rowyn

The floating puffball character was adopted from one of

tuftears's suggestions, namely to make easy-to-draw fantasy characters that didn't look like any particular thing or species, but with cute expressive eyes so the reader could relate to them.

This page also has the one thing that I was most tempted to change at the end: in the bottom panel, I didn't have room to put the puffball where he should've been, floating between Peace and Joy. I wound up sticking him in front of Joy because there wasn't space for him anywhere else. At first, I had his back to the viewer, but Lut read it while I was still working on the comic, and commented that he thought the puffball was part of Joy's costume in the last panel. So I stuck in a mouth and an eye to make it more obvious.

It does the job, more or less, but I was tempted to do some serious cut-and-paste work on this panel (with actual scissors and tape) to make the layout work better. I finished my bare-minimum inking on the last page with an hour and a half to go, so I had time to re-do that panel if I chose to. Instead, I worked on making various other improvements -- adding background elements here and there, erasing some pencil marks, checking for spots I'd missed inking (and there are some I still missed, even so. Like the white space between the "when?" and "three months ago" in the third panel of this page. Sigh).

One of the things I did in those last ninety minutes was add the stars into the background on these pages. (I had a white marker for just such a purpose.) The stars helped a lot, I think. Especially since it meant that the parts where there were tiny gaps in the inking coverage no longer stood out -- they just look like more stars.