THE CHASTE AND THE CHAINED: Page roughs for 2nd scene (pp.06-09)!

Behold, my initial page roughs for the second scene from the opening story I'm writing and drawing for The Chaste and the Chained, the previously mentioned fantasy comic I'm using as a test bed for digital art production in Clip Studio Paint.

The first scene from the opening story proved a bit too ambitious to tackle right off the bat, as it involved not only a scantily clad distressed damsel but also crowds of mutated cultists, a giant (alien?) war machine and an ill-defined but vast underground chamber, as vaguely hinted at in this early analog-media rough:

(The final version of this page will be an even more ambitious double-page spread to set the stage, BTW.)

Anyhoo, I had trouble making much progress with such a challenging task at the start, so I skipped ahead to story pages 6 through 9, which flash back to a strolling conversation 'twixt Elf Mage and Human Paladin that lays the expository groundwork setting up the overall narrative:

Only two characters and a wee bit of background work, which naturally proved less daunting to lay out.

On the other hand, I soon ran into trouble with the main Paladin figure on the next page:

...as I have great difficulty with drawing male figures at certain original sizes and particular camera angles. In fact, I had to sketch the figure very small, at a scale that avoids this odd artistic block of mine, and then scaled it up in CSP.

Gotta say that I was pleased to work in overt hints from the first pages that the Paladin is already struggling with the whole "purity" thing.

 Note also that his panel 1 dialogue re: "every man-jack with a pulse and some rope" is a repurposed line from that Rose & Lily story with the potion-shop gnomes; I liked the phrase enough that I thought it could be used in a "real" comic.

I should also note that the dialogue in these roughs is "for position only," an only semi-legible scrawl intended to give me an idea of how large the word balloons should be. See, I intend to go "manga style" with the lettering and ink the balloons directly into the artwork, but use software-generated fonts for the actual text.

And here's an overt flashback to his even less pure days before taking up the mantle of Paladinhood.

Anyhoo, this initial, layout-style work stage went pretty smoothly, though with the disturbing side effect that I feel much more run-down than usual after an all-digital work shift.

This effect might be in part caused by how I'm hunching over a Cintiq that's resting on a flat tabletop, raised up at only a slight angle by the tablet's truncated "legs," as opposed to the steeply angled drafting table upon which I draw all my analog material.  Clearly, I'm gonna have to look into setting up the Ergo Stand I bought with the Cintiq, even though my cramped workspace is ill-suited to fit the g-d thing at present. (The quite literally more flexible Ergo Flex arm might be a viable alternative, come to think of it.)

Ah, but these roughs were definitely the easy part, folks. The real challenge will come when I try to produce finished artwork digitally, which is what I'm currently grinding away at with already frustrating results.

I should further note that, while I plan to show Work Stages on pages like these to the $3 tier on occasion (and the $1 tier more rarely), only the $5+ tiers will have full access to the scenes involving "damsel in distress" imagery, such as the opening scene mentioned earlier.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure at the moment as to exactly what's coming up in the next M/W/F slot, TBH. Let's find out together, shall we?