WORK STAGES on a new Clip Studio Paint test illo for THE LAST PARTY! (Patreon)

So, here's a recent illo I worked up in Clip Studio Paint (iOS version) as yet another art test for perpetually in-development fantasy project The Last Party (which features a cast merged from earlier Patreon dealies Hushed Half-Elf and Party of Two):

The main intent with this piece was to see if I could use Clip Studio Paint's Design Pencil brush, which I prefer when sketching in CSP's iPad iteration, to possibly produce finished artwork for comic pages. The test was largely successful in terms of the final artwork, which is about as close as I've ever gotten to devising a digital analog for the pencil-based Empowered art format.

Here's the initial rough, which features a few minor differences from the final illo:

And here's said final illo with the rough visible as a (pseudo-)blue-pencil layer that I drew over:

Bizarrely enough, I always feel that leaving the blue pencil layer visible looks slightly better than the final version without it. Weird indeed!

Note that I initially tried a different set of FX for the Half-Orc Healer's powers:

...but I felt those high-contrast FX were making her corner of the illo too "busy," so I messed around with a lower-contrast set of FX for the final version. Furthermore, the piece is rife with a bunch of different artistic experiments with varying degrees of success, from the mage's tattoos (which kinda suck) and spellbook covers (which, in practice, would be replaced by some kind of flat image pasted onto the surfaces) to the spellbook chains (which worked out quite nicely as a white-line artwork layer with a black border effect).

This test, alas, was definitely a failure in terms of elapsed worktime, as I spent large chunks of at least 4-6 workdays noodling away at the piece. On the other hand, I didn't actually dislike the work process, for once, as opposed to some of the more finished artwork for The Chaste and the Chained, which is almost certainly a project that another artist will have to draw.

This illo was plagued by the same painstaking, detail-intensive perfectionism that wound up crippling my production speed on later volumes of Empowered, but the CSP Design Pencil medium shows some promise for a looser and less detailed art approach in the future... maybe. (Sure would be g-d nice if I could get the g-d Design Pencil brush to work like this on my g-d Wacom Cintiq in the PC version of CSP, though...)

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, will likely be another Life Drawing post, with the Exclusive Monthly Bonus Post (based on Biggest Spender art requests) looming over the weekend.