Making of "Filters"

The dog family were a great excuse to explore family relationships that aren't there with the cats.  I thought a teen girl would be easy to write for because I could just draw from my own experiences, but I quickly realized that things have changed somewhat since the 90s!  Cue the months long journey of trying to write for a modern teen!  All my ideas were coming from a very naggy "She's always on her phone!" kind of place and I didn't want to be that dull and OLD! 😆

The kids and I will mess with Snpachat from time to time and I'd previously thought how fun it would be to draw the silly filters.  It took me a while to connect the 2, but the teen dog showing Baba Snapchat had huge potential!

I suspected I wasn't the first to come up with putting a grandma on Snapchat so I googled it and I'm happy to report there are videos and they are DELIGHTFUL!  A couple of grandmas even went viral, which gave me the idea for the 1st line.  I brainstormed on how Baba might react to being told she was "going viral" and thought maybe she might mistake it for something medical.

Next I made a list of all the common Snapchat filters and sat down with J to come up with some funny reactions to them.  We got a few down, but I still didn't know how to end it!  J came to the rescue with the suggestion of Baba being cool with her cataracts glasses!

So I had the script, now I needed to draw it!  Get ready for these reference photos! 🤣

I had wanted to get the dog filter in there somehow, but we couldn't figure out a good enough reaction.  Baba saying "Well datz just offensive!" was a bit meh, so I made it the filter that would have come next if she hadn't thrown the phone in the bin.  That joke is more "create your own adventure!" now! 😄

Right at the end you can see I remembered that the images on the phone are flipped.  Luckily it didn't interfere with the flow of the comic, in fact it actually made it clearer when Baba grabbed the phone that we were back in reality!  

I had initially drawn the teen girl with her hair flopping the other way, but I needed her this way around for the speech bubbles to work, so she has been permanently flipped!  Now she has a set direction, I fear it will be a problem later, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  She also lost the chin piercing because it was interfering with her mouth too much.  Honestly the eyebrow one is already a pest, but I didn't want to get rid of both.