Tsutsui never sees it coming, does he?
Oh, how I love these two. Love love love. For completely different reasons,
of course, since they're two
completely different people. For some reason I get the feeling that
they've been next-door neighbors since
they were about three, which means that poor Tsutsui's never once been
able to get away from Kaga...
which is why he holds the title of Kaga's Favorite Toy.
Ahem. Yes, in many, many senses of the word, according to my brain.
In many ways this was a very difficult picture to pull off, because
I've never really done anything like it before.
It's kind of like a four-koma, really, and I don't draw comics often.
Gah. Continuity. Not my strong point!
I had to do my best to make them look more or less the same in all
four panels; this required a lot of fiddling
and redrawing. I didn't entirely succeed--Tsutsui looks pretty consistant,
but Kaga apparently gained a lot of
weight between panel 2 and panel 3. Actually, he's just far too skinny
in panel 2 in general. Phoo.
I went for a slightly more cartoony look in general, both with the
linework and with the coloring, because I
wanted to get fairly extreme reaction shots. I think it worked.
Specific quibbles: the linework is very wobbly in places, especially
on Tsutsui's face. Especially in panel 1;
poor Tsutsui looks kind of lumpy in that one, and his hair looks pretty
stupid. I'm not sure why Tsutsui got
the short end of the stick on inking. Kaga's hands? Very bad. (Tsutsui's
hands? Very good.) Kaga's face in
panel 2 just pisses me off, because it's about half right and half
wrong.
Inking? Yeah, I never get much better. I also managed to split the nib
of one of my .005 Microns, which pissed
me right the hell off.
Coloring... I wanted to keep it very simple. The focal point is meant
to be the action and the 'story', not the
artwork, so I didn't shade in multiple tones or mess much with the
hair. I've never actually been in an instant-photo
booth, but I seem to recall that they all have those sickly-blue backdrop
curtains in them; I painted that separately and
dropped the colored linework on top.
I kept moving the artwork back and forth and back and forth, Photoshop
to Painter, Painter to Photoshop; Photoshop
to clean the linework, Painter to color it, Photoshop to layer the
artwork over the background, Painter to put in the drop
shadows, Photoshop to assemble the whole thing and add my signature.
I ended up throwing away about ten
temporary files, the total weight of which was about 200MB. Sheesh.
But it's all worth it for the big-ass grin on Kaga's face in the fourth panel.