Making of "Bustin'"

I find shared pop-culture moments hilarious and took a chance that others would too!  I knew not everyone would know what bit in Ghostbusters I was referring to, but I gambled on enough knowing that people could be filled in in the comments -or be intrigued enough to Google it.

For those who haven't seen it, there's a bit in Ghostbusters where Ray has a dream about a lady ghost who unzips his pants and appears to do something carnal.  It's all very strange to watch now, especially with your kid sitting next to you, but luckily it usually flies over children's heads!

I wanted this one to be mainly told with reactions.  The shock of seeing it, the panic about what the kid is going to say and then the hysterical relief when they realize that there are no hard questions incoming!

I've learnt the hard way that if a comic has repeating panels it's best to get one of them completely finished before working on the rest.  Having to fix a mistake 6 times instead of once is no fun at all!

I spent some time juggling around their poses so they all looked comfortable on the sofa.  I'll often reference real pictures I find online for this, but then run into problems because of my characters ridiculously large heads!  They can't snuggle in many natural ways and I have to watch out for their ears covering each others faces.

You can see here where me owning a real life cat is starting to creep into my art.  Pre-cat I would have drawn Cooper sitting like a toddler on Fran's lap, but after spending many of the last months evenings with a cat on my lap, I drew him "loaf-style" instead.

I got to neat pencils on the 1st panel and then used that as a starting point for the rest.  Once I had the pencils down, I completely finished the 1st panel and then copied the inks and colors to the others and modified them to match the changes in the pencils.

While referencing "family movie night" poses on Google, I noticed that the light from the TV was much softer than I usually draw.  I always start lighting effects with real colors:

Normally I'd then add shadows, with full-color where they're lit up by the TV, but this time I put a blanket shadow over the whole lot -leaving their eyes shining on top:

Then I used a soft brush to add a little bit of light blue on the parts that would be hit by the TV:

I maybe could have left it there, but I was having fun, so I added some shadows to pick out the really dark bits:

Finally I had the "TV glow" look I'd been searching for all these years!

Although I was happy with the reactions and colors, I still wasn't really sure how to end it.  I had a couple of options, but neither were quite right:

I took it to J and he suggested flipping the first option around -Vincent thinks what he said IS funny!  I changed it and his "Yeah, I'm Funny!" smugness was the perfect cherry on top!