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DISTRESSED DAMSELS: "Cocktail Dress Distress," pt.2
🕑 Added 2020-01-29 14:01:01 +0000 UTC(You can check out the first few pages of this story fragment here.)
Per your votes in a recent Patreon poll, here's the second-highest-rated option from said tally, which is yet another incomplete commissioned DiD story in proto-Empowered pencil format. This time around, a shockingly easy-to-subdue Kei gets gassed, gagged and trussed up by an unnamed Bad Girl whilst (presumably) snooping around at a hoity-toity party, hence the quickly tattered cocktail dress. I also tacked on a few semi-related sketches to this post, as explained below.
A few words:
Extremely tight pencils on this story, which was drawn in the same year (2004) as the early Empowered stories. Lemme warn you that you will not often be seeing such finished-looking artwork in the DiD content I'll be posting here, as most of my commissioners from this era were cool with looser pencils. (No idea, TBH, why this particular episode of distress wound up with such detailed artwork.)
Only now occurred to me that Kei could order the gag in her mouth to likewise fall apart, as it, too, is a length of torn-off (semi-)smart dress. Uh, well, maybe that strip of dress didn't respond to her signal...?
That is a very finished-looking fight scene, gotta say. In all likelihood, by this point I was jonesin' to draw a real fight, as I'd not done so in years.
And now, bonus material! First up is a recent set of DiD-related Patreon art requests from the $5 tier, including an image of cocktail-distressed Kei:
This is my first time using the approach of "turn pencils into a (blue) underlayer, then ink over the top of 'em" in Clip Studio Paint; I left that underlayer in the jpeg for your edification. Can't say I'm thrilled with the result, as CSP's inking tools don't please me all that much. (Time to order up that Frenden 800-brush CSP pack...)
Next, a better scan of a recently posted Kei vs. Red Monika con sketch:
...and the original rough:
Note that the blindfold wasn't in the initial rough. I'd assume that I couldn't depict Kei's face to my satisfaction, hence the very different version in the final piece.
NEXT WEEK ON "COCKTAIL DRESS DISTRESS": Poor Kei finds herself forced to flee, but then runs into someone in the hallway...
TOMORROW: Time for another excerpt from the Twitter-format prose experiment I Am Empowered, folks!
Comments
PixelThis
Glad to see Kei getting the better of the villain in this story
Jack Hallows
Adam, thank you soo much as i love how my OC came out! WOW gives me whole new idea how i should draw her. my week was a shit whole but this made me happy ^___
Burninator
There’s a fairly straightforward No Prize reason that would explain why the portion of the dress being used as a gag didn’t respond to the disintegration signal. Run From The Future showed that Kei and Yuri both are known to pack bioware/chemware in their saliva(we only saw the chemical arrest feature, but I strongly suspect there’re other options depending on the mission or what have you). Clearly, whatever loony crap Kei’s rolling with this time reacted with the smartfabric in her mouth and frotzed the “Take Me Now” functionality on that chunk.(I have a theory or two about how that could have happened, but I won’t clog the thread further with my rambling.)
Matthew Rogers
I adore Kei's facial expression in panel 3 of the second page, would love to see larger shot of something similar.
JKurt
Thank you for drawing my suggestion!
Strypgia
I am somehow not surprised at all Kei would have either that dress or that code phrase.
