DISTRESSED DAMSELS: Complete WORK STAGES on the final EMPOWERED "conventionless con sketch" for 2023!

Behold, my final Empowered DiD commission of 2023, rendered in the two-color, 11" x 14" format I once used for con sketches back in the (pre-pandemic) day. In reverse order from the image gallery above, let's roll through the Work Stages, starting with an initial pair of thumbnail-sized roughs:

Next up, a full-sized rough at 11" x 14"; note that my separate scans for the top and bottom of the piece didn't quite line up, but I didn't quite care enough to rescan the rough.

I'm quite rusty at drawing figures this large nowadays, which probably explains why I drew Emp's head way too g-d small; tough to keep your unruled, "eyeballed" figure proportions strictly correct when you're drawing at a larger scale, I've always found. (Ruling out said figure proportions might've obvsly helped, but I was just "wingin' it," folks.)

Drawing Ninjette's rope-hanging pose from imagination proved challenging, so I dug up a relevant piece of photoreference and based a revised rough on the image:

Yeah, that's better. On to the underdrawing's light pencils on Bristol board, jacked up in Photoshop for clarity:

Yeahp, head still too small, booba too big (though that was arguably the point of the illo's joke); oh, well.

Next up, the inks, mostly rendered via Ultra-Fine Sharpies (and not Extra-Fine Sharpies, which I found to my dismay are a different thing entirely):

And here are the final colors:

Ehh, I might try tweaking Emp's head (and booba) size in Photoshop before this post goes live.

UPDATE: I did indeed make such an attempt at Photoshop tweaking, but I can't claim that the results represent all that much of an improvement:

Screw it, I'm sick of tinkering with this piece. Onward!

Note that Emp's straitjacket was taken from a design originally created for a scene in the perpetually upcoming Empowered vol.12:

However, I didn't bother to go back and actually look at this exact straitjacket design from Emp v.12, hence the slight design differences appearing in this commission.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON:  The Monthly Exclusive Bonus Post for the $10 and $20 tiers will be coming up this weekend (featuring a bunch of CSP sketches based on $20-tier art requests), possibly along with a "Next Year on This Here Patreon" text piece if I get a chance.