That bell has never been there before. (Yes, that is a bell on the wall behind Willie … I inked this first panel yesterday evening, when I was too exhausted, so many things in it look crappier than usual.)
Or, rather, that bell has never been *visible* before. Just like how many of the guys in shojo manga are actually hairy, but they are just drawn in a very stylized way so that it doesn’t show, I had up until now been drawing that wall in a very stylized way so that the bell has never shown before.
I’m serious.

For this week’s acrobatics, I filmed myself from behind as I threw myself up from the floor, and studied the results frame by frame. (I had to change pants for that, because the wide ones that I was wearing made my arse look bigger than necessary on film.)

Erlik in the last panel was inspired by my little baby boy Sergei:

I don’t have any hammock here, but I assumed that it should be about the same to throw yourself out of a static bed. (I can imagine that you’d need a bit more propelling power with a hammock, though, since it swings out of the way.) So I tried throwing myself out of my bed several times to see in what kind of position Aeron might come to a halt, and to what extent he might drag the blanket with him … Yes, being a comic artist is so much fun!

In this installment: Tinet tries to make friends with the French curve to make prettier “speed lines”.
In the last panel, I made a few lines with the curve, and then filled the space between them with freehand lines to create a “grittier” effect. Admittedly, it looks a bit less shitty than when I’ve done it all freehand …
I bought two French curves (in the exact same shapes as in the reference link above) in Russia, some years ago, for 8 roubles each (about 2 Swedish crowns or 20 Euro cents – for the same sum you could also get a loaf of bread or a yummy пирожка back then). It says “ЛЕКАЛО И2” and “ЛЕКАЛО И3” on them. I didn’t find any “ЛЕКАЛО И1” in that store, but it must exist … They also had excellent drawing paper.
I don’t really like using rulers of any sort. Most of the time when I really have to, I use a ruler when sketching and ink the same line freehand. Of course, with more practise, I could make ruled lines look less artificial than they turn out when I draw them now, but … it’s much faster to draw freehand.

Bobik’s food is mainly leftover meat, bones, fish, potato, buckwheat, carrots, porridge and other stuff cooked into a stew.