WORK STAGES: My first stab at p.6 from THE CHASTE AND THE CHAINED, via both Cintiq and iPad!

As pieced together in wildly intermittent bursts of Clip Studio Paint work, behold my first stab at page 6 from the opening story of fantasy test comic The Chaste and the Chained, which serves to begin introducing the lead Elf Mage and Human Paladin in a flashback that actually predates the "real-time" Godmachine Cult scene which opened up the story in pages 1-5.

Back in March (ouch), I sketched out the rough for this page in CSP for the PC via my often challenging and uncooperative Wacom Cintiq: 

Then, after turning the roughs into blueline form, I tried inking the first three panels via Cintiq, using a series of unsatisfactory brush tools that frustrated me greatly:

Gotta say, though I don't like Clip Studio Paint's lettering functions overall, I do quite like the program's word balloon generation (via, unsurprisingly, the balloon tool).

Anyhoo, I was so annoyed with my attempts at Wacom inking that I ported the CSP file over to my iPad so I could deploy my beloved Design Brush tool to finish off the artwork:

TBH, I wasn't all that thrilled with both the workflow and results, and don't think this approach is the way forward for my future work. (More on this matter later.)

In the last week or so, I've been trying out a completely different "hybrid workflow" approach using a variation of my old Empowered technique, which covered the same sequence from The Chaste and the Chained but with a different page layout; as you'll see, I thought this version of the page felt kinda "rushed" and overdialogued, so I worked up an expanded scene that uses two pages to convey this dialogue exchange. Yay? In any event, you'll see that revised version at some point in the next week or two, after I scan and correct the new pages.

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?