The sole commission I got at the final What the Fur,  jenorafeuer had me contribute to his sketchbook theme "Dancing". And for once, I actually had a good idea of what to do there. Jenora's character is canonically a macro, although that didn't have an effect on anything but the name--but if the commisssion had specified some sort of backdrop I would be well able to make it obvious (i.e. bouncing cars, trees and buildings :D )

So, the next question was, what sort of dance? Well, for a long time I wanted to animate or rotoscope one of my characters doing a dance called "The Running Man", among other 1990's dance moves. There are others I'd like to animate, the "Kid 'N Play" among them, but the problem with selecting a still frame for this commission is that most of these moves don't look like dancing when you grab any one frame from them, except for the Running Man (you can see it demonstrated here). So that's how that particular dance got the nod.

Technical: Seeing as the pose was coming out so well (unfortantely I didn't think to scan the pencils), I chose to ink this one with brushes and India ink. This was rather close to the ending of Artist's Alley that day, and the brushes I had on hand weren't cooperating. The best one I had was starting to come loose from its handle, and I had to superglue it on in hopes of switching to it for the finer details as the other brushes were really bad at the kind of variable lineweight.

For posting to FA, I once again employed my trusty old Micrografx Picture Publisher along with a new technique for darkening inked lineart (which sometimes goes a bit grey owing to varying amounts of ink in the brush). Instead of trying to select the lineart itself, I selected the white areas of the page, then made use of an option called "Find similar colors" to one-step select everything but the inks. Then I inverted the selection so the only paintable areas of the image was the lineart. One flood-fill later and the result is what you see here. Nice dark, crisp lines. For those working with more advanced image editors, this is the equivalent of "lock alpha", which prevents one from painting or bucket-filling those pixels of the image that have not yet been changed from their default transparent "color".

Pencil on sketchbook, inked with brushes+India ink. Cleaned up in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Single-layer image except logos/attribution, 24MB scan