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WORK STAGES: A new page from THE LAST PARTY's Half-Orc Healer test story offers a ray of workflow hope?
🕑 Added 2024-09-02 13:17:04 +0000 UTCSo, last month I showed you fine folks some new analog-media pages from a test story for fantasy project The Last Party featuring the Half-Orc Healer:
Those pages were inked directly on art board for decent enough results, but the workflow was too slow and cumbersome to offer much promise going forward.
Wellp, onward to page 3 of the story. Here's the analog-pencil page rough you've already seen:
With this page, I decided to switch over to doing the finished artwork in Clip Studio Paint on the ol' iPad. Here are the final (digital) inks:
Moving backward in the workflow, here's the underdrawing beneath those inks, with both layers visible:
I was quite thoroughly sick of this g-d page by the end, and found myself deeply annoyed by the many different "inking tools" I was struggling to use.
After the fact, however, something interesting occurred to me as I looked back at the initial underdrawing alone:
I actually quite enjoyed sketching this underdrawing, as opposed to the tedious and frustrating inked artwork that followed. The insight that belatedly struck me was this: What if I used some form of this underdrawing as the final drawing, rather than doing the finished artwork as a layer drawn over it? That's not something that's possible with analog media, but might be possible in a digital format (I did say "might," of course); that is, I could possibly clean up the rough directly and try to rework it into some form of finished art.
I would, however, need to somehow force perfectionistic and persnickety Artist Me into accepting the production of considerably less finished-looking artwork, which is much easier said than done; but the reality is, I am never again going to have the available worktime to crank out the painstakingly precise and detailed and massively time-consuming artwork that reached its final flowering in Empowered vols. 11 and 12. If I am to draw as well as write a future comic alongside the other series I'm hoping to write on a continuing basis (as in, Godplayers and The Chaste and the Chained, at the very least), I'll need a seriously "high-speed, no-drag," looser and sketchier approach to my workflow.
Anyhoo, back to my page roughs and script for The Chaste and the Chained issue #2, folks!
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?
