A DISTRESSED DAMSELS/ WORK STAGES crossover: Behold the experiment of page 11 from THE CHASTE AND THE CHAINED!

So!

As mentioned in a previous Work Stages post on the opening story from fantasy test project The Chaste and the Chained, one of the last "hybrid workflow" pages from that update showed some promise:

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 (from that earlier post), I thought this approach showed potential; 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.

Wellp, I rolled with the same approach on a successive page (p.11) that returns to the same scene; that is, a smaller-format comic page that fit on a 11" x 14" piece of art board, as opposed to the 11" x 17" board used for earlier tests.

My first take on the layout was quite different from the final version, other than panel 1:

And here are s'more random Elf DiD sketches worked up for use in this sequence:

Eventually I worked up a revised digital rough in Clip Studio Paint:

Looking to avoid that odd speckling effect from printing bluelines on Bristol, instead I transferred the image via lightboard and tightened up the image with the underdrawing below:

..and then inked the page:

And, just now, slapped in some scrawled text for your reading convenience:

Wellp, guess what? The time savings of the earlier p.5's smaller format were emphatically not realized with this subsequent test page, which wound up burning 4:15 for the layouts & underdrawing and 6:15 for the inks. Once again, this page took 10:30 of worktime, which was not what I was hoping for; the results are just fine artistically, but not in terms of productivity. So I pulled the plug on this approach and moved on to further workflow tests, which you'll be seeing shortly, okay?

UPDATE: Just tacked on a Work Stages montage I worked up for Twitter:

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?