More EMPOWERED vol.12 Emp, Spooky & sabertooth pages, plus work stages! (Patreon)

A few weeks ago, worked on a few more pages from the otherwise stalled-out Empowered vol.12, as seen above, before other matters drew my attention.  A few words about the work stages:

Whoops, didn't notice the lettering glitch in the word "WORLD'S" in Spooky's first word balloon. Will fix that later.

What is the catch, you might ask? You might have to wait until the years-off release of vol.12 to find out, I'm afraid.

Next up is a scan of the transparent vellum overlay in place for the big cat's whiskers, the line art for which was inverted and inserted atop the main page's artwork in Photoshop:

Below is the rough for the first page, a rare one that featured all of the page's elements drawn on a single sheet of paper:

The page after that started with dialogue (including synonyms harvested from a thesaurus app) and no panels, but a few loose sketches of the distressed-Emp situations Spooky was discussing: 

The rest of the page's roughs were sketched in the familiar "one or two panels per sheet of paper" format, so I could draw outside the panel borders as necessary to construct figures or faces:

Finally, behold the very, very simple effect I tried to indicate the multiverses, by sketching 'em with a Sharpie in a matter of minutes as seen in this early test...

...then inverting the art to white-on-black in Photoshop:

What is positively infuriating is that those dashed-off, preliminary test sketches look much better that the carefully drawn ones I laboriously rendered on the final pages. (Oh, well.)

I should say that this particular Empowered vol. 12 scene is stalled out because it's a Very Significant Conversation that rolls onward for at least another 10-15 pages, and I find that I just can't muster any enthusiasm for drawing such a lengthy convo right now. Worse, I can't really skip back to a story earlier in the volume because a number of Very Significant Conversations lurk back there, too, and I don't feel like drawing those, either. 

I'd skip to the fairly extensive sex scenes but those are gonna be a g-d nightmare to handle, as the finicky, frankly crappy paper I draw regular Empowered pages on is extraordinarily unfriendly to the mid-range shading I'd like to use for those sequences. (As opposed to the very different paper stock I used for my 2016-2018 life drawings.) In fact, the paper used for Empowered is good for only one thing—rendering the darkest values of Emp's supersuit while being easy on my ailing drawing hand, unlike almost all other types of paper. (Or was that two things?)  

So, yeah, dunno what the heck I'm gonna do with vol.12, folks. I'm considering a serious time jump skipping ahead to the nice, juicy action scenes I'd love to be drawing, followed by attempts at loosely, tangentially addressing the Very Significant Conversations and Milestones we just jumped over... maybe.

MONDAY ON THIS HERE PATREON: Life drawings ahoy, as usual!