I am at the point in the first storyline where the other moms appear. (Well, not Bud's mom.... she'll be here for the holidays, though!)
As any Precocious scholar can see, I have been deliberately trying to make my kids shorter and cuter. This small change is positive for the strip - the kid's arms can't reach the top of their heads, but the shortness allows for more adorable dialog - but it also means rethinking the look of the parents. For Sky, the change is beneficial because I get more face space for her cranial quirks. For Ivy... the bigger head makes he look really young. One think I'm trying to get around this is giving the adult women the almond eyes. It works when I do it right...but I rarely do it right. The other is to make the eyes proportionally smaller on the adults. This means I must counter all the muscle memory I build up - but correcting it is far easier when drawing the strip than with even-erasing-shows-up-when-scanned sketches. Finally, I could just alter the character design to suit the latest style.
Is it time to rethink Ivy's hair draping over her face? Maybe try shorter bangs? Maybe shrink the ears to a more natural size? Maybe stop worrying over a character who is obviously Autumn's mother? (In fact, Autumn looking like Ivy's mini-me is a key point in many stories and somewhat of a go-to gag.) In conclusion, I need to stop worrying and enjoy the cute.
(I may do a Sky-centric update tomorrow. Ivy got the nod today because I could just scan the sketchbook page I filled with her. Today, laziness won.)
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