Straight-ticket

This one seemed simple from the start, and it was - but it had some challenges nonetheless. It took a little more than an hour to complete (full disclosure: I had to go back a couple weeks later when the Iowa Secretary of State mentioned this will be the first year Iowa ballots won't have the straight-ticket option, and you can see the change in the animation below). I was very satisfied with the color palette. The simple composition multiplied out over the panel was a fun one to shade. Of course, I saved some work for myself by waiting until ink, shading, color and highlight layers were all in place before I copied the frame for the triptych. I thought it would be just a matter of adding the speech bubbles at that point, but it took a bit more. The frames needed to be differentiated very badly. Thankfully, being an avid fan of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," I immediately thought of using a dark line for the outer two copies, and I later found using a blurry eraser to trim the center copy compounded the effect. The center panel was already going to be silent, thanks to what I learned from McCloud's book in the section on sequential perceptions of time. Before I finished, I applied another of the book's concepts (this one on auditory perception while reading words associate with pictures) to the second speech bubble, which is why it is lower and has a swooped tail. Hopefully, this one will run in our edition before Nov. 6, but we'll see how things work.