Duck you!

What happened...

First off, no ducks were harmed in the making of this. The guy picked up the duck looking like he was going to break its neck. But he didn't. He squatted down, back to us, for like 30 seconds, doing god knows what to the duck. Then put it in a box with the top open and took it inside. Then this repeated with the second duck. We don't know what was going on. However, Niki reported that the next day the ducks were back in their pen, happy as ever.

Technical details

Everything was done it in Photoshop, except for the speach balloons and their text, which was imported from Illustrator. My initial sketch of the idea is here. I decided I wanted this to be quick, so I didn't use color and didn't want to have "penciling" and "inking" stages. I also can't draw a straight line, so it's part of the "charm" of it all. Looking at the initial sketch, you can see I dropped the first frame. It required a lot of straight lines.

I started it and was using Illustrator but it became too complicated and drawing different versions of the characters in different scales and poses so they could be recognized would take too long.

Also, there were two ducks in the pen, but nothing different happened with the second, so it didn't add anything to the story (or joke) and this was already at 5 frames.

I used an obvious cheat and only drew the first and second frames from scratch, and then just modified the expressions on the three faces as needed. Lazy. But I was able to get it done in one day.

The second-last frame is, as usual for me, what was in my mind from the start. A big part of this is the facial expressions and how they shift. I think they generally worked. The "biting her lip" part in the last frame was tricky for me and took a few tries. Eventually, I drew a quick sketch looking at the bathroom mirror and used that as a reference. I think it worked. I added my line at the end because it seemed like everyone should say something. Katie's line was pretty close to what she actually said.

The usual disclaimer

As usual, I have my disclaimer that the people I drew don't really look like the real people, and the me on the right doesn't look like me. That's not the point—they are placeholder characters. However, it's slightly more intimidating, since Niki and Katie are talented artists and graphic designers (they can draw and they can draw straight lines AND they can certainly draw circles around my doodles). But they're nice enough not to be insulted...I think...

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