Zoe Jay

This is probably the single most difficult time I've had working on a zine piece, which is really something. I put dozens of hours of work into this, probably around 60, definitely at least 50. I thought I would be saving myself some time by doing a lineart style of comic instead of flat limited palette like I normally do; more work on the front end that serves to simplify the finishing significantly by making it easier to color. This was completely wrong and I ended up really floundering. Well, that's drawing for you. Sometimes you spend what amounts to a week and a half of full time work on something and it looks worse than things you've drawn with a tenth of the effort. That said I had fun playing around with all of my little paper scrap and ribbon photo pngs, and it was great to get to draw a headcanon I've had for a really long time but haven't had the chance to do anything with up until this point.

There was a bunch of additional stuff I wanted to add but couldn't figure out how to cram in here because I have a lot of thoughts on this period of the canon. The snippets interspersed throughout the last couple of pages are bits of senryu poetry, which dahlia was studying while at ivy, but my headcanon is that dahlia was some kind of undeclared humanities major just kind of coasting through general credits, and specializing in senryu is something iris has a real passion for and decided to pusure while she was impersonating dahlia. I think dahlia stuck with it mostly for the sake of not rocking the boat too much and because studying poetry is something she felt she could coast with. i don't see her as caring all that much about her academics, certainly.