(Mostly) complete WORK STAGES on pp.4-5 from THE CHASTE AND THE CHAINED's first story!

From last month's ultimately failed series of "hybrid workflow" experiments (said failure to be addressed in detail down the road), here be the Work Stages on page 4-5 from the opening story of fantasy test comic The Chaste and the Chained. 

For page 4, I grabbed the initial, sketchy page rough, worked it up in Clip Studio Paint, then turned it into a blueline:

..then printed out the page at the scale of a full-size DC artboard on 11" x 17" Bristol, which I then inked and penciled:

I ran the page through some Photoshop tweaking to remove the bluelines (and the odd CMYK speckling added by the printout process, possibly as a mandated "fingerprint" dealie):

(Note that I haven't yet cleaned up and/or corrected this image.)

And finally, just now I took 30 minutes to hastily letter these two pages with some scrawled, "for position only" text that would someday be replaced with real lettering:

Time elapsed on this full-sized comic page: 3:30 for the roughs and 7:00 for the final inks and pencils, for a total worktime of 10:30 scattered over multiple days. That's brutally g-d slow, folks, as I'm not able to squeeze all that many hours of drawing time out of each workday due to manifold other responsibilities (notably including this very Patreon, alas). More on this matter later, needless to say.

For the next page, same process, but with a new twist. 

This time around, I printed out the page a fair bit smaller, so the comic page could fit on an 11" x 14" piece of Bristol board. Inks and pencils followed:

Next, Photoshop tweaking followed, though I've still not cleaned up or corrected the page fully:

Next, this morning's scrawled text:

Time elapsed on this smaller-sized comic page: 3:00 for the roughs and 5:00 for the final inks and pencils, for a total worktime of 8 hours scattered over multiple days. As that compared somewhat favorably to the you-gotta-be-kidding-me total of 10:30 expended on the previous page, I thought this approach showed potential promise; and, as this page was mostly inked, I figured I'd roll with an "all-inks" workflow on the next "damsel & cultists" page from this opening story of The Chaste and the Chained.

A future post will feature that smaller-format inked page which, alas, emphatically did not fulfill the promise cruelly hinted at by page 5's slightly better efficiency. I'll eventually discuss the maddening failure of this summer's stab at a "hybrid workflow" and the multiple, very different options I'm considering next, but as I just spent another 35 minutes outta my critical morning workshift setting up and writing this g-d post, now I'm just gonna hit "PUBLISH" and switch over to other tasks, all right?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?