Chesca Hause

Making of "Taking Twees"

Added 2022-11-16 18:56:15 +0000 UTC

J is a master at leading the kids into funny conversations. He'll send me text messages with transcripts of the best ones, so when I get stuck for comic ideas, I'll dig back through to find gems like this.

I was a little nervous about comicafying this one because there was a lot of back and fourths, weird angles and a car interior. So often "easy" comics, turn out to be much harder, so you can imagine my delight when this one came together much more smoothly than I had anticipated!

I realized I often leave out the true start of my process. I always start with the text and how it will be broken up into the panels. The general rules are; 1) Look for natural pauses in conversation, 2) Don't have too much text grouped together and 3) Separate dramatic emotional changes into their own panels. The text will often dictate the widths of the panels -I'll rarely allow the text to take up more room than the art.

Once the text and panels are vaguely figured out, I'll rough out the art. At this point I can usually tell if it's going to work or not and make changes to the flow if needed. I was surprised I managed to pull this one off on the first attempt!

In an ideal world, I would have liked to have had Joel deadly serious in the 4th panel and then had him smirking in the 5th, but there wasn't enough room. I'm always terrified of people online misunderstanding the humor and thinking my husband is being serious about this stuff, so I erred on the side of having him smirking in panel four.

The "twee thief" of course had to be a beaver! I used this picture as a guide: