[06/16/2024] First pic of mine to accumulate 6000 views!
[10/06/2022] First pic of mine to accumulate 5000 views
[10/21/2021] First pic of mine to accumulate 4000 views
[05/13/2020] First pic of mine to accumulate 3000 views. ^^
Second pic of mine to accumulate 2000+ views. And the fastest one to do so.

All you fans of the Mud Scouts, I haven't forgotten you--our patrol leaders are going through their training before meeting their troops. Because a good leader doesn't put their troops through anything they wouldn't do (or are at least qualified to do) themselves. Tina and  preppymarshmousee's Penny prove here that they are more than up (or is that down?) to the task, reviewing their remaining achievement badges while up to their shoulders in a sloppy bog. I don't think they were planning on sinking this deep, in fact I think they fully expected to walk right through this mess, but started to bog down unexpectedly. Never fear, they came prepared with their official Mud Scout manual, so it should cover how to get out of this mess, which probably explains their nonchalant exchange. After all, how can you lead a troop if you never make it out of training? :D

Technical: (this means digital-art newbies should look)
I didn't expect this pic to break any new ground--if anything I'll be experimenting with a simplified mud-texture process and possibly a simplified character model for a proposed reboot of the original Mud Scout website (from way back in dial-up days) in the form of a collection of cross-linked pages here on FA. What I did do was return to the original design of lineless backdrops and outlined characters. The different part here was depicting the sunken portions of both characters below the mud line. Those weren't inked at all--I painted their bodies a flat dark brown on a seperate layer that allowed me to airbrush in the shadows and loosely draw in the contour lines that crossed their limbs, such as their socks and shoes.

I should mention that this image was done almost completely in the free/open-source Krita (website). I used Inkscape to redraw the original Mud Scout logos (which were 100x107) as a vector image so I could export a .PNG at any size I needed (in this case "heug"). After pasting this enormous bitmap into the Krita image (taking the form of an independent layer) I used the options under Krita's transform tool to resize and perspective-shift the logo to fit within the patch adorning their berets. Since Krita's text-handling abilities are better left un-discussed until an upcoming revamp, I merely drew the word balloons on a new layer (using ellipses, and Bezier-curves to connect them) and made the fill somewhat transparent. I did the the inks on a layer over the original pencils with a sepia-toned backdrop (similar to fluff-kevlar's digital sketches) underneath, both for the benefit of not coloring against a stark white backdrop (which can distort color perception I'm told) and to make sure I had filled in every speck of the image with color or linework.

Speaking of linework, one thing that had frustrated me with Krita was it's 'G-pen' brush. Often used for digital inking in SAI and Clip Studio Paint (which I have). It's an anti-aliased brush, which means the jagged pixels are feathered out along the edges of the line. While this makes things look nice and smooth on the drawing, it's a pain in the butt to color using magic-wand+bucket-fill tools for the flat colors. Because of the fuzzy pixels, the fills don't completely butt up against the darkest region of the lines, leaving light halos that have to be manually painted out (like I did with the last four pages of Trail Trouble 2), else your color work looks like the Amateur Hour.

While Krita allows you to make the selections automatically scale up a user-defined number of pixels to get around this (so the mask extends under the lineart), it's not perfect, and doesn't compensate for lines that may get to be only one or two pixels wide at the ends of their stroke. I finally found salvation by poking deep into Krita's default brush set and found inking nirvana in the form of its "Pixel Brush Round" If you use Krita and have had my problems, this brush (located near the bottom of the default brush docker) will bestow inking heaven upon you. This is actually the second image I've done with the Pixel brush, the first is an ongoing commission that will likely appear as my next upload--this pic was already farther along, but yeah. Even though the lines look jagged up close, that's why you work large and scale down for web display (don't delete your original though, geez). The original image was 2529 x 3305. Resizing it to 800x1045 (about 30% of original size) makes everything nice and butter-smooth. And it doesn't force you to buy a 4K monitor to see the entire pic (unlike some other artists I know 9_9).

Pencil on bristol (2/2017) inked and colored in Krita 3.1.3, Lettering (typeface: "Gnatfont") applied with Micrografx Picture Publisher 10.
Original files: 33.2MB (Krita), 26.4MB (Picture Publisher). Project ID# 401