In-progress WORK STAGES on another promising page from THE CHASTE AND THE CHAINED!

On The Chaste and the Chained front, I made some decent progress this week on another test page from that recent story I posted about. Here was the rough for the story's initial page, as seen previously:

 Then I worked up an underdrawing for the page in Clip Studio Paint, starting with my PC's Wacom Cintiq before finishing up this stage on the ol' iPad:

 Note that I really enjoy this stage, which I can't say about the subsequent hours of work that followed as I "inked" the page with a combo of the Turnip pen brush and the iOS Design pencil brush:

 Story-wise, the conniving Elf Mage has convinced the Paladin (under false pretenses) to let her use another vision spell to gaze upon him, as our next page will reveal.

Here are the work-in-progress inks with the underdrawing layer's visibility switched off:

Note that the Paladin's feet appear to be floating because the Elf Mage's spell has rendered his clothing invisible to her spell-enchanced gaze, including his boots, as seen in the previous page:

 Anyhoo, the inked results are looking acceptable, which is nice; however, that process is taking way too long, and is veering back into the slow, painstaking, detail-intensive grind that choked out my productivity during the last two volumes of Empowered.

The dream is now to work out a process that would, in theory at least, get closer to the speedier, more spontaneous approach of "FDOD" (First Draft, Only Draft), so that the underdrawing stage could stand on its own without requiring an "ink-over" approach. Note that one panel of the most recent page achieved this ideal:

Yeap, that's the "blue-pencil" underdrawing switched back to B&W, tightened up with additional inks, and used directly. Not that tough to do with such a simple image, though; much more of a challenge with a more complicated shot, alas.

Anyhoo, I'm gonna need to figure out how to wean Artist Me off the crisp, clean, precise rendering approach in favor of some faster, looser, sketchier technique; y'see, Artist Me keenly appreciates the aesthetically pleasing results of the former workflow, while hating the grind needed to produce said results. "The struggle is real," as they say.

Onward!

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?

UPDATE: Ehh, tomorrow's post will be the Exclusive Monthly Bonus Post dealie for the Biggest Spenders of the $10 & $20 tiers; pity that, at present, I have nothing on hand for such a post. Yikes! "Tune in tomorrow," needless to say.