Happy 4th, my fellow Americans!

Brief artistic discussion moment. When the half-colored version was posted earlier, reader maggPi made a critique comment that they liked the monochrome-white background characters in Panel 2 more than my usual “color everything” approach for clarity reasons. I usually do full-color on my background characters because in general I find the “color the background characters a single monochrome color” technique to be a bit… well, lazy. It just looks off to me to see a big crowd of people all be one single color, and I can’t really see anything except a paint bucket when I look at it.

But I think maggPi had a good point about the clarity part of it, of making the crowd look uniform in purpose and helping the foreground character (Mina) stand out. So I thought I would try a “halfsies” approach to it, by lightening and desaturating the background characters a bit to make them somewhat more muted compared to Mina. Any thoughts on it are appreciated.

Oh and to answer some questions, Tehk is a boy with longer hair, and Te Fahn does not have a beard, she’s fidgeting with her braid. 😉

a last name that rhymes with the first name like that is considered cute in Sarnoth culture, but very kidd-ish. It won't serve her well when she grows up.