soft-pedaled, page 7

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soft-pedaled has been on hold for a REALLY long time. i want to finish it even if it means chipping away at it. it's obviously embarrassing to not update a comic for a really long time, especially one i'm obliged to draw, and i know that the shame of it just multiplies and makes it harder to pick it up again.
this page has some borders done strangely because i originally tried working on this more something like a year ago, and got too busy. i altered the pacing slightly, and also noticed that these squares need to be surrounded in white, so the borders need to transition to completely consume the panels at the end of this page rather than flanking them. i'm probably going to re-angle the final borders to meet diagonally instead of just continuing straight down.
the last time i picked up soft-pedaled is still important because i drastically changed the course of the comic in a rewrite. one of the reasons i've struggled with this one is because i didn't like the ending. for this reason, i'll be uploading the thumbs i had done for the original story and its summary. i don't really thumbnail much and at the time, i had only done so because i really didn't feel mentally well enough to draw normally anymore, and thumbs gave me a guide.

anyway, the rest of this comic will be a little awkward, because i've never done an in-world sequence like this, and i'm not a master of the two-column comic structure either.
tangentially, my roommate joked about how izzi doesn't look at the road much in this comic, and i CANNOT stop noticing how much she ISN'T looking at the road now. i knew it was a little but it's anxiety-inducing just how much she looks away!!!

POST-COLOR EDIT: not much changed about this page -- noticed that my sketches near the end were entirely in the new model style, and decided to transition the sketches in this page that way. both felix's and izzi's inner worlds have different palettes to accommodate the transition to inner dialogue, with izzi taking the green side, and felix taking the red. i also wanted izzi to dissociate into a white void, and felix to dissociate into a black void, to help separate them further. izzi was given white because her inner world is white, while felix's inner world is solid and flexible in its portrayal.
the split in the borders was really challenging to draw, and makes me kind of glad that i am phasing the transparency out of pages entirely with newer work.