I cannot draw a newspaper from memory

Soren Pingo: Newspaper reader. I dunno... are wry comments always funnier when said by a newspaper reader? Now that I think of it, a future storyline is partly based around Soren's daily newspaper rituals. Librarians love reading... but is reading a newspaper when surrounded by books cheating? Maybe it's like flirting with the floozy checkout girl just because she smiled at you and then going home to your beloved wife. Maybe I'm thinking too hard about sexualized word delivery units.

So where was I? Oh yeah, I was going to see if I could do another family portrait with the Pingos because I haven't drawn many Sorens. This quickly failed as I somehow couldn't draw a proper Autumn without soiling the page with my drool. Ok, that sounds really wrong, especially after a paragraph where I implied newspapers have loose morals and inclination to naughty deviation. What I'm saying here is that I finally drew a worthwhile Autumn and then did one of those "about damn time" sounds - which resulted in my spitting all over the page. Maybe this is why my friends never invite me to parties.

Portrait failed, I tried to draw a Soren just for practice. As the title of this post states, I couldn't figure out the proper newspaper pose, so I gave him the blank cheer expression that he would have had in the posed family portrait. Somehow, with this guy, it's appropriate no matter the context.

Soren is also supposed to be a bit overweight, but I'm not sure how well that came across. It's surprisingly difficult to get these weight subtleties with the characters at this point. Soren is chunky. Deirdre is curvy. Sky is skinny and compact. Ivy is to be the moderately-slender control case. None of that really comes across with the strip yet. I'm not even getting into Harvey Linkletter, since I'm still not sure what proportions are going on with that guy.

Soren was named after the Dane that came to America and started my Paulsen family, by the way. Just FYI. (Edit long after the fact: Turns out he was Soren Hansen, but his daughter still bred Paulsens!)