[(06/11/2024) Number 20 in the 'over 3000 views club']
[(11-05-2022) Number 46 in the 'over 2000 views club']

Many have wondered why Tina seems to be satisfied with just walking her cute shoes through mudpits rather than just going whole-hog and wallowing in them like any "good WAM-er". Like  muddyleafeon's OC Teal Vividria, who has encountered Tina after taking a flying leap into her favorite mudpit, and seeing Tina's mud-caked maryjanes, probably assumed she was looking for the same thing and invited her to join in.

What follows is a conversation where Tina explains why she's satisfied with her approach, which as you might've guessed doesn't make a whole lot of sense to Teal, which explains her amused expression. If only she knew the things that have happened to Tina when she wasn't intending to do any more than muddy up her shoes. Had Teal borne witness to her misadventures, she might even conclude that Tina would't mind if she just dragged her in anyway--Teal is a big girl--her model sheet says she's 5-foot-11--and Tina wouldn't be much resistance

Technical:

Originally this pic was to guest star another character, whose owner I had talked to about a pic with our respective characters. As often happens, the proposal appears to go nowhere, then out of the blue something comes of it. Well, in this case two years passed, and in the meantime I joined the Creative WAM Discord server, and in a conversation, the name of this person came up. Turns out he had been booted out of the group for persistent misbehavior, and I was advised to not pursue this project using his character. A few months pass, and over the course of many conversations and DM's Teal surfaced (heh) as a suitable replacement, as canonically her only interaction with mud is to get completely covered in it :D.

So now to insert Teal into the scene. Tina was a pencil-on-paper image, and Teal was drawn digitally, at first a head shot because I wanted to improve on the previous pic I did of her --"Sloppy Selfie". When this came out well, I noticed that her orientation and expression were near perfect for her position in the pic, so I added the rest of her body once I placed the headshot in an appropriate location, as Teal was to be standing, with Tina perched up on a fence to be at eye level with her--as mentioned before Teal is almost 6' tall, and Tina represents an average-height woman. While I was at it I improved Tina's character model with a more realistic torso length, hip/thigh width and eye shape, as well as redrawing her bust to better represent her endowments up there, with a little sideboob for good measure. Teal was drawn wearing a tank top and jean shorts--looking through other pics of her seemed to suggest she goes mudbathing in the nude, but I thought the combo looked good on her. Both characters were drawn "clean", then mud effects were drawn in on their own flat+shadow+highlight layers, balloning the image data beyond 700MB within Krita, making it lag a fair bit. The backdrop was done in a manner similar to Damian's Dirty Debut, except with a lot more foreground grasses which again called for experimenting with a bunch of brushes I'll have to figure out the next time I do a pic like this :D

What then followed was..."The Muddening", where I gave Teal the throrough covering of mud she earned, drawing over a dedicated pencil sketch to get all the gloppy runny goodness in. For an extra dash of glitz I added rim-lighting around the characters where their edges faced the blue sky behind them, and three-layer shadowing on the voluminous covering of mud. Just before publication, I made an adjustment to the mud color on Teal so it looked like her mudpit was a different one than what Tina had walked through.

Combination pencil-on-paper and digital drawing processed in Krita 4.2.8. 17 layers, 689MB in-application, 60MB on-disk. 10 hours 16 minutes editing time as per Krita's project timer. Project ID: 480

Alternate title: Mud: Walk or Wallow?