Chesca Hause
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Making of "I Wish"
🕑 Added 2021-07-06 15:26:02 +0000 UTCThis happened the other day while I was tucking 6yo into bed. He clapped back with "-but YOU have loads of toys!". I prefer to make a gag visual, so I set the comic in Fran's office and had Vincent give her a withering look.
I added a step to the animation above where I bring in my "paper dolls". I do this every time, but I never thought to screenshot it. I have a character sheet with emotionless outlines which I place over the rough pencils. I chop them up and move the body bits around to create a guide for my neat pencils. It keeps the characters in proportion with each other, as well as anatomy semi consistent. I would be absolutely appalling at keeping on model without them, although sometimes I do long for a more "stretchy" freehand drawing style, which this does limit.
I experimented with different poses in the top panels. I wanted Fran's eyes closed so she only realizes her mistake once open, but combined with the hands together, it looked like she was praying. I went back to my first instinct of the raised pointer. Whenever possible, I like to have as much difference between the panel poses as possible, so now she had her hand raised, I changed Vince to have his down. This adds some visual interest and makes things seem more animated and natural.
The toys took a while to draw. They are all mine except for the 3 horror POPs and the Starship Enterprise. This is a nod to how her and I are slightly different. I do enjoy all these things, but her passion is writing Sci-Fi horror novels. This has never come up in the comics before, but it will come into play if we ever get a TV show.
For every punchline I ask myself what needs to come first for maximum "punch" -the words or the image. I'd decided the words should come first on this one and placed the speech bubble accordingly. It wasn't until I'd colored it that I realized I'd made a mistake. The speech bubble was getting lost in the shelves, I had an ugly looking gap by Vincent AND actually, perhaps it was funnier to have the reader reach the conclusion just before she did. I moved the speech bubble, which was a huge pain in the ass because I had to draw in all the toys behind it. I'm glad I did though, it would have bugged me!
