Making of "Fly"

I'm afraid I didn't do a great job of capturing the progress shots on this one because I had to get the repeated frames down 1st before I could work on the action ones.  Probably more interesting though is to walk you through the main steps anyway,  

J had the idea for this one really clearly in his head, so he story-boarded it out for me.  I LOVED it, so I figured I'd just redraw it in my style.  As I did so, I ran into some issues with how they were sitting.  I didn't like how the dad and baby were just staring into space.  J said they were supposed to be watching TV, which I realized was a sign of the times that I didn't immediately realize that!  Still, I liked the idea of everyone in their own little worlds, but still "together".  I gave the dad a Switch, but didn't want to give the baby another screen, so I added the mouse toy from an earlier strip.  

I reworked their positions a little, both for necessity, (some things didn't work once they had the correct proportions) and personal preference (the mom's pose didn't seem very "momish" and I wanted the dad and kid to be a bit more snuggled up) and ended up with this:

From there I refined it and then repeated it for the other frames, adding slight changes.  I adhered pretty closely to J's roughs for the action shots.  He'd forgotten the tails, so I shuffled the mom panel around a bit to make the most of adding one.  J really liked my pencils and suggested I keep it looking rough with the inks to give those panels a more "frantic" look.

For the action panels, I colored them normally and then applied an adjustment layer that tweaked the color balance more towards red.  Here they are before it was applied:

The final change was the baby eating the fly.  He was originally like this, but my friends said that it was a bit confusing him saying "GULP!" before actually chomping down on the fly.

All in all, this strip was a pain to do, but I LOVE how it turned out and it was so cool to have J more involved in the art! :)