fresh meat, page 42

sorry, this page is also a bit late... i had to take public transit and it's pretty time-consuming. city blocks here are considered 1 mile and the only pet store to get my dog's food near a transit line is in the next town over.

anyway... i'm leaving the sketch up for the curious, though i ended up trying to move most of them straight to lines. tabitha's dialogue got tweaked for space but i don't think much else.

it's past 2:30 AM, and i usually try to aim for being in bed by midnight, so i'm just going to have to shade this tomorrow. i'm still kind of unhappy with the palette in a way that's hard to explain and i think i might do better on a fresh head.

i actually already tweaked the palette a bit while laying the flats down -- added a fuchsia and a darker red as additions to the palette. i still feel a strong push to add a truer blue instead of only the teals, or at least tweaking the saturation and darkness of the teal and red.
i got a lot of good responses about the colors, but... maybe it's just personal taste combined with how a good palette works with my process versus a bad palette. i think a big mistake was putting the shadow colors as the base. it's worked before, but my process was way different then, as i hand-picked colors for every single panel and blended them all pretty significantly.
purple is a pretty dark color, so i knew it had to be the shadows, though, and i thought that a mint green overcast as the lighting would be an interesting addition that helped it look like the same hospital still... just like the hallway shots from a scene or 2 ago. the problem is partially the hallway was darkly lit and the cafeteria isn't supposed to be. it's supposed to be a little dim, but still lit.
i think i ended up making the purple a bit too... purple, and not violet enough. the fuchsia was added as an accent color to help it feel a little less washed out and just lean into the purple instead of trying to nudge all of the colors into a more periwinkle zone -- the value transition from magenta/fuchsia and indigo/blue is pretty stark, as blue is the darkest primary color on the spectrum, which would mean pretty much all of the colors would need significant tweaking.
the second red was added because the first red was way too bright and it really pissed me off. i generally only use red for the mouths and then recycle it as an accent color in the lines to unify the palette a little more, but here there were the straws and whittacker's soda. now, products are designed to claw at your attention, so their packaging has a certain aesthetic brightness to it... so the usual red zone that i use looked wrong. but it was way too bright for every other way i use red. for some reason i went with prioritizing the look of the packaging. now there's just another red in there. i might try tweaking the brighter red when i put down shading still.
i think they did a lot for the palette already, though. having a subtler darker color for lines draws the eye away from spots it's not supposed to focus on, and a purple-pink color that isn't used anywhere except for sparse lines on the palette helps draw the eye around. having a purpler tone for this scene also allowed tabitha's colors to fit into the preliminary round of neutral colors instead of demanding a specific brown for her coat, so i was happy about that too.
now if i can just get the lighting to look cool and dim instead of this weird eerie teal, i'll (probably) be happy...

unrelatedly, whittacker and sugar's input on the "are people vegan" question was cut. it wasn't that interesting and the joke was that if you say people are vegan (to eat) then you're saying they aren't made of meat, which is funny, but if you say people aren't vegan then vegans aren't vegan; a grammar ambiguity joke, basically.
i had a goal for the pacing that was "make sure kim has at least broken into the conversation" which was probably the biggest reason for the cut.

that's about all i have to say on this page for now... maybe more after finishing it tomorrow.