We can hope with all the showers going that the tile on that partition has warmed up a little.

Probably the dirtiest joke in the comic so far. You’d think it might come from Dabbler, but where as she is a fan of all things sexual, including its use as a weapon, Harem is more like the party girl. I was going to compare her to Paris Hilton, but that’s a bad match. Harem isn’t a flighty, sheltered nincompoop, but she does care a little too much that her shoes and handbag match when she’s out partying, of course only at the right clubs. Speaking of which, I haven’t really decided what happens if one of her gets drunk. I think it would have a rather attenuated effect on her mental faculties cause she’d still have 4 un-drunk brains, and her coordination and reflexes would only be impaired on the one imbibing. Even that would be mitigated because she can keep an eye on herself from another perspective if she needs to. Basically if she wants to get sloshed she needs to order 5 times as many shots and spread them around. If one of her drank enough to get all of her acting drunk her liver would pickle.

Being a comic primarily focusing on the female characters, it’s no surprise the odd page fails a reverse Bechdel Test. (The Ledhceb Test?) When the guys show up, chances are they’re talking about the women.

On the previous page I may have made Varia a bit too buff. She’s supposed to be marginally fitter than some of the other girls just cause of her hobbies, stuff like rock climbing and soccer, but on that first panel especially I think I was slipping into some old habits. I should try and scale back slightly from that. Not on Anvil obviously, but the girls are supposed to be fit, not off-season-Ms.-Olympia.

The vote incentive is finally finished. It came out pretty good considering I don’t really paint like that much. I was trying some new techniques I’ve been studying lately, of course all painting really comes down to basic competence with anatomy, light and shadow, color theory, and composition. I’m comfortable saying have general anatomy down pretty good, it’s when I zoom in really close and start thinking about how light falls on the skin around the eye sockets or against the nose that I need to go scurrying for reference. That and I could stand to be more bold with rim lights and multi color fill lights, depth of shadows, stuff like that, but I learned a bit doing this one and the next one should be even better. Since it’s so close to the end of the month I may leave that one up for the first part of August. It just depends on how quickly I can get the next one put together. At some point the vote incentive will probably be me putting together the cover of the book.

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.