Year: May, 2007
Tools: mouse, psp7, photoshop
Notes: Faith tries to assuage Jester's concerns about Grudge, telling him he doesn't exist, and does his usual bang up job.
Something a bit more light-hearted than my last few submissions (if you can call Jester's brain damage 'light hearted').
Im quite proud of this, in as much as Im ever proud of anything I do, because its the most characters I've put into one piece for a long time. Also, it allowed me to show the proportions of Jester and Faith (and to a lesser extent, Grudge). Faith is kinda squat and chunky (not fat, mind), but Jester is stupidly lanky and bony, though it may not be apparent all the time.

Rats do not tend to get skinny in the way dogs and other animals do. A skinny rat does not tend to have a 'tuck up' under the belly, or a greyhound like rib-cage, or a narrow waist; these are the features you'd normally put in to indicate a thin animal, but they are not accurate in rats. The most emaciated rats I've ever seen, one of which ended up dying of it, were still not matching the above description. Instead, rats show thinness by having a very pointed, angular spine and prominent hip/leg bones. When viewed from the front, their back would be very arched and pointed and they would be quite 'flat' looking.

I've been guilty of drawing Jester too dog-like in the past to emphasise his skinniness, due to my skills in rat anatomy being less polished, but Im trying to get away from that and keep him more like a thin rat would be.
But back to the pic: I wanted Grudge to still be 100% focused on Jester, even with Faith's arm stuck through him. Grudge is very single minded; he doesn't care about anything except making Jester's life miserable, and he never acknowledges anyone else, which only adds to Jester's feelings of being completely alone.

People may have noticed the amount of night time pics I have done lately (though this is meant to be very early morning, say 6am.) This is purely because rats are not the kind of animals who come out during the day. They dislike sunlight.