Maryanne’s musings: Sometimes I have an idea for a comic but have no time to sit down and make a good start. I’ll either quickly email myself the idea from my phone so I can pick it up later, or if I’m lucky I’ll load up Illustrator and give 5 minutes to playing around with the dialogue.  This comic started with the Goldilocks style horse dialogue and not much else. It was when I re-looked at it a second time that the rest all nicely fell into place.  Then I started sketching and storyboarding it into the frame. The second panel didn’t exist until late in the process. The dialogue from the 2nd panel was in the third so the chestnut horse’s eyes needed to be focused on the grey horse, but I quite liked his stunned expression, so I managed (yay!) to get a second panel in.

The fiddly part for me on this one was the 4th panel. Usually I remember to double-check symmetry early on in a face-on scenario. The mouth can hook upwards because he’s talking, but I’ve got to have the eyes the same size and not have one side of the face bulge out. Anyway I took a fresh look at it after doing all the shadows/highlights and realised it was all out of whack. So back to the original file I went for a bit of surgery in selecting my favourite side of his face, copying it and flipping it to get the eyes and cheek profiles symmetrical.