WORK STAGES: Behold the (mostly) completed opening double-page spread from THE CHASTE AND THE CHAINED!

Ughhh.

Behold the terrible majesty of the opening double-page spread of pages 2 and 3  from the first story of fantasy test comic The Chaste and the Chained. Running waaaay behind tonight, so here's a quick rundown of the Work Stages involved.

First off was a digital rough sketched in Clip Studio Paint on the ol' Wacom. Didn't track the worktime involved when I sketched this several months ago, but this probably took at least 4-6 hrs of drawing, counting earlier rough sketches:

Next, using my new Epson printer, I printed out these roughs at the size of DC artboard, lightboarded 'em onto the Bristol, then did an tightened-up underdrawing in H pencil lead. (By this point, I was tracking my worktime, and this stage took 4.5 work hours.) After jacking up the faint pencils in Photoshop to make 'em readable, here's a scan of the taped-together pair of artboards:

Then I proceeded to use both pencils and inks, as in latter-day Empowered, to produce the finished artwork.

Alas, I screwed up very early on and didn't ink the cult leader's word balloon before drawing the g-d cavern background; oops! Here's a quick, crappy mock-up of his text, using the notably poor selection of available CSP fonts:

This stage took 18 hrs and 45 minutes of drawing time to finish both pages. Tack on the underdrawing-related stages, and the worktime totals up at around 24 hrs; tack on further the 4-6 hours of analog and digital roughs, plus the 3-4 hours so far I've spent scanning and tweaking this g-d piece, and this g-d spread took well over 30 hours of worktime, scattered over several weeks of intermittent windows of availability. 

Note #1: With a maddening array of other matters gnawing away at my availability and attention--including this timesuck of a Patreon, for one thing--I'm experiencing great difficulty in racking up enough uninterrupted work hours at the ol' drawing table to claw my way through challenging pages like this. (More on this issue later, if I get a chance.)

Note #2: This spread technically still isn't finished, as it would further need to be either colored or toned in B&W to separate the various planes.

The verdict? The results look artistically dandy, sure, but the process of drawing full-size comic pages via this approach is far, far too slow and time-consuming to be even remotely viable for future work. (More on this issue later as well, as I tried out some different techniques on the successive pages that show a smidgen more promise.)

Wellp, hope you enjoyed the largest and most demanding double-page spread I've drawn since 1999's Dirty Pair: Run from the Future, folks! (Too bad the test is arguably a failure, though.)

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?