"Stranded" (Beauties and Beasts) (Patreon)

     I'm postponing the Boneyard short I had planned for this week because a comment from a patron gave me an idea for a strip that I want to do, and it has to fit into the "timeline" in a certain place. We're already one short past where the new one will go, and I don't want to get too far ahead before we "go back". Don't worry, I'll repost the short that precedes it when I post the new one.

     So this week I'm sharing more from my Beauties and Beasts series--and in the case of this particular piece, you'll be getting a little look inside my Swiss cheese-like, Mad Cow-addled brain.

     I wanted to bring several pieces in the series a little further along last week, so I pulled a few rough sketches out to work on. One was "Stranded", seen above. It features a lovely, petite gray alien who has crash-landed on Earth in the distant past. As I was going over it, turning barely-visible squiggles into readable lines and forms, I kept having the nagging feeling that I had already done this step of the process. But that was impossible; the piece was clearly in rough form, only now becoming something recognizable. Still, the feeling wouldn't go away. It got worse when I came to certain parts of the sketch, where I had originally roughed in very little information, and had to make decisions on what to put there. Then I thought, "You dipshit, you did work all this out before, when you did the color sketch!" Sure enough, I had done a color sketch, so that answered that. But when I went looking for the color sketch, I found a small scan of A COMPLETED SKETCH OF THE PIECE. This is the main image you see above. The smaller, added pic below it is the one I was working on last week. I have no concrete memories, but I must have done the very rough version I worked on last week first, decided I didn't like certain elements of the composition, so I made a tracing paper overlay to transfer it to another sheet of paper. That would also explain why the images are reversed: I wasn't married to the image facing one way or the other, so why waste time putting graphite on the back of the transfer, then have to go over it a third time just to have it face the original direction? It'll be interesting comparing the two, to see what choices I made creating the same image at different times.