Jorcy & Co's Failed Quests #3 - TIA BTS

PICS + WIPS HERE
NOTICE: All the pictures in this link are of consenting adults performing in role play scenarios.
Literally role play, in this case, as the characters are D&D characters played by other consenting adult characters!
Scenes such as the ones portrayed herein should always be safe, sane and consensual. And fun for everyone involved!


Wow, this one turned out to be a bit of a doozy! :)
I ended up getting a cold in the middle of working on it, too (having a fever on the hottest day of the year wasn't great... :D ) so it took some extra time.
No time lapse this time, I'm afraid - but here come all the behind the scenes and stuff!
As usual - if you want to save the pics, download them from the attachments rather than "save as", so you get the correct name etc!

First thing I had to figure out was really just what the picture would be.  I had ideas of Tia being both just sitting on the road, with a leash to a nearby tree, tied to a signpost, and tied to a tree. The tree one won out because... I've done very few tied-to-trees scenes! And I mean it's a classic, isn't it? :)
These are very square pictures because I already knew I'd need a row of pics on the top to squeeze some story in.

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I settled for the third one above, but... I realized it would be quite hard to draw! Basically a bit of a top-down perspective. So I enlisted the help of a 3d Tia I made in the "game" HoneySelect.

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HoneySelect is basically a hentai game I think, but I use it to create characters for reference since it also has a built in "studio". For my purposes, the characters really don't have to be this detailed, since I just need the gist of them, but I love character creators :)

So here's the scene as I built it in HoneySelect Studio. Shio-Bari's character Shio, that I made for reference for another picture, got to act as a stand-in for the evil thief lady.
I also skewed and resized and morphed it to get it as close to my thumbnail sketch as I could.

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The blue sketch basically set everything up as I wanted it.
I figured it would be fun to have sort of cut-away panels of stuff to show events, rather than having the entire bottom picture as one single thing. I kinda have the script in my head, so I sooort of know what the word balloons will say - but it's pretty different from how it will turn out. The extra tied up ladies in the back was very inspired by some Franco Saudelli (the artist who made me want to draw this stuff in the first place) pics - where there's just a bunch of tied ladies practically all piled up on eachother - each with their own personality and reaction to the events. 

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Of course, this pic, just like the ones of Jorcy and Amy, had to have a villain!
The witch who captured Jorcy was kinda over-the-top crazy-ish, the inventor who captured Amy was timid and not very villanous at all. So I wanted someone who felt more classic wicked meany. And so I figured I'd do a fantasy version of the blonde villain who's had some run-ins with Jo in my pics before. Head over to my Deviantart and you can find here there - in the comic Rescue Jo for example.
A bunch of people have told me it'd be fun to have her in the fantasy world too, so I figured this might be a good place! I gave her eyepatch to liven up the design a bit, and changed her top to a more corset kind of feel. 

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And here's the finished red sketch. Basically just a rougher versions of the eventual lines. With a few changes! (Tia's head in the 2nd panel is unfinished because I used the blue sketch underneath for the rest of her head)

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 Most notably, I removed an entire frame at the top. This frame would be a chance to show what the note actually says and a way to be able to get more of Tia's thoughts into the pic...

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But then I figured... would it not be more fun to do an in-progress shot of Tia getting captured instead. I'm sure most of you agree that it was the right decision.
So I started sketching that...

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This version I really liked, but the thought of the villain kinda stripping Tia beforehand to check out what she's "delivering" felt a bit exploiative. And it made more sense to have the frame set right after the other one - just in the first overpower moment.
Silly Tia for not even bringing her wand, eh? :O

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Here's the line art!  I love drawing nature and stuff - and details too - so I couldn't really stop myself.
Since there's so much detail and stuff happening in the main/big pic - I had to work to separate the "planes" of the picture.
The background with the houses and the road winding off in the distance - I colored these lines quite light, and avoided doing any fills or "black" fills. I also didn't do much detail and drew the trees in quite "big" shapes. That way it faded off in the distance nicely. 

Stuff that was closer to the viewer, I did more deep shadows, more thick lines, more detail and textures, and colored the lines almost black. The panel on the right side was kind of half-and-half.

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Doing flat colors was really labor intensive.
Though mostly everything in the pic was nature and "green" - I had to very everything between blueish greens and yellowish greens and pure yellows etc.
I actually added the yellow flowers hanging from the tree Tia is tied to to match Tia's jacket in the top frames. Just to balance the page a little better.
Differing from how I usually do pictures though - I kind of took a bit more of a painterly approach to this one, doing color changes and shadows and highlights as I was going, rather than adding all that after. So the "flat color" picture looks quite finished in itself.

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Here's how the color with shadows and things turned out. Since the "flat colored" one was so detailed, I figured I could do quite little shadows and highlights and it'd still look good.
So mainly what I tried to do was heighten the mood a bit.
I added a very blue shadow on the villain under the tree in the 3rd frame, to separate her both in the composition and in light/dark from Tia.
I had the tree cast shadows on Tia for effect and to separate her in the foreground against the bright background.
And I did a bunch of shadows on the captured ladies on the right, to give that the feeling of them having been stashed away to the side. 

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And heres the completed pic without text.
It's only without the text that you can see all the tied ladies ;)

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Thanks so much to everyone who suggested stuff for this pic and everyone who voted for stuff, to everyone who bothered reading all this and thanks SO MUCH to all of you pledging to my patreon! You're giving me a chance to make my dreams a reality and it's so incredible :) :) <3