WORK STAGES: The ongoing blueline nightmare of THE CHASTE AND THE CHAINED's page 1!

Wellp, this month I tried out a new "hybrid workflow" on more early pages from The Chaste and the Chained, with an approach that used digital roughs and analog pencils & inks. This workflow has, alas, proved direly unsuccessful in various ways, as I shall discuss in the days and weeks to come as I post Work Stages on the five-page opening scene of The Chaste's first story. 

However, as I've been scanning and processing the finished pages from this test sequence, entirely new realms of non-success have confronted me in an ongoing ordeal which I'm still trying to puzzle my way through.

Anyhoo, for the opening page of the story, I worked up a digital rough in Clip Studio Paint, which was pasted into a scan of a DC original artboard page (hence the bluelines):

Then I converted the rough into theoretically non-repro blue lines, and printed that out on the blank backside of a DC artboard, as my snazzy new printer could not possibly be trusted to insert the rough precisely into existing blue lines on the artboard's face:

Then I used 8B(!) pencils and PITT Artist Pen inks to draw finished artwork over the bluelines, as seen in a subsequent color scan of the original page:

Ah, but when I got around to trying to remove the bluelines from the artwork, I soon ran into weird problems that remain unsolved for the time being, as my usual array of Photoshop adjustments couldn't process the page to my satisfaction. (I'll have to consult with more knowledgeable Photoshoppers this week re: these matters.) 

For one thing, the process of printing out the bluelines on my new Epson Workforce apparently introduced an odd pattern of teeny-tiny dots of color—imperceptible to my naked eye, at least—all over the original artboard:

To quote Francis Dolarhyde, "Can you see? Can you see?"

Anyhoo, these tiny dots certainly popped up quite clearly in the 600dpi scan and are proving weirdly pesky to my Photoshop fumbling, hence the lack of a final, fully processed jpeg for this page. Ughh.

Wellp, next up in this failed experiment with a hybrid workflow for The Chaste and the Chained, I'll post the Work Stages on the epic, sprawling double-page spread for opening pages 2 & 3. That panorama, thankfully, didn't use the blue-lined-rough approach of this page, so it should prove earlier to process in Photoshop (he typed hopefully).

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Ehh, might be the brand-new Life Drawing piece I'm planning to finish up as soon as I schedule this g-d post. (BTW, I just blew three g-d work hours struggling with this page's g-d Photoshoppery and setting up this g-d post. Yay, g-d comics!)