Making of "A Change in Perspective"

The big challenge in this one was to not make Fran look too cold.  It's supposed to be an innocent enough exchange between parent and non parent friends -just the idea that Fran's "seen some things".

I started with the "WAAAAAHHHH!" coming from the TV, but we were worried it might be misinterpreted as crying coming from the baby monitor.  When I removed it, it left a gap, so I shuffled the sofa over to the left.  I was going to move the bottom panel too, to match, but I liked how the "camera" moved to accommodate who was speaking.

I messed with the fox's expression a LOT.  I wanted her to look like she'd just considered how hard being a mom must be for her friend to say something like that, maybe tinged with a little bit of "Oh shit. That might be MY life one day!"  Turns out that range of emotions are impossible to do in a single frame and she just looked like she was being judgy.  Instead of risking the misinterpretation, I fixed her eyes back on the TV.

The shadows were a lot of fun to do!  I color the characters and backgrounds in the correct colors before adding the shadow layers on top.  

The foreground characters have 2 layers of purple shadow, one at 50% and one at 25%.  I do most of it on the 50%, but sometimes it looks a little too harsh (eg on lighter colors) so then I use the 25%.  

The background is 2 layers of a less saturated purple -the more painty shadows on the walls and sofa and then the sharp shadows on the characters and couch.  I duplicate all the characters lines and color layers, merge them, color the whole thing purple and then take one character shadow at a time and distort it, getting wider the further away it gets.  Here are the 4 shadow layers by themselves so you can see how they work more clearly: