adamwarren
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DISTRESSED DAMSELS: Preview of upcoming CSP test comic ROSE & LILY: FLOWERS OF PERIL!
🕑 Added 2022-08-30 15:00:07 +0000 UTCSo!
Much as long-ago Kei & Yu--er, Rose & Lily commissioned damsel-in-distress comic pages were a test bed of sorts for the pencil-based art format I'd later use on Empowered, once more the girls are being roped—ha ha!—into an experiment to familiarize myself with actually drawing comic pages in Clip Studio Paint via Wacom Cintiq.
See, I am nowhere near the level of skill and/or comfort with the ol' Cintiq that I'd need to produce publishable comic pages for, say, The Last Party, or just for cover illos like my Harley Quinn dealies. Thus, I figured I should just bite the bullet and get crackin' on comic pages that are pretty much unpublishable to begin with—and that's where our perpetually struggling Dirty Pair variants come in, with a Patreon-only story I've dubbed Rose & Lily: Flowers of Peril, which dumps the girls in a vaguely "fantasy-RPG" setting to give me some Last-Party-relevant environmental practice.
The first image in the gallery above is a work-in-progress jpeg of the Clip Studio Paint file for the story's first page, currently still in (fairly detailed) rough form:
...followed by an earlier draft of the CSP page, and the hand-drawn, analog rough that was the basis for that page.
Next up are more paper-drawn roughs for the next few pages, in which distress strikes down our damsels once again in the form of sorcerously empowered cloths cleaving unto them...
...with page 2 getting tweaked and revised after I scanned it:
...followed by another page in which Rose & Lily are set upon by magically animated rope:
For reasons unknown I accidentally drew the next page's rough on letter-sized paper, rather than at proper comic-page proportions:
...so I enlarged the page to the correct proportions, allowing for a notable change in the last panel:
But who could be responsible for this distressing scenario? Could it be a malign if as yet unidentified sorceress, glimpsed in an cropped rough previewed a few weeks back? (Not a huge SPOILER to hint that she might seem very, very familiar.)
Anyhoo, later on in September I'll get around to attempting finished—or at least semi-finished—comic pages based on these roughs, which you fine folks of the $5+ tiers will be getting exclusive looks at. Yay?
TBH, I'd probably be better served by using Hushed Half-Elf pages as the basis for these CSP comic tests, given that the title character winds up as part of The Last Party; OTOH, I find that I'm having fun drawing a DP variation with the cheesecake level cranked up to 11, so I'll keep rolling with Rose & Lily for a bit.
UPDATE: Lordy loo, doing comic-page roughs in this format is the devil's frickin' candy for me; all the fun parts of drawing regular comics—with heightened cheesecake levels, of course!—without the tedious detail and time-consuming backgrounds. Not only have I already roughed out the first 10 pages of this sequence in said addictive format, but yesterday I got carried away during a break in the workday and roughed out six pages (and counting!) from a later scene in which Rose & Lily run afoul of the potion-shop gnomes who tormented the Hushed Half-Elf a few years back. Dagnabbit, I have responsible s**t to do; gotta switch over to doing finished artwork ASAP, before I blow too much more time on these g-d roughs. Dagnabbit, again!
NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: While a full work week of posts rolls on to finish off August and kick off September, we're slated to end the month with the Exclusive Bonus Post for the $10 & $20-tier Biggest Spenders tomorrow. Right now, the ($20 tier) voting to determine the nature of that post's content is coming down to the ol' wire, with a highly problematic deleted scene from Empowered vol.11 currently neck and neck with a literally & figuratively sketchy DiD comic featuring Emp bedroom cosplaying an impressively damsel-y scene from the early Hitchcock film Jamaica Inn. Which will prevail? Find out Wednesday, Biggest Spenders!
Comments
Adam Warren
Probably wouldn't be much fun to draw the complicated icons every time, but my big idea is to have 'em available as existing files I can paste into the artwork as needed. (In theory.)
Burninator
Yeah, I spoke with my psychologist about something similar, and he admitted that he fairly frequently thinks he's an AI. Given that I've never actually seen him in person and that there are lots of video glitches, I'm not sure he's wrong, frankly. Hell, I sometimes get it in my head that I might be a fictional character.
andrew
That's a fair if existentially troublesome question.
Adam Warren
Yyyyyyou might be in luck!
Burninator
Yeah, there's the potential for serious issues there. The usual party line on that seems to be that it's no different than how all artists are inspired by their forebears and that therefore any attempts to crack down on that would have undesirable side effects; i.e. people claiming ownership over whole styles of art in such a way as to impoverish legitimate creative work. Reminds me of the lawsuit over the Ghostbusters theme song where Huey Lewis sued saying that, essentially, the producers didn't want to pay his fee, so they hired Ray Parker, Jr to write a soundalike; I think Huey got paid off in a settlement. Wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens in comics; some publisher that can't afford a big name uses an AI to mimic the style and gets sued. It looks highly likely that AI will displace human artists sooner rather than later in highly commercial commoditized applications.
Frank Innes
The ethical implications of how some of these projects seem to be actively trying to get their AIs to mimic the styles of living artists is very, very concerning.
PixelThis
Hoping for a Shasti cameo!
Burninator
Can you prove that you have a physical body and exist outside a simulation?
Burninator
You know, some of the new advances in AI might actually be capable of taking your roughs and turning them into finished or semi-finished art without the tedium; I've seen some people having significant success online doing similar stuff. Might be worth fooling around with it.
andrew
Have we ever confirmed R&L have physical bodies? It's starting to seem like they only show up in simulations. Hmm.
TF Commando
The rose and lily icons on their chokers and thigh bands are a great touch!
