fresh meat, page 51

cranky because your prescription finally went through aren't you carmilla... understandable.
i wanted her to at least get to the point where tabitha verbally taps her on the shoulder, just another row, but after 2 late pages, i told myself i wasn't going to keep making pages longer than 15-17 panels for a while.
i think my urge to rush a scene probably intensifies when carmilla or sugar are in it. when i write lesbian characters they can and do draw a special amount of ire when they aren't being just funny or sweet -- sugar especially has received the most public hostility of any of my characters, ironically. although i enjoy the only writing portion a lot, when i get to actually drawing the page i'm viscerally aware that it's going out into the world soon for every hour i'm working on the page. it is what it is, i guess. it's not a good reason to avoid writing these characters at all.

anyway. the sketch of this page wasn't very different, so instead i added the page's art without the bubbles. my work style has shifted in terms of how many layers i use, and sometimes i shut off the bubble layer and work on the art separately instead of as sort of, one image.
usually this is the case for pages where i'm unsure if i'm going to need to radically alter the placement of the bubbles or remove bubbles entirely. here they're really pushing it, and kind of cramped, so that's why the art was mostly done underneath.

i've been trying to use different shades of white for the eye shines on characters based on approximately how... well they're doing, physically. i'd been trying to tone down tabitha's eye shines and nose wetness to make her seem sicker without directly pointing it out. it wasn't really coming through strongly, so here i didn't put any shine on her nose at all. she also has a pretty dark color for her eye shines, although i contemplated not giving her any at all for the time being. i probably want to go back and edit out some of her previous nose shines now that i've gotten used to how it looks.
carmilla's eye shines are a mid-white, because at this point she is fairly sleep-deprived. a few different spots where a comment could have been made about her vampiric sleep schedule to indicate she hadn't slept i ultimately left out for space and pacing.
i was also trying to draw her eyebags the most intensely, beyond what they usually are, since, in the morning scene, most of them had eyebags to indicate fatigue -- but, like sugar, she has dark markings around her eyes that just kind of vanish them. i figured it wasn't that important anyway, so now it's just another small element going on in the meta...
sugar has the brightest shines: the whitest white i use on pages, usually reserved for eye whites and motion lines. if she skips breakfast, and morning check-in, up until she gets kicked out of her room, and goes to bed early by requesting meds early, can acquire about 12 and a half hours of sleep. she's usually most bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at lunch because this is the point where she's kind of just woken up.
kim also has the brightest eye shine color because i didn't want sugar to be the only one and i figured kim has probably just started running on a second wind thanks to the walking between wings for therapy, similar to the level of alertness after the first few periods of the day in school.
the other thing i did for the characters' appearances is all of them have brushed their hair. carmilla's cheek fur is also groomed.

this time the snack carmilla traded with tabitha is a bag of lies potato chips.
relatedly, this is i believe the first time any of the characters have been shown with a utensil -- sugar's eating with a plastic spork. it isn't obvious as a spork right now, but i'm going to see if i can push in a shot where it's obvious. she's the first character to do this because it's kind of a pain in the ass to acquire one from the staff.

the palette was also mainly reused from the previous lunch scene on pages 28-30, touched up a bit. i figured i shouldn't keep trying to find new ways to make fluorescent lights look okay-ish when this would at least indicate a familiar sense of time even if the clock was in the background of the establishing shot.

anyway, i think that's all i've got to say about this page.