Making of "Kombucha Girl" Meme

I pull these faces so often as a parent, I HAD to make the meme!

Cartoonizing a photo expression can be a challenging exercise because sometimes the more accurate you are, the more wrong it looks! I started with the harder grimacing face, because if I couldn't get that right, there would be no point in continuing. My process with these is usually:

1) Try to get Fran as close to the photo expression as possible
2) Hide the photo and attempt to get the linework looking more like Fran again
3) Unhide photo and repeat previous steps until I'm satisfied

-so basically a wrestling match between what is right in the photo vs what looks right on the character!

The biggest problem was Fran's big head on a tiny neck, which prevented me from going all out on the "head disappearing into neck" thing that makes the 1st pic so funny. Other problems were the general proportions -Fran's huge eyes and proportionally small forehead, plus trying to get Fran's ears to look flattened from that angle without them disappearing altogether. After some back and forths I got it and the 2nd picture was crazy easy compared to the 1st!

Then came the background and it was at this point I realized I'd been following a much tighter crop of her than was normal and had to redo the composition to show a bit more. This was annoying, but I much preferred the pictures afterwards because it looked better with more shirt and seeing the left side of her head.

I got a bit obsessed with the lighting and background. I had it in my head that they were important to the piece, but maybe I went too far? I managed to recreate the background with my own art, but when I showed it to J, he thought it was just a photo! I decided to change the walls to pink to be more like the Litterbox house (and show that it was a drawing!) but looking at it now, I do wonder if I should have made it simpler still? Ah well, live and learn! I had a lot of fun making this even though it took all day! 😅