fresh meat, page 92 (flats)

this ending is so close i can taste it... what to say about this page... i'm hoping that threading this little slice development will make the sting of a relatively flat drop of carmilla's arc less noticeable. kim not snapping here, and leaving instead, should also indicate a change in the story, even if the conflict still takes place.

for the palette of the hallway, i wanted it to have the same minty teal color as kim's scrubs, like always, but still bright. her colors would be more true to what they actually are, less drowned out by the ambient color of medical equipment.
i wanted it to be still somewhat vibrant, while still clearly being darker than the day room, as the impact of the lighting is now not completely unexpected, and because the ward expects you to be in group therapy right now, so the lights are fairly dim. in general, the lights of the hallway are dim, because they don't want you to linger in the hallway.
i look forward to posting a side-by-side of this page's palette with palettes in hallways with a similar shade of blue-green once this is shaded. i was flipping through some earlier day room pages, and the contrast is pretty drastic, i was really surprised! i picked the scene that the opening shots of page 90 were a callback to for comparison.

i'm also somewhat pleased about the eye-leading in the middle of this page... transitioning to the hallway, the reader's eyes are supposed to be drawn to the contrast of the folded clothes on the floor, in the foreground to help; in the next panel, the room number to indicate that this is kim's room, and the door is closed, rests in a similar spot to where the pants were; she looks down, and at the tip of her snout, the reader can wander to see sugar in the background (or not); kim bends down out of shot abruptly, and they see sugar approaching where kim's face was previously placed in the shot.

the outfit was a challenge to draw, because the sports team logo style is so different from mine, but rewarding. i decided to not have the mascot be anything symbolic (although i think you could really extract some out of there if you wanted to), because it would have felt hamfisted, but the shirt itself and the content of it would be meaningful, not only in that they are normal clothes and not scrubs, or that they are an oblivious expectation of the future paired with a suicide attempt, but because this is a return to what is ultimately a symbol of that suicidality.

i had to cut a line about kim announcing that she was going to take a shower here. it's not the end of the world; it's just going to require a little more intuition from the readers than i really like to trust some with. it doesn't help that her hair is already fairly smoothed out... i used freshly groomed hair to indicate a shower had taken place before.

that's really all i can say for this without spoiling an ending. i thought it was pretty obvious, but i feel like there's been very mixed reception about how that last evaluation went. hopefully the last conversation of the story will also make it a little obvious why sugar has been a heavy focus for the last few scenes as well.