On a tangent - thinking of a love story

Combing the Hair, Edgar Degas. Another painting in the National Gallery that I thought was beautiful and showed a really interesting relationship between two characters which had a lot of potential for development.


Did some rough thumbnails for a story about a barber and his customer. The customer is a shy, generally antisocial character who falls in love with his barber because he is the only person he sees on a regular basis and therefore has some kind of relationship with. He starts bringing the barber gifts like chocolates, flowers, theatre tickets. The barber, who is an arrogant and vain person refuses and makes the man feel stupid, until one day the customer brings him a gilt mirror. He loves the mirror and starts admiring himself in it, but forgets to say thank you. The disillusioned customer walks out of the salon, never to return. Eventually the barber realises he has gone, and waits for him, gradually getting more and more deflated and depressed as he realises he misses the customer.

The following are a few examples of sketches done whilst thinking of this idea - processed hand drawings in flash.

Abandonned this idea when I realised that the setting and storyline meant there would be a lot of repetitive animation, of the smae scene with small variations.