This is how the idea was originally conceived. I thought it was funny to be more practical about a cow jumping over the moon (?) and have it in a spacesuit. It looked too cute for me and maybe it wouldn't have been clear enough to everyone that it was The Cow Who Jumped Over the Moon. So I ditched the idea.

It didn't take much imagination to picture what the cow would look like out of the spacesuit, tail high in the air and jumping away from you...no way. In the wrong hands, that could look positively disgusting. So I reversed the cow's jumping direction.

I usually do a more complete sketch (like I did for the top illus.), but I knew exactly what I wanted from this one, and as I was using a vellum for the final drawing (vellum is a plastic tracing "paper" that will take many, many erasures...a lot more abuse than the papers of my sketchbook could ever withstand), I worked out all the details on it.