Maryanne’s musings:

I can totally relate to dressing a horse in gear that it probably is embarrassed by.  I love bright coloured rugs, decorated browbands and colourful saddlepads.  Judging by the enormous range of gear at the saddlery stores I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that I’m not the only one… 😉

This one was an easy concept. The original sketches had legs though and I’d spent lots of time getting them right, only to have to crop them out to make it all fit.  Especially the first panel was going to suffer if I didn’t bring it in close because the focus would have been lost off his expression.  The female character’s side profile head took a couple of goes to get right and I ditched her original more cartoony head for one based off more normal proportions (but bigger eyes).  I’m still finding my way with drawing people and I’m not sure that I got the female character right here -She probably could have been pushed to be a bit on the crazy side.  But every attempt is good practice, so on we go.

I also did a colour layer in Photoshop that unified the colours and toned them down for a more evening feel, but I didn’t like how that made it feel flat overall. So that layer got canned and only a tiny bit of that effect stayed under the neck of the horse in the third panel.  I think it would have been the right effect if it was a big detailed picture, but for this comic I like it bright and fun.