Making of "The Diet Starts TODAY!"

I started out with the characters the other way around in this one as it's probably more relatable to have the wife talking about diets.  But in our household it's J that makes these kind of bold statements, so I flipped them around to match. 

I had Fran with a thing of Oreos in the last panel, but as Dad Cat isn't so into sweets, we had to think up something different.  J came up with the idea of him producing an enormous pizza out of nowhere.

I was going to have this as just 2 panels, but it was losing some of the drama, so I split the last panel in 2 to build up the suspense.  

I fiddled around with the expressions quite a bit with this one.  I liked the big grin in the last panel, but J wanted him to look more crestfallen -like he really had tried and not just planned to eat pizza all along!  

I wasn't exactly sure what that would look like, so I asked J to draw it.  I thought his first "looking up" one was a bit dull and a bit of a downer, so I got him to try again.  He did the one you see here and suggested maybe he could be inhaling the pizza somehow.  The goofiness was the perfect antidote to the slightly "sad" ending so I added the pizza slice and was finally happy!  Yay teamwork! :)

I know I'm not at my follower goal, but the reference photos I took for this one were quite funny and I thought you'd get a kick out of them!   I find anatomy really hard, so I take copious numbers of reference photos for almost everything my characters do.  I find it easier to take the photo myself, because then I can see I'm getting exactly the angle I want -the downside is I often have to take 2 photos for every pose, so I can hold the camera.  

My characters proportions are quite different to mine, so I have to change things up a bit once they're translated into cartoon, but I find things turn out SO much better than trying to draw poses from memory.

Please excuse the crazy looking expressions!  I find getting into the characters "headspace" makes for a much better pose! :P

I'm going to start posting this photos in future "making of" posts!  I'm a month away from turning 40 and I think I might have lost all my shame!  😅