Hair pulling, and meat loaf

I've been pulling my hair out (by pulling my hair out, I mean taking the dog for a walk, deciding what new DS game to buy, and watching "the watchmen"...obviously) all day today trying to get my picture book character consistent for the second painting I'm going to do. It wasn't until I scanned the thing in to work on composition and placement on the page that I think I figured it out! Her arms are too lanky and her hands are too big...and there is probably something wrong with her eye. BUT, I am awfully fond of my depiction of Meat Loaf (the loaf, not the singer). Not that I have anything against meat loaf, mind you. I love foods in loaf form (bread, cheese, meat, etc), but it does conjure up unpleasant images when combine "meat" and "loaf". I ran the drawing by my wife to make sure it wasn't too gross for a picture book, kids love gross... right?



One of the things that I find helpful is a comic book trick, where you change your drawing to blue tones in Photoshop, print it out, ink it, scan it back in and remove the blue tones. Editing stuff tends to be a pain but it is essential to getting a good image, or good writing (not that I write, but I've heard there are these people who specialize in editing written things). In order to keep my momentum, tricks like the blue line thing are invaluable time savers. Below you can see what I'm talking about, my old drawing is in blues, and then I re-drew some new arms in pencil. I'll do this a couple of times till I get it right. I think in the old days people used tracing paper, but who owns tracing paper anymore? Normally I can just fix this on my original piece of paper with a good ol' fashioned eraser, but I've drawn and re-drawn this thing so much that my paper is getting unusable.