Original Art Sundays No. 248: Sharp Invitations: Curt, p. 6

Posting a day late. I anticipated being tired from Pride and completed this week's page in advance, but I didn't reckon with just HOW tired I'd be, so failed to post last night!
When last we encountered our heroine (me), she had met a charming and buxom young (and I do mean YOUNG) woman with a guitar in the Loring Park. Their hands touched.
This page has little overt trans content, beyond my presence, but is important in other ways. The event is the beginning of my re-asserting the bisexual/lesbian part of myself. I thought that, as a woman, that might and might not be part of who I was, and this part was the same scared little rabbit I was before coming out as trans.
It's amazing how many things we can hide when we're trying to be honest.
Read on.

 What I like about this page: the pacing and layout are right. Initially I had reservations about the sliced angled panels, but it struck me as a way to slow the moment down while maintaining the tension between the principals.
The line of music, loosely rendered, is an ersatz version of the melody to Holly Near's classic song How Bold. This is a song that I would play while dancing and exercising alone, while I lived with Curt, when I thought of Delia.
The trembling tails of the word balloons echo the tone of the moment- soft and eager, yet afraid the whole thing would fall apart at any moment.
It's worth noting that if Delia is reading this, she's probably howling with laughter. She's much more self-assured than this implies, and has such a fericously independent streak that she would NEVER say she belonged to anybody, as is implied in her last line here. But it's verbal shorthand for a very long, elaborate conversation we had that day.
What I don't like about this page: the backgrounds/environments are better, but still need work. The candle on the mantle gave me an excuse to stipple a bit, always fun. The backgrounds disappear in the second and third panels, replaced by a large grounding area of black. This is a little bit of a cop-out, but not much. In that moment, everything did fall away except the two of us, at least as I experienced it.
Also Delia's facial expression in panel two and mine in panel three are a bit wanting. I find drawing left face profiles very challenging. Judging from the few I've seen in comics in my research, I'm not alone in this.
We're coming up on a big scene in the next page. I've been stalling on it a bit, but the core of this work is honesty first, cutting myself slack second, so we'll jump in.
Net seven, as they say in the business world!