fresh meat, page 21

this page is late because... significant computer problems.

i've been having trouble with figuring out what to do with the shading process lately (obvious to anyone who has seen my personal tumblr recently)... i've left this page with only block cel shading for now. i need to try to figure out how to make it look natural without looking lazy, but the last few pages have looked really bad and overworked to me.
even if i didn't touch the shading at all in this page, i still need to go back and edit a few things (like the koala should be visible behind kim in at least that last panel)... but i wanted to just get it up. it looks acceptable to me as it is.

anyway, first of all, here are the designs of the new characters appearing in this page:

the koala nurse is from page 14. i had fun with these, although all of them won't be in the story for super long, hence why they were introduced with a quicker pace, and after the main cast... i guess it's more of an art than a science, but i assumed characters introduced earlier would probably be more likely to be remembered. at this point, a reader might have a little bit of "cast fatigue," but it's less of an issue if the characters aren't important.

i was getting a bit self-conscious about this part of the story, asking myself why i included this part if i was just going to throw all of the characters out the window, especially if they aren't evidently foils for the already introduced characters... a comment i got on the most recent page kind of made my thought process more obvious to me again: it was one about how kim is rather brusque even compared to other patients in the ward.
the cuckoo i don't doubt is a nice person, however, it becomes more obvious that her pleasantness is at least somewhat motivated by something like a "participation grade" from the staff. the first evidence of this is on this page, where she offers to go first. as the story progresses, kim's interactions with these ward patients affects what she assumes about the main cast.

i've drawn at least a few beat sequences of kim looking around awkwardly... i try to keep in mind how much teenagers are driven by peer acceptance (or disapproval).

that's about all i've got for this page commentary-wise.