Panel 3 was the other difficult cow-shot of this comic. Originally it was an extreme close-up, where the cow’s head and foreleg dominated the panel, and it didn’t look right, no matter how many times I re-drew it.
I was still working on that panel a month later, when I got to Periscope. Steve Lieber suggested that I was over-selling the joke a bit. “Put the ‘camera’ at the same distance in the first three panels,” he suggested, “so that only one thing is different about the third.”
I still didn’t know how to draw a cow from that angle. Googling “cow from below” proved to be a bad strategy. I had no idea what to do. Then, behind Terri’s desk, I noticed a cow figurine in exactly the same pose as Albertina!
There are many exciting things at Periscope studio–huge scanners, wacom tablets, shelves of reference material and talented/knowledgeable/friendly working artists–but the highlight of my day was that toy cow.