WORK STAGES on a 2013(-ish) comic project, pt. 1!

So, here are the complete Work Stages on the opening pages of a 2013 Scarlet Witch/ Domino story I wrote for the Avengers/ X-Men team-up anthology A+X. (I'm a tad dubious about posting Marvel material here, so keep this stuff to yourselves, won't you?)

Anyhoo, this bygone project came to mind as I'm mulling formats and media for future projects, given that the workflow I used on this short story showed some degree of promise, though I soon abandoned the techniques used here.

First off, some too-tight roughs:

...followed by tightened-up pencils on Marvel art board, which were scanned and used directly, without any follow-up inking:

...and then colored by the fine fellas of the excellent color studio Guru eFX, who have worked with me on a number of projects.

Only have one page of the final lettering on hand, so enjoy:

Overall, as we'll see in more detail with future installments of this ongoing Work Stages feature, the pencil-based artwork repro'd pretty well, and certainly saved me a good deal of time over struggling though a separate inking stage—as seen with the nightmarishly time-consuming inks for last month's Harley Quinn story.

This technique showed promise, though the process of sketching super-tight layouts followed by pencils drawn on a full-sized Marvel art board would've still been unacceptably slow and tedious. As I've noted before, a smaller original-art page is always faster to produce than a larger original size; I first noticed this issue with the smaller-sized originals for 1994's Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal, then rediscovered this revelation anew when the even teenier original art (8.5" X 11") for Empowered.

Skipping over a few stages, note that on page 2 I left the landscape open for the creative lads at Guru to handle, which is something I'd never consider doing with colorists I didn't already know and trust:

And lo, the Gurus did a bang-up job on the landscape (and clouds):

Anyhoo, I'll revisit this story's subsequent pages in future Work Stages installments within a few weeks. Beyond that, I might do a text piece exploring in mo' detail the very different formats and workflows I'm mulling over for future projects like The Last Party and (I hope) The Devils' Art.

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