[dc]I[/dc] didn’t even think about drawing a Valentine’s Day comic until Steph said, “You should draw a Valentine’s Day comic.”

A good idea, that. This was after I showed her thumbnails for a couple other strips I thought about drawing for today. In typical guy fashion, I totally forgot about Valentine’s Day–even though I wrote an Amazon Enigmas post about Valentine’s Day last week. Go figure.

Steph helped me write this strip a bit too. My original idea for this strip was pretty much the same, with the roles reversed: I would be the one making her watch something dumb and/or geeky (my ideas either being ALF or Ancient Aliens).

We both decided that was cliché. And since we happily watched Predator on Valentine’s Day before, our watching ALF or Ancient Aliens would not be too outlandish.

So, I flipped the roles. Steph loves Dance Moms (as her different size eyes indicate), while I can’t stand a show consisting of grown women yelling at little girls. Instant hilarity.

I really pushed the cartoony look with this strip, and I like the result. I am working on sticking to a consistent character design for the comic versions of Steph and myself, which helps. I had to practice drawing kissy faces for the second panel, because I have never done that before. I enjoy exaggerating expressions, and want to keep it up.

There are a couple of cameos too–Nigel the cat on the floor and No Filter Fox in the picture frame.

At first, I tried a halftone effect again, just like last week, but I wasn’t happy with the result. I used two different methods, but I didn’t like how it looked. So, I just kept the shaded layer and dropped the opacity.