[(07/29/2024) Number 73 in the 'over 2000 views club']
Commission for  flippedoutkyrii

Hannah (left) loves her new winter boots. Two of the features that led her to buy these are the towering platform wedge, and the top-to-bottom waterproof construction. Of course she's been looking for an opportunity to test that latter feature.

At first, the light snowfall didn't present much of a challenge to her boots till she spotted a huge slush puddle nestled against an island in the parking lot she and her mother were crossing. What better way to test these stylish waterproof boots than to just jump in? And that's exactly what she did. Despite the six-inch heel height, the boots were fully underwater to just past her ankles--a good 10-11 inches deep. The smile on Hanna's face is ample proof that the boots were more than up to the task, still warm and dry on the inside. There's just one little hitch...

...that being Hannah's mom Debra, who went around the puddle because her $800 Christain Loubotin (you know, the "Red Bottoms" brand) boots were probably not designed for puddle stomping. Hannah's touchdown in the slush lake generated a huge wave that jumped the snowbank retaining the puddle, and landed all over Debra's back from the waist down. Including the expensive boots, which is going to be the second thing Debra is going to think of just as soon as she recovers from the shock of being doused with icy slush.

Somebody's getting grounded, for sure :D

Technical:
This is one of the surprisingly few images I've done with two characters. Initially not wanting to crowd the layout, I drew it across two sheets of paper, which is why the aspect ratio is more square than rectangular. The inking was done in Inkscape, and I ported the PNG versions into a Micrografx Picture Publisher document containing the penciled backdrop. At this point I started building up the backdrop, feeling out the colors as this was a snowy environment.

The slush puddle texture is taken from a photo I took of a real slush puddle many winters ago, and the wet snow on the pavement is digital airbrushing, as are the tire tracks and splatter surrounding them. (I am still surprised at how realistic the effect looks). Hannah and Debra were intended to have minimal shading since the cloudy setting diffuses the main light source, but I bumped it up a little to help them stand out from the backdrop. I tell ya, coloring snow is really non-intuitive since your mind tells you it's white, but in order to have different-looking accumulations on different-color surfaces, a good deal of it has to be something other than white.

Pencil on bristol, inked in Inkscape and colored in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10, 13 object layers, 235MB in uncompressed non-flattened format.