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Back again with a fun short! I was thinking about Christmas stuff and had just seen Red One, and so had Gryla in my head. It occurred to me that a fun Christmas yuri story would be Gryla having a yearly affair with Mrs. Claus when Santa goes to deliver presents. He’s always too busy to pay her enough attention — like, multiple sources on Christmas lore even say he usually calls her honey or dear, and that’s why we don’t have an official, established first name for her. Also, Gryla has so many kids running around that she has to always be “mom.” I think I had initially thought of another beat about Mrs. Claus, but I forget. There wasn’t room for it.
I went into this fast, just because I wanted to do this fun seasonal thing. As a result, I didn’t set myself goals on what to accomplish artistically. I wanted to get it done right away, since it was a simple thing and honestly I just don’t crank out stuff like this much. It’s a fun exercise in itself. So there are some more simplistic things I did in putting this together that I do want to move past in other work, like the straight-on view of the desk with no perspective work, but I’m not disappointed by it here. I think Santa’s cabin in the North Pole should be a simple setting, you know? Somehow, to me, that kind of simplistic construction feels right at home.
What I did like was doing the overlapping figures and working with this new page ratio. I haven’t purposefully worked with a frame meant to fit well on a phone screen before, and it did bring new challenges. I had wanted their full body figures to be page-length, but then they’d take up three-quarters or more of the width. The last page, in particular, had a notable deviation in how I organized the word balloons; with how squished the three panels were at the top, I couldn’t fit the first two among them comfortably, and thus moved them around. Or maybe I was being too precious, and it wouldn’t have hurt to cover up part of their hands? I don’t feel strongly enough to change it now, and I do think hand-holding is an important image worth preserving. The important thing is that I drew two pretty old women kissing. That, and I made a point of keeping the color palette simple, instead of giving everything a very specific shade of grey. It looks a lot cleaner that way.
Life in the Gutters 