Making of "Moral Of The Story"

FYI: it's been brought to my attention that Patreon aren't blurring out locked images very well so I'll be moving the main image down into the body of the post.  Not sure how that will affect reading them and I'm sorry if it's negatively.  I wrote to Patreon to ask them to up the blur and they advised me to do this instead which I thought was weird, but there you go! (:

Alright, on with this making of post and welcome to my new patrons!

For a while the kids and I got addicted to Gravity Falls.  I'd never seen it before and it's an incredible show so I couldn't say no to marathoning it.  At one point I remembered I'm the grown up and needed to feed us all.  As soon as the show was paused, the kids started fighting, I can't remember what about.  Gravity Falls has a reoccurring theme of the twin brother and sister characters falling out and then patching things up, so I said "Hasn't Gravity Falls taught you anything?!  Siblings need to stick together!" -to which the fighting stopped and 8yo said the line every mom loves to hear "You're right Mummy!"  *dramatic pause* "..Gravity Falls has taught us NOTHING!" *fighting resumes with gusto*

For the comic version I thought it would be fun to parody some lame kids TV show, like she'd put it on in the vain hope it would make them friends.  The name "Friendship Brothers" popped into my head and as much as I tried, I couldn't think of anything more awful! 

For the first panel, I wanted to capture the ridiculous tangled up mess my boys get themselves into.  It says everything that I didn't need any reference pictures!  For the last fight, I wanted them to be more cat like; spinning around with fur flying everywhere!

My normal process after doing the roughs is to overlay the character sheet versions and modify them -changing as little as possible from the standard shapes (you can see it with the kids heads in panel 3).  This helps keep the art consistent, but can lose some of the energy; so this time I went about it a little differently.  I got the vague proportions from the character sheets and then drew everything new.  The boys ended up not technically "correct", but they look so much more dynamic!

For the Friendship Bros. show I briefly considered making it a My Little Pony parody and anthropomorphizing 2 boy ponies to be the stars.  I googled boy pony characters and was surprised to find there are pretty slim pickings!  Some popped up, but not being well versed in Pony lore, I didn't want to accidentally pick characters that would be a distraction (eg "Pony X and Pony Y would NEVER get along!")

So I went with my other idea of mashing together PJ Masks and Carebears.  The logo is inspired by the Carebears logo:

I traced over PJ Masks screenshots, but the characters look SO damn creepy I had to make their eyes and mouths bigger.  I didn't want to draw anymore of them than I had to, so I managed to hide the TV in the second half of the comic with some emotional background colors.

I've had a few weeks of struggling a bit with drawing, so it was a welcome change for this one to come together so well!  I challenged myself with some poses and Fran's face in panel 3 keeps making me smile.  Here's hoping this is the start of another wave of inspiration! :)