do you still think about it, page 5

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PATCH NOTES 1.5.2
-shortened all of sugar's claws for continuity
-flipped sugar's hair in panel 2 because it is a mirror image
-removed the first smear of panel 6 because it was superfluous and slowed the pace
-fixed the arms in panel 7 for continuity. the right hand clenches the handle right above the knife, and the left hand clenches the top, which was not the case for the smear's first afterimage.
-ruined panel 7 by overworking it for fun

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this page took more redrawing than i honestly thought it would! initially, i planned for the camera to rotate so that sugar stabbed herself in profile, to make the stab easier to draw. there was an issue with this: she'd be stabbing herself with only her brown eye visible. i could flip everything to only show the blue eye, but i, at that point, realized i wanted to draw it at 3/4ths view.
drawing everything flipped while holding 3/4ths was an issue itself, because it would put the blue eye first in LTR reading style, but i wanted both eyes to show a mix of emotions -- blue with rage, brown with pain, from being stabbed. i wanted them to mesh well and not be obvious.
however, the pained eye, i needed large, somewhat distorted, and wide open. this does not work well when that is "the second eye" on her face. i ultimately decided that the expression was more important than twisting a camera in this specific way, and did not flip it, but i still ended up un-rotating some sketches.

the last two panels are a very swift set of actions as well -- not easy to portray in comics. she switches from a hammer grip to a reverse grip using her index finger as an axis, and this especially i knew could not be intuited, because it is not a motion many people make.
i wanted the fist holding the knife in reverse grip to jump out of the panel and function as the next panel's "first frame" -- as the after-image of sugar's arms holding the knife up for the swing.
there were a couple issues with this as well: the perspectives were different between the second to last panel and the last panel -- making it very difficult to use one as a transition to the other -- and sugar's other fist hadn't actually made contact with the knife's handle yet.
the space of the second to last panel was quite cramped, so the finalized version got the benefit of being larger, without also struggling to juggle the last panels' perspective. the last panel would then have to be a little bulky to make space for the smear, but it still came out decent to me. as long as the force of the stab is obvious and believable, i'm okay with it. 

i want the palette to shift to a recognizable "inverted" feel (ironically not using the second palette with blue and brown) several times in the comic, but it was hard to note this in a sketch. i ended up doing a little "ball on a square background" to try to get it across to myself. i will have to intuit that the dark markings will be lighter than her fur.

last note, the next page will have some ultimately censored gore. it will only be censored similarly to how anime might censor gore by just coloring it all in black.