Commission - Pond Ponies

I'm the best at naming these things!

This commission whupped my butt up the street and back. It took SO LONG to do this one. The biggest reason aside from laziness is that my job has recently been giving me much more work (I went from 3-4 hours per week up to 20+ over the past month), and by the time I got home, I was too buggered to do anything aside from hop on YouTube and veg. Hell, that's what I'm doing right now, having got home from work a few hours ago.

Commission for Xan151, of his two OC's, Switch Track and Sweet Paw down by the pond, hugging. I did a few things differently this time. The biggest is that I actually moved into Photoshop for post processing. This allowed me to do some different voodoo with shadows and stuff which would have been too much of a PITA to do in Flash. I was almost tempted to use this image as a foray into shading and more advanced shadows (and I may still do someday if I can be not-lazy), but it was taking long enough as it was, so I decided against it.

I also tried experimenting with different textures for things like the sand, grass, water, etc, but unfortunately whatever came out turned out looking either too overly complex for the style, and/or just looked plain terrible. So I settled for adding some generic noise effects over some elements, breaking it up with a cloud alpha... although I'm not completely sure it actually shows through on this version, so I may go back and look into making it look a little more prominent, but for right now, subtlety, sister!

My own shortcomings regarding the overall progress aside, I quite like how this turned out. This is probably my third-most complex background done so far (first being the Cityscape in that RD pic I did last year, and second being a so far unreleased mini-comic that I need to get off my butt and finish... I'm bad with comics), mainly due to the rock faces and the sand. It got a little tedious, but overall I'm happy to just not be drawing the library and all. Those. Fucking. BOOKS! So it was quite fun to stretch my metaphorical wings and do some naturelike background stuff.