[ (03-19-2024) Number 65 in the 'over 2000 views club']
Commission for  rubbervixen

The origins of this pic go back to Anthrocon 2014, when I was practicing shiny latex effects while building up to the "Tight & Shiny" series, an effort I started in 2012 a couple of days before Anthrocon that year. I colored the first two pics right after the con, but then held off on the rest since I remained convinced that I could do better, and from time to time tried out different approaches to rendering shiny latex.

It wasn't until I penciled the above pose of Rubbervixen that I started doing more research on rendering the lighting effects and hit upon a technique described in the color version of Tight & Shiny 3, and brought that series to its current state, with Tatiana shoulder deep in the sloppy mud of a drained pond, and the implication that I'd later draw her freeing herself, making her way back to the dock, and hosing off the mud. It was during the brainstorming of the latter sequence that I remembered Rubbervixen's suggestion of a play-date with her character in the first pic linked above, and I made plans to finish the pic of her in color using the same general setting. But that effort got caught up in the backlog of personal projects I've amassed--I have pics more than 2-3 years old that I need to ink and color before posting--until recent events made it easier for me to accept online commissions and an offer was made to complete the pic as a commission, which placed it at the front of the line :)

Technical:
Since these latex-themed pics will eventually result in Tatiana and Vikki taking a rubber-shielded romp in the slop, it only made sense to picture her in the same setting of a dock over a drained pond. The easiest route would be to re-use some of the backdrop and foreground elements (i.e. "assets") in much the same way as I did "Muddle Jumper" as a follow-up to "Thousand Watcher Splash". This case being a commission merited a more in-depth approach than simply copy-pasta-ing a backdrop layer from the T&S series.

Using the backdrop from Tight & Shiny 2, I set about patching up the tree-leaf texture behind where Tatiana was standing, before deciding the textures I made in the original looked too much like masses of green cotton balls--not good enough.

(From this point I streamed the rest of the work, Sat. 3/19)

I re-detailed the closer ones with a more realistic-looking technique I tried out in No Shoozie. Time-consuming even with a fair bit of clone-brush work, the end result was worth time invested IMO. I raised the farthest-away trees and partly re-drew the dock to pull the camera back a little. The sky backdrop got blanked out and replaced with a gradient to a deeper shade of blue with repainted clouds. Thus, only the grasses and mudflats remained unchanged. At this point brought in the vector-inked Vikki from Inkscape, adjusting her physical size before exporting a PNG to superimpose onto the scene, and once composited in, set about coloring her using the technique I described in T&S4, starting with highlights atop the dark grey base, and then applying shadowing, rim-lighting and extra-bright highlighting as necessary, finishing off with a shadow cast upon the dock.

Pencil on bristol, character inked in Inkscape and composited/colored using Micrografx Picture Publisher 10, also used to redraw backdrop. Five layers excluding attribution text, 80.5MB uncompressed/unflattened