fresh meat, page 48

alright, here it is...

there are 2 sketches for this page, the first one what i was struggling with last week, and then what i did with it to completion on monday of this week.

framing with multiple characters is pretty difficult. i needed to shrink down the second row, and even then it's still cramped and somewhat unclear to me. a smaller model for a wider shot like a waist shot seemed wrong, though... sometimes comics are very legible, but what i aim for is high clarity... the lowest chance of "wait, what?" i can manage.
you can't always do it, though. comics have very limited space, and worse, the use of that space is directly correlated with literary tone in a way that sometimes directly contradicts the literal spatial needs of even basic and simple narrative devices.
anyway, revising the second row, i did shrink it down a bit to make the chair more visible. i also made her maintain eye contact with carmilla for some better continuity. i lowered her head in the third panel to make it a SMIDGE more intuitive that she had lowered herself and made contact with the chair.
... one of the other problems with that row is that kim is taller when sitting in a chair than standing because her legs are so short.
the last edit i made, which i usually hate doing because pixel-perfect selection is particularly annoying in sai, where there is no pixel-perfect selection tool, is i tightened up this shot after it was done:

it probably seems pretty innocuous as a thing to edit but uuuuuh... anything for butt-germs panel i guess.

another continuity edit i made in this page is that this ward has less comfortable seating. it was something small, and i could have backed out of it... but they're also easier to draw. the prior page showed carmilla sitting in a different chair style, and, while i knew there was enough ambiguity that the benefit of the doubt could allow me to just revert back to the other type of chair seen in the comic, i thought it was a lot of future energy invested in just not redrawing some chairs in a couple of these panels. this wasn't fixed until the lining phase... honestly, every phase of working on a comic involves a lot of continuity tweaking. there are so many things to catch. so i don't think there's any particularly unique reason that one didn't get fixed sooner.

in the fourth row i decided to push off any dialogue as carmilla leans in, giving the panel some pacing space to help the reader reorient what's happening spatially. the entire panel's purposes is now establishing that kim and carmilla are closer to each other.

then the next row i changed to what i considered a more cinematic shot, now that i didn't feel i had to show the entire table with all 5 characters to establish space more firmly.

then for the next shot that gets held, i could have the camera tilt slightly and use that space between them as framing for tabitha and the shark, who were the focus.
this change also fixed another issue i had: the door wasn't visible behind tabitha in the first version, but the nurse needed to walk in and interrupt her.
i think it could have been pulled off better, but i think it would've required a lot of gentle tweaking and redrawing this sequence about 4 times.

i considered having several more panels showing this guy walking around and exchanging some words with whittacker in this page, but i thought it'd be better to leave it on this shot here.

anyway. most of these decisions or ability to make them relied on energy and how much i had. weeks and months where i'm consistently low energy end up with a lot of compromises because i don't have the energy to draw it, figure out how it would work.
then for some pages, there is no easy way to do it. it's just energy consuming. these are the ones i usually struggle to do on time. it's frustrating on a weekly schedule, which really doesn't give me time to recuperate or rest in general, but it is what it is.