#mouse rules

first! before anything! go read my comic! it's about a witch who tries to break a curse on some people who got turned into mice but it turns out they want to stay mice!! my sister and i work sososo hard on it and also it's silly! read it here @notinvitedtothemouseparty or on the neocities our younger sister made (mouse-party.neocities.org)

now that we've got some basics out of the way, when annie (sister) and I first started throwing this idea around we realized we wanted the mice to look like a completely different art style than the rest of the comics. the easiest way to do this would, obviously, be to get a non-annie artist to draw them.

i am a non-trained artist, outside of like. elementary school art lessons. but during the first COVID lockdown, i had started a silly little challenge to draw a mouse (completely unrelated to this project) a day every night before bed and sent it into the group chat we share with our sister. going back over these drawings, it was really cool to see how i progressed drawing the same thing consistently and we started to discuss whether or not *i* should be the one to draw the mice. which um!!! made me a little nervous ngl! annie is very talented! and i didn't really know how to draw hands!!

but when we put some of my mice on her backgrounds it felt kind of undeniably charming. the contrast between the watercolors and the paper doll-like mice worked really well together and i think ultimately ends up serving a good thematic statement. this comic is fundamentally about Growth And Creativity In The Face Of Weird Horrors And Situations Also™ and what better way to show that than conducting a story-wide psychological experiment to see if i end up going from being a scribbler to an all-around okay illustrator! could get better at art, could get worse! the goal here is fun and also to finish a project amen forever and ever!

the mice needed to be pretty simple shapes so i knew i would be able to replicate them over and over. all the mice are going to have the same basic head shape (circle+triangle), eye shape, and tail style with variations in the body shape and hair. bc they don't really have mouths or large eyes most of their emotive energy comes from the tails and eyebrows.

while i reserve the right to change the way i draw the mice at any moment (more on that later) i decided pretty early on that i didn't want to erase the pencil sketches after i inked. i think it gives them a cool "in process vibe" that reminds readers of the fact that they are in a literal created state via spell

i also decided there wouldn't be a lot of redraws allowed. part of the deal with me taking on some of the drawing would be i could tap out and have annie help me at the sketching phase if a pose was coming out a little TOO whack but for the most, first drawing is what sticks.

now that the mice are finally in the comic some keen eyed readers might have noticed there are some differences between the first promotional cover we posted and the first page they appeared in and the first page the mice appear in as characters. that's because (trade secret) they were drawn at least a year apart from one another! all that is to say is that there isn't really a way for the mice to ever get too "off-model" if a part of the experiment of this comic is to watch the way i draw evolve.

for a more detailed breakdown, here are the two pages im talking about below:

a big difference can be seen in how i drew the mice's ears and how the clothes became more complex.

first appearance from the mice in story = all white ears with flat black and white colors

promotional poster = hatching give the ears a slightly more 3D/curved look and the clothes have more going on then just being white or black lol

with this close up on the couch from the promotional poster, you can also see some of the "roger rabbit" production approach we have going on. first, me and annie discuss general composition. then, she paints the background in watercolor. then i draw the mice and we throw them in. this gets more difficult when they actually have to interact with the environment! with the two mice on the couch, i drew the mice and couch all together based on measurements of the couch that annie had already painted so they would approximately align when we had to edit them together. here, you can see i left the pencil lines of my sketched couch in the final scanned mice so you can kind of make out its rough outline: