[[07/26/2025]: Number Eight in the 'over 4000-view club'. ]
[11/02/2022]: Number Five in the 'over 3000 views club'
[Number 6 in the 'over 2000 views club']

Commissioned by  flippedoutkyrii
A spiritual successor of sorts to Slush Splash, this pic depicts flippedoutkyrii's spotted hyena Hannah getting a bit of comeuppance for the incident in the earlier pic. As it's described:

"Hannah is mighty prideful of her boots after her splashing incident, feeling that her boots are indestructible. Taking a shortcut home, Hannah notices how low the waterline in the pond has fallen and how thick the ice has become over the weeks frozen temperatures, she shrugs and walks across the ice, knowing that even if she falls through she would most certainly get out with just a little water on her boots."

That is, she believes her boots are tall enough to let her just wade on through should she break through the ice. Well, the first part did happen--stepping on some thin ice and falling through. The second part, not so much. Her boots, despite being platform-wedge-soled, over-the-knee and waterproof all the way up, proved less than invincible. For starters, let's look at that pond bottom. It seems Hannah has never done any wading in this pond, or she would have known that the bottom isn't solid at all. In fact it's pretty muddy down there. Pretty deep too, like in this video clip. Not only that, when she plunged through, it was in a spot with lots of long weeds just waiting to mix it up with a hapless boot suddenly punching through the pond bottom. So now she's stuck in an awkward off-balance pose...with ice-cold water flooding in over the top of her boot, which is steadily sinking into the underwater mire. And on top of all that, the more she thrashes about, the more tangled the grasses around her foot get. Lacking zippers, those boots aren't very tight around her ankles, which now adds to the risk that Hannah may wind up yanking her foot clear out of the boot should she manage to get enough leverage to pull herself free of the muck.

Technical:
I thought a snow scene would be easy. Ha! I kill me!

Well, putting down the snow was easy. Putting in the rest of the backdrop was less so. I originally set this on the edge of a city park, with houses and a commercial building behind a boundary wall on the hillside in the distance. The two-story building looked out of place though, and what was supposed to be a parking lot fence peeking over the wall didn't look right either. I then thought to replace all this with trees, except that this is winter and trees don't have leaves. Bare trees are complicated. Making enough bare trees to cover the skyline would be even harder.

Fortunately for me, it snowed here in NYC on December 8-9th. For those living in other parts of the world, although it frequently gets cold enough to snow here in December (as I write this, it is 21F/-6C), it rarely snows enough for any accumulations to stick around more than a couple of days (i.e. the cold lets up and the snow vanishes). I only wish I wasn't assigned to work that day since the trees would have been full of snow. When I got to the park the next day, almost all the snow in the trees had melted or been knocked off by the wind. But the skies were clear, allowing me to get photos of the complex branches against a blue sky. Later I picked out two shots and copied portions of each one into the backdrop, blending the visible sky behind them into the flat-filled one I placed. I also changed the inset from a hole in the ice to a magnifying glass.

Late in the project I decided that Hannah's leg in the inset was positioned wrong. I originally penciled the leg as if its knee were pointed away from the viewer, but the orientation of the foot argued against this. Just before highlight and shadow, I repositioned the leg to better match the direction the foot was pointing, and added Hannah's opposite thigh dipping into the water amidst the broken ice. I didn't figure out how to rotate both the inks and flats (the character and background flats are on different layers) in Krita, so I elected to rotate the inks and repaint the flats. I then added some more weeds, texture to the pond bottom, and "stuff" buried in the mud around her foot. Last detail was to color in that foreground tree. It's the only hand-drawn one in the scene, and shading in all those branches took a significant amount of time being that it was mostly flood-filled ink outlines that had to look reasonably complicated in front of the real trees behind it.

Pencil on bristol inked and colored using Krita 3.1.3. Attribution text composed in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10 (image saved and loaded into Krita). Ten layers excluding attribution text and logo. 35MB in Krita's KRA file format.

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