To me, this is about the funniest joke in the whole book, I realise it is not at all clear why from this frame, which actually just shows that I am very uncertain how an udder works (because I drew it in after I drew the body of the cow, then I thought - well - doesn't it somehow fit to the rest of it in some way?). I still don't know, and the various google image examples I looked at had the udder in a very shadowy bit so it was hard to tell, but then you just go well, this kind of conveys an udder without it being in your face, so that's fine. I cannot tell you how hard it was to come up with anything even slightly evocative of 'cow walking away, making a comment over her shoulder', and whether this does it or not, I guess I can at least say to myself that my four or five earlier attempts did not even slightly do it.
I really got tired of drawing these two as well. I never have to draw Tabby after this page, so I'm done with her now because I did finish it, but I do have to draw Billy (who I guess is in his late teens here) in his mid-to-late 30s, so I guess I have to figure out what is different about him as an adult cat rather than a juvenile. In my experience usually older cats just get fatter but that is not what I'm aiming for with this character. It was a good accident to give them those nasty long noses but the slack-jawed horror expressions have worn me down over time. I really just didn't want Tabby to be a 'pretty' girl cat, regardless of the fairly tawdry device that you know her face is that of a girl because of her eyelashes (not evident in this pencil sketch except the shorthand in frame four to remind me in case I get forgetful when drawing them in with a pen).
Basically I have forty more pages to draw, though I have only run about 1/20 (probably) of the whole through photoshop, but that's slightly more like grunt work (process is draw the page>tart it up in photoshop and add in various greys, erase residual pencil marks etc>save as jpg). The ending is still bothering me because I guess while I am used to writing narrative, my narrative is always nonfiction narrative. So when I finally came up with something I was (and am) bothered about it being too 'neat' (although I know fiction is usually in some sense 'neat' - at least - it has to have an ending of some sort). The ending as it is currently planned hedges its bets; it is partly a callback to an earlier parody of fictionalised, romantic (in both senses) endings, but it has a frisson of perverse 'reality check' to it. But I am still bothered that it raises more questions, but also I am aware that it's OK for an ending to raise some questions. You don't know what I'm talking about and indeed I may even change the ending and pretty soon, me being so forgetful, I won't remember either.
The main practical problem I'm having now is that I think Officeworks has closed, despite their website giving no indication of this - at least - they're open 'for printing' but I don't know whether this means self-service scanning or take your stuff to the counter and get it scanned/printed. I suppose if I can get the stuff scanned that's all that ultimately matters (in terms of meeting my end-September deadline).
The next section I have to draw is dialogue between two characters, it goes for six pages and will most likely just be character 1, character 2, sometimes the two in the one frame just so you don't think either of them is talking to themselves, but in the main, it's going to be a bit of a slog. I have to remind myself that all of these frames are going to be super small, so that's one saving grace of the basic nature of the drawings - there's not much room for anything but hieroglyphs really.
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