight/shadow layers independent of the character. Clouds were highlight and shadow effects this time around, instead of being painted directly on the backdrop layer. With two sets of highlight/shadow layers, this pic came in as one of my larger images data-wise, coming in at a shade under a quarter-gig.

Pencil on bristol, scan digitally painted and composited using Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. 13 layers, 247MB at full size.