Commission for  backlash

Fifth in the DeShoozed series, we find Gloria Riaz trying to succeed where her friends have failed--making her way across a muddy field or walkway to some unspecified destination. Wearing slippers though, she's having no better luck than the rest of her social circle. Maybe she should have brought the boots she sought in "Quest for Winter Footwear". Or perhaps she was misled into thinking that nothing special was needed, just come as you are like this guy.

Technical:
This pic marks a departure from previous color jobs. While I still did it in Micrografx Picture Publisher, an ancient Win 98-era Photoshop wannabe from a company that was absorbed into Corel, I had to make use of a technique I had only seen demonstrated in the streams of  furball, an artist significantly above my skill level. Why was this? The reason lies in Gloria's outfit. a tie-dye-like progression of four bright colors, yellow into red on her shirt, and turquoise into purple on her long skirt. I couldn't very well fall back on my usual method of applying the same color on a Multiply layer above the flat shade because of the gradients. After I started the flat-shading of the imported inks (done in Krita) I realized this wasn't going to be a run of the mill color job.

What did I do? First order of business was to lift the color gradients off Gloria's inks. This was simple enough with the magic-wand tool since the inks had been converted to 1-bit black/white to eliminate any blurring added by Krita. Returning the inks to color leaves things sharp enough to select inside the line-art without leaving halos around the edges. The selection was turned into its own layer and changed to Multiply mode, which makes the colors transparent over the solid whites of Gloria's B/W lineart. I then added shadows by flood-filling the white clothing with medium grey and airbrushing white onto the areas that were not in shadow. When the color layers are made visible, the grey shows through as a shadow, which also has the added benefit of de-saturating the colors it casts into shadow, something I've not been able to do on a consistent basis in other works.

Pencil on bristol, inked in Krita, colored in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Seven layers not including text and logos, 188MB at full-size.