First artwork of the year

It's quite a surprise, but did my first digital painting of 2025. I hadn't actually planned on this, but sometimes things just happen. The origin of this odd piece is  is as follows. In one of my classes this semester, I was asking for suggestions of an image to search for. I heard 'frog' and did an image search. An unexpected image was among the results. I liked this little guy just sitting on the edge of a rock, dangling his feet in the water. It just called out to me to paint it, but I felt it needed something. Frogs aren't known for wearing clothes, but I felt that this guy needed some swim trunks, especially given his pose. I couldn't stop there and thought he might need some water wings, if only to boost his confidence. I started with this simple sketch, done freehand while looking at the reference image. You may notice that I used a toned background; that's almost always a better idea than starting out against while. 

For the brush, I decided to step out of my usual comfort zone and started with a different brush from Photoshop's Natural Brushes group, now assigned to Legacy status. I didn't use either of the two brushes I use for just about all my work. I made some modifications to the brushes I chose this time, but was always mixing up the brushes used for this piece. I was trying to see if the working process or the end result would be noticeably different from what I usually do. In this next step, I painted on a layer underneath the sketch layer. For the green areas, I used a Pantone 580. For the pinker skin areas, I used light Warm Greys. This is a common practice for me that I kept up with here: I start out with a range of PMS colors to start out. Painting lightly and loosely, I allowed some of the background color to show through.