fresh meat, page 12

EDIT: finished going back and adding the detail. if you want to compare it to the version with only flat shading, its link is here still.

wow, i always forget how LONG shading takes. sorry for the lateness of this page... and also that it's not fully rendered right now. i've been working on it for about 16 hours now. there's a level of "unacceptably/illegibly unfinished" and "base shaded" isn't that, so my thought process was, 'okay, i need sleep because i have to stream today too, but i think most people would rather see what happens sooner rather than waiting another 18 hours for the fancy effects.'
i feel like part of me wants to explain myself, but part of me feels like i can only word it intelligibly as "very bad brain problems." the dilemma with mental health issues is that the brain does more things besides feel emotions for you, so in this case, while i know that you have to be accountable for your mental health, it feels like the equivalent of trying to explain why i didn't just willpower away an aneurysm. trying to bootstrap through obvious symptoms as though it was an issue similar to depression has actually been making them worse.

anyway. i don't want to focus entirely on negative for the commentary of this page. i'll be trying to finish up a nice, more thoughtful project i've been working on on the side to compensate without throwing the rest of this month's schedule off too.

1) the yellow speech bubble character is a parrotfish. no special symbolism, i just realized i hadn't made another fish in a while.

2) this is the end of this scene, although i'm hoping to touch up the effects to make that more obvious once i get some rest. the "we've seen EVERYTHING" line was one of the more poignant memories i have -- another one being a cut instance in the last page where the nurse was supposed to snap her fingers directly in front of kim's face because she was dissociating so hard she wasn't responding to anything else. this one didn't get cut.
one difference between that instance and this is that... in my experience, they had actually not seen everything. none of the staff members i've had strip search me have ever seen an intersex person before, or even heard of the phenomenon, and there was a conflict and discussion about whether i needed to be sent to a different ward due to the gender separations, which made it very ironic and memorable to me. but sugar's in this story, and the fact that she is treated with different, kind of haphazard protocols is nodded at later. it'll probably also give that line more punch on a reread of the comic.

3) i had to go back and forth with myself about including this part of the scene at all, but i did include it, with the stipulation that it wouldn't actually show kim stripping (obviously) or even confirm or deny whether she did.
i was fascinated to learn that canadian institutions don't do this. i had a couple of canadian friends who were institutionalized several times, but nonetheless surprised and confused when i off-handedly mentioned the stripping thing they do.
i ultimately included it because if the purpose of the story is to demonstrate what a ward experience is like, and i feel like the stripping part is what catches most first-timers (and only-timers) completely off guard.

i'll see if i can think of more to say by the time i'm done rendering this, but i'm very sleepy as is, and honestly just very glad to move past this scene! it ended up taking a lot longer than i expected, and i've actually been writing a small not-quite-a-tutorial post about the meta mechanics of why this seems to happen a lot when writing comics (even scripted ones like this)