v. late Dec 2009: Greg and Connie

very late Dec 2009: Connie Returns Home

Now that I think about it, Panel 3's pose may be an unconscious homage to the "love 'em and leave 'em" rerun strip

very late Dec 2009

I'm back to vignettes instead of a more continuous story... so the Liz/Paul situation will have to wait on a Hawk Creek vignette as followup.

And seeing Connie in the reruns has apparently made me draw her hair more like her old style.

End of Dec 2009

Shortly thereafter...

End of Dec 2009

Yeah, I'm going to skip over the wall of text (with copious "um, well"s) of Liz talking about staying. Instead I'll skip to the end:(pencils plus grey liner for this - I just can't seem to draw anything like Liz' Panel 1&2 expressions in non-photo-blue + pen)

End of Dec 2009

... and I did find a .005 liner pen in the 4 aisles of scrapbooking items. I'll see if this brand is more durable.

26 Dec 2009: may I just say arrgh

No, not about the story, about my liner pens. Blobs of ink out the side - wipe them, try using them. Kaput. &*^^%. The last panel was painful to get some use out of one pen.

Brush pens aren't steady enough and the main local craft store only stocks the liner pen brand that just went bad on me (and only down to size 0.01, not 0.005, but I digress). There's one more craft store to try, but I have a busy weekend ahead of me, so I may be back to pencils for a while. Or "pencils-plus": in panel 2, I used a non-photo blue to get the picture blocked out, then went heavy on a regular pencil, then used a light gray brush-pen (where the unsteady thickness isn't as much of an issue as a black one). It's better contrast than the pencils only, but I was getting used to the pens' job.

26 Dec 2009: Boxing Day Shopping?

26 Dec 2009: Comparing Notes

I imagine that off these "newspaper-level" panels, Therese and Liz have compared a lot of notes.

26 Dec 2009 (Therese again)

Therese still isn't a confident mother:I'm still not fully happy with the wording of the dialogue. Therese knows she's not a perfect mother by a long shot - she was able to almost ignore Francoise for a few years (the strip where they run into her and F wants more time, not more gifts). The strip's tone implied that because she could head off to work, she wasn't a good mother, I had Anthony directly tell her she wasn't a good mother, and I think she's still digging out from that a bit. But the "not missing" / "not a good mother" sounds a bit awkward to me.

And I couldn't get a fully satisfactory expression for Liz in the last panel. The FOOB thing would be laughing uproariously at Therese's "fine. if you want her right away on Christmas, you'll get her - after *our* traditions exhaust her" attitude. But that's not really a nice thing to do to a little kid. So I was going for "amused but concerned" or "amused, but know you shouldn't be" and it didn't come out well.

26 Dec 2009: Therese's Christmas

Not much to add. I don't know how much the economy will have recovered by 2009, but if Therese's vague "finances" job is at least not with a company that owns a fund, they might still be in business.

26 Dec 2009: so what's up with everyone?

I fully admit that I don't know much about behaviour disorders, but ADD has some spectrum of behaviours, so Robin's problems could partially fit. And I don't know what is recommended as therapy for that case. Or maybe Liz doesn't have the full picture - she's relaying what she knows and Mike & Dee may not want to give out all the details. That's my "out" if I need it :-)

And while F was born post-Xmas, if anyone could benefit from early kindergarten, it would be her.

Boxing Day Traditions (26 Dec 2009)

Maybe not quite the friends people were expecting Liz to meet:(Yup, panel 2 is my usual level of pencils, which I kept that way for comparison. The next few strips [ETA: M-W-F] have results from various games I played with different pens.)

We're Ba-aack...

So the sketchbook took a holiday, and got a couple of gifts. As in non-photo blue pencils and a thin liner pen. There were some experiments, one of which came out OK:
So this would be included as part of 25 December 2009. I should start Boxing Day tomorrow or Monday (yes, Liz' "people to meet" will be interesting, but not as drawn-out as the Christmas Eve arc).

I may or may not be able to do penwork regularly. One of the non-photo blues is waxy and hard to work with, so I effectively have to draw with the pen. The other draws more like a regular pencil, but isn't quite as non-photo in the results. Plus my liners are frustratingly unreliable - the lines feather - some of that stuff up there was overdrawn with a second pass of the pen, and the couch's outline is of unreliable thickness. In all, it's like drawing twice over... so there may be plenty of pencil-only episodes. But dang, the B&W contrast in the photo comes out nicely.