catharsis, page 2

now we can see that the trick to the opening shot is that felix is talking to his reflection. what the audience sees first is felix's reflection rather than felix himself. you can notice this immediately from the first page if you look closely at his name tag, where i made sure to write his name visibly backwards in at least one panel.
this super fucked with my head to work on, because i had to mentally flip his markings back and forth, lmfao. sometimes i still look at it and kind of have a mini heart attack because i think i drew his markings backwards.

to compromise with myself about the color scheme being too... well, colorful for a mcdonald's bathroom, it becomes a lot grimier and dimmer when felix's spiel is interrupted here.
the orange sweatshirt is significant, since the opening scene is supposed to represent the work as a whole; the guy wearing it is a skunk simply because i thought it would be funny for a skunk to walk into the bathroom to use it specifically. the comic is mostly supposed to be humorous with a little bit of drama.
as another little breadcrumb: the last shot of this panel features half of it lit by the yellow of the room on the other side of the door, half covered in imposing blue shadows. this was also intentional.

hopefully it is obvious to the audience by this point that felix is concocting a lie in the mirror. the principal themes of this comic will be dishonesty, a fear of rejection, "being yourself," and how & why people create stories. this is a little list that might enhance your experience of the story if you keep it in mind.

another thing i'd like to point out in my thought process here is that the background is a little awkward and finicky -- i was aiming to have the gaps in between the bathroom stalls look like cage bars. when the camera flips to show felix's reflection in the mirror from the side, the bars are reflected as well in segments of the mirror, but they're now in front of felix.

i was super figuring out my footing with shading in these first few scenes -- felix is very fluffy, and he's also mainly white on his fluff, which is a terrible combination. i had also just come from making drop-out edits, where rendering was intense, and very detailed in subtle ways. i wanted to bring some of that subtlety over to catharsis without going all the way back to that level of rendering, but i think i ended up dropping a lot of the subtleties, as they either didn't add much benefit or made felix look overworked. it's definitely something i'll have in the back of my mind as a tool to help things look less plastic with the cel shading.