Seriously, Kate? That is a top-notch pretty princess pout, though.

I had to make an extra background for panel 5, because flipping the panel art just didn’t flow right. Besides, we’ll eventually be back in the kitchen some day anyway, so may as well make that backdrop now. My reasoning for doing all the stupid little collage frames is far less reasonable though. That was pretty much, “Gee, this wall is kinda empty. I bet they’d have photos up – let’s do that!” You know, so that I can cover it up with word balloons, because I manage my time super-efficiently.

Hey, you can totally kinda, sorta (not really) see two characters we haven’t met yet! …The third is under the word balloon, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time finishing the art I used for that frame so, like, fuck this shit, right?

Right.

I get the impression Sam is having absolutely zero of Kate’s teenage bullshit right now.

Considering how much I HATE drawing trees, you’d think I wouldn’t decide that Sam needs to have a ginormous tree tattoo on his arm. Also, that we need to see it because it’s summer. “Maybe it’s not too warm yet for him to wear long sleeves. In August. In Colorado.”

Yeah, no.

Fun fact: Sam has one more tattoo that’s not visible here. Ooooo!

Thankfully the third page takes place in the same set, so that’s a relief. Page four ALSO takes place in the kitchen! Oh, how I spoiled myself when I wrote this. (Page five requires not only a new set, but it’s outdoors and has A: architectural elements, B: landscaping. This is what I get for forcing myself to write the story without regard to how hard any aspect may be to draw.)

I’ll probably post a full version of Sam’s tattoos soon. That tree took hours. I did the full thing and then applied it to the character on a Multiply layer, and transformed as necessary for size, skew, warping, etc. Fun! I’m pretty excited with how well that works – trying to draw and color tattoos every page would be insane and they wouldn’t look as good. Too tiny to get that much detail!