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Early on I was fretting about how I was ever going to release a fully-colored comic page each week, largely because I had really low confidence in my ability to do shading and backgrounds.

A good friend of mine named Leo that I've collaborated with in artistic efforts before offered to do the backgrounds and shading and final stage polish for me, which would have saved me a great deal of time.  This project, however, had been my creative brainchild for the better part of a year, and it felt weird to me to bring someone into it like that.  One of my major reasons for making a webcomic in the first place is to practice and grow my own artistic skills, so passing off a part of that process wasn't really going to help me on that front.  Furthermore, this project is mine, from start to finish, and though I occasionally tap into outside opinions to make sure the overall direction of my story is on track, or that it makes sense on the whole, it felt weird to bring someone else into it without really giving them any influence over the story or process.  It also became clear pretty rapidly that he was going to be busy with several of his own projects as well, and I didn't want to keep burdening him with extra work.

I feel like he did an excellent job with the background and the lighting on this page though.  When I redid it with my new style for backgrounds, I pulled the back wall in a lot closer, because I wanted the space inside the Ramen shop to feel small and tight.