Distressed damsels: HUSHED HALF-ELF, pt.1 (Patreon)

Welcome to this Patreon's "damsels in distress" feature, big spenders of the $5 and $10 tiers! I've done quite a bit of commissioned "DiD" work over the years for a handful of helpful—and discreet!—clients, which I'll be sharing with you kind folks on an at-least-weekly basis.

We're kicking things off with a goofy fantasy-RPG premise I've dubbed Hushed Half-Elf,  which I've been using as a test bed for experimentation with different art techniques both analog and digital. The main image above was worked up well into the haphazard project's development, but serves as a decent introduction to the basic concept—which, like a fantasy iteration of early Empowered, features a hapless heroine magically cursed with bondage. (The AD&D references above are a mixed bag from varying editions, including a reference to the short-lived 1e Unearthed  Arcana characteristic "comeliness," which was not one of Gygax's better choices for a stat name.) 

The premise started out a year ago, when a regular commissioner requested, in effect, "something with an elf in peril." I drew the following pages on two different types of paper stock, in an attempt to find a new surface my finicky 5B pencils (and ailing drawing hand) might work decently on. Cue the distress, which—backstory ahoy!—depicts an unnamed elven warrior getting kidnapped at an inn late one night, snatched from under the very noses of her unseen, presumably sleeping adventuring party by a well-equipped chica with a peculiar speech pattern: 

Not sure if you can see the differences in pencil rendering between the two pages' surfaces at this resolution, alas.

The preceding two pages characterize much of my commissioned DiD work: heavy on the fetching damsels, but light on environments or the characters distressing 'em.  (Then again, I wasn't getting paid to draw backgrounds, obvsly.) The kidnapper is whispering because she's spiriting the elf through a roomful of sleeping adventurers, none of whom I bothered to draw; the existence of the elf's party, howeva, will become relevant down the road.

Ops, forgot I scanned a rough for one of those pages:

Earlier this year, for the same commissioner, I returned to the hapless lass—still a full-blooded elf, at this point—for another two pages of art experiments, this time trying out toned paper as a basis for comic artwork. Cue a different scene of distress:

B&W-only pencils on toned paper didn't work out too well on the first page, so I tried inks with red-pencil shading next:

The results looked better, but the technique was far too slow and time-consuming to use in future comics work. Still, worth a try, though! And now, the page roughs:

Experimentation continued with a few more pages roughed out in the art app MediBang Paint, in early efforts to familiarize myself with working digitally:

(Gotta admit, that dialogue's a bit more DiD-ish than I usually write in Empowered.) But finally, our hapless heroine begins to turn the tables on her vaguely barbarian-y tormentor:

Alas, that's when I pulled the plug on this episode, such as it was, as convention-going loomed.  Sorry that your moment of defiance was paused indefinitely, unnamed elf!

Anyhoo, these initial pages were mostly bog-standard, straight-up cheesecake DiD content, but had nonetheless planted a few seeds of interest in the figurative soil of my imagination—strained metaphor, ahoy!—which would blossom into something a bit more interesting and complex in the near future.  Ah, but we'll have to save that for more exploration in Hushed Half-Elf pt.2, folks, because I just blew the entire g-d morning shift trying to upload this post! (ProTip: Do not attempt complex, text- and image-heavy Patreon posts via the g-d app, kids.)

But wait, here's one more bonus bit! Behold the photoreference I was using for the main image above, as I'm depicting the post-GodCurse (which will be explained later) Half-Elf rather notably bustier than I normally draw my already curvy heroines:

So, big spenders, did this initial post of DiD-skewed content work for ya? Hope you can appreciate the art, even if the distressed damselhood isn't your thing. I'm probably aiming towards a weekly "binge post" featuring a veritable slew of DiD images, though I might post bonus installments periodically.