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	HAIRCUT! ... The thumbnail shows the kid with a radical haircut like a mohawk or really moussed into spikes, either administered by a barber, much to the chagrin of the mother, who evidently wasn't present for the operation. That didn't seem right for some reason. Click on any illustration for an enlargement. The first full size sketch: I thought it would be better if the kid cut his own hair when the barber and the mother are distracted for a second...like the barber who's bending over to retrieve a dropped hairbrush. I wasn't satisfied with how the mother is portrayed in the sketch. I wanted it to be clear that she was the mother, and the costume wasn't doing it for me. So what makes this a mother and not just another customer? I gave her another cub (who's being a brat and uncooperative), and made them all pandas to tie them together as a family (and separate from the barber). Water-based dyes are applied as a base coat for the colors to come and to cover the white of the paper where I don't want it. I'll be using colored pencils in the next step, and I don't want to see those little flecks of white paper showing through where they shouldn't. The colored pencil stage, where most of the work is done. One thing that had to go was a comb behind the barber's ear, put there to help identify him as the barber. The trouble was, I didn't put it in the right place...it looked like the comb had impaled itself in the barber's skull, but moving it up put it into the area where the cord was, and I was afraid it would just confuse things. Anyway, the scissors are a clue that this is the barber (and he's a brown bear, obviously not related to anyone else in the illustration). So, as a result of the combined efforts of the white pencil in this step and the white acrylic applied in the next step, the comb went. After more acrylic paint than usual (I chased my tail more than once on this...you know, fix something, then fix the fix, and so on), I declare this (finally) done. Top of the page