A burnt mummy for Melbourne's Child

After the sad stories I have recently been asked to illustrate for Melbourne's Child magazine (Sydney's Child, etc, in other Australian cities) it was such a relief to work on this one. Here a mum laments that her four year old is finding it difficult coping with the attention that the newborn of the family is getting. He does this in all sorts of ways, but when he brings home a picture that he has drawn of the family with his mother "burnt in a fire", the mother is unsurprisingly at wit's end.
As you can see, there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with this one. Here I think that the mum looks a bit TOO upset, but I like that baby looks grumpy! I worked on this picture just after having gone to an illustrators' seminar: there I got to see how other people work and was reminded that not all of the characters have to be sketched together on the same page: this way they can be shuffled around more easily. (I do the shuffling in Photoshop.) That's why the little lad is missing from this one.

I don't remember why I ended up reversing the whole scene, though!