An animated GIF showing each step in making this comic.
Someone on Instagram asked me:
"Do you have specific reasons you make a character a certain animal? Or do you just randomly pick an animal?"
"A little bit if both! I’ll start by checking what types of animals I’ve used recently, so if I had a reptile in the last strip, I’ll try to use something non-reptilian for the next one. Then I think about how I want the character to come across -for this one I wanted a sweet Grandma type, so a mammal fitted the bill.
Then I think about the shape I want, in this case a hunched old lady, so I research mammals that could have that kind of body shape once standing up. Then I just pick the one that would be the most fun to draw!"
You can actually see in my original sketch I had no idea what animal it would be, just the general "hunched" shape. It always makes me want to do a tortoise, but I've done one of them already, so I had to come up with something else. I briefly toyed with her being a hedgehog, but I thought that would get a bit cluttered with the spikes going through the headscarf.
For her clothes I referenced The Queen! :)