DISTRESSED DAMSELS: Sudden "HAPLESS HALF-ORC" post!

This week, I'm interrupting the ongoing serialization of the Dirty Pair Pint-Size(d) Ninja Platoon story in favor of posting some recent commissioned damsel-in-distress pages that may have spun themselves off into a completely different project. Huzzah!

Anyhoo, I had an outstanding DiD commission from a long-time client essentially involving, well, "something with lady orcs." Wellp, I was interested in exploring a possible new art approach for commissions, so over the weekend I worked up the idea for a fetching half-orc lass running afoul of a hostile Dryad Druid mistaking our good-natured, adventurer heroine for a chaotic evil orc-clan straggler. Below, initial designs for the two characters: 

Then I worked up rough sketches for the first page:

Note that the full-figure rough above looks quite a bit better than the image seen in the Sharpied, colored final page below: 

I normally just use red and blue as colors for these 11" X 14" con-sketch format pieces, but I broke with tradition by digging up some green colored pencils for the Dryad.

Note also that, with our hapless half-orc heroine, I was trying for a softer, fuller-figured physique than I normally draw (even on modern-era, mo' zaftig Emp), an effort which became even more pronounced on the next page's roughs below:

And once again, those rough sketches wound up looking better than the finished artwork,  as seen below:

Due to an unfortunate breakdown in communication with the commissioner, these finished color pages may have wound up being, well, not what he was looking for. Whoops! (Pretty sure I can dig up someone else to buy 'em, so no biggeh.) 

Howeva, two key insights arose from these pages!

1) This art technique, of doing partial-color comic pages in my usual con-sketch format, is completely unworkable, as it's far too slow and time-consuming for the page rate involved. Not a huge surprise, TBH, but still a valid discovery.

2) Ah, but far more importantly, over the last few days I realized a very different story I could tell with this half-orc lass, one that holds a lot more intrigue and promise in my eyes—and, unlike the similarly promising Hushed Half-Elf, this idea isn't inextricably bound—ha ha!—to DiD imagery. So, sometime in the next week or two, you can expect to see further imagery from this new take on the character, posted to the lower Patron tiers sans the DiD content seen here. Wheeee!

A hint on the new direction: I'm looking at a fantasy-RPG-based romantic/ sex comedy with an Empowered-style approach, sorta. Might draw it myself, at least initially. Stay tuned, needless to say! (UPDATE: In fact, I think I'll post some initial designs from the project on Friday.)

Tomorrow on this here Patreon: Serialization of the unpublished 48-page, Empowered-format story Dirty Pair: Quick & Dirty from 2003 continues!