fresh meat, page 41

because there are so many characters... this page has a lot of details flying around. it's also late. i started to mentally note the smaller ones i tried to do in my head to list out:

• carmilla is drinking blood packs, which are modeled after capri sun pouches, since those were visually similar to IV bags of blood, and also probably the most chemically compatible with a viscous separable fluid
• originally i was thinking of having paper cup-pouches like minute maid juice packs, but i remembered those are usually frozen, which is not compatible with blood's composition
• sugar is eating a hot dog with scrambled egg on top. i decided to relent a bit about the protein composition of her meal because cats go bonkers over bread even though they're obligate carnivores. sugar's meals look so sad sometimes
• sugar is using a napkin under her hot dog because she doesn't want her hands to feel greasy
• whittacker is eating 2 burgers at once, the texture of which is modeled after these weird burgers in an early episode of ed edd n eddy, "nagged to ed"
• carmilla's ear twitches in panel 2 as she hears tabitha leave the lunch line from the other side of the cafeteria
• sugar chokes on part of her hot dog and chugs water to wash it down
• whittacker is too engrossed in her food to open her eyes to notice tabitha. she probably closes her eyes to focus on the taste of the food more
• by the time kim confronts carmilla about her seat, whittacker is done with her meal entirely. she has a soda like last time which she seems to save for last
• the extra 2 pouches in the sketch by carmilla were added later, to imply she managed to bully sugar and whittacker individually into grabbing her a ration of blood from their lunches as well... hence why they're a weird seafoam green color in the sketch
• tabitha has a juice box in addition to the bag of blood on her tray because she probably didn't realize there was something she could drink until she was grabbing something for carmilla from the fridge in the lunch line
• tabitha is again wearing a sweater that keeps her wristband hidden because she's cold from the lack of food
• she's wearing a different sweater with cuffs that is partially unzipped to make her seem a little more relaxed and feeling like she's part of the group at lunch
• the seating at the table is uneven, with carmilla and sugar sitting extremely close to each other, and tabitha sitting pretty close to carmilla's other side, leaving whittacker on the opposite end of 3 of them at the table
• drew tabitha grabbing the pretzel bag in a way that indicated she was intuitively planning on flipping it over as soon as she had it to look at the nutritional information
• needed to draw the nutritional information on the side visible to the viewer in the pretzel bag's first appearance because it needed to spatially make sense that tabitha was flipping it over, unlike the sketch, which had the front showing to make it more obvious the bag was pretzels
• kim was supposed to leave the lunch line WITH tabitha, because i feel like tab would see her and wait for her to finish too to walk together
• but i wanted the focus to be on tabitha and carmilla's interaction first. there was no good way to show that kim was there the whole time, and i decided kim walking up to the interaction made about as much sense and was a fine interpretation too, but implicitly it makes more sense to assume kim was standing there the entire time because she's the narrative propulsion of what gets shown in the story
• carmilla doesn't have breasts but she's implicitly wearing a bra like it's a purse you wear under your shirt
• in the second to last panel, carmilla leans over to grab sugar's arm like "BUTCH. DO SOMETHING" when she feels threatened by kim's confrontation
• originally in the first 4 panels carmilla had one leg up on the table to help indicate she was leaning back in her chair, still only FAINTLY visible in two of the referential undersketches, but i decided to just have her doing the knee-to-chest gargoyle position to make room for the extra blood pouches (plus feet on the table during mealtime is so rude it's barely tolerable)
• tabitha grabs the bag of pretzels with her left hand because she's left-handed and carmilla hands them to her with her right hand because she's right-handed, and needed the more dexterous hand to pull the bag out of her shirt
• kim is a chronic milk-drinker apparently, second time she's had milk on her tray

anyway... sorry for the lateness, i forgot that having so many characters makes pages a lot more labor-intensive. i tried to swap out monday for starting to sketch the side comic that hasn't updated in forever and then... dominoes.

i'll finish this up in the morning, because i'm really tired and there's still a ton to do for this page too.