WORK STAGES on the cover illo for 2015's EMPOWERED: ANIMAL STYLE, pt.1! (Patreon)

Behold, the first of what will likely wind up being three or more(!) Patreon posts featuring the Work Stages on the cover illo for 2015's one-shot Empowered: Animal Style by Guest Artist John Staton and me, along with final colors on the piece by Rob "Robaato" Porter.

I'm gonna need multiple posts for this Work Stages installment because I'm looking at roughly 30-35 work-in-progress jpegs lurking in this project's "COVER ILLO" folder. Ouch! Even if I skip a bunch of 'em, that's still gonna require a series of wildly overstuffed image galleries.

A few words of clarification are in store. The image below was John Staton's initial rough for the cover, notably featuring the enemy mecha on their transport vehicle, along with Supersuit Emp at lower left and College-Era Emp at upper right:

I replied with a similar rough that ditched the vehicle, and focused on John's fantastic designs for the "Animal Style" mecha:

(Note also that I would wind up drawing the Emp figures, which is a design riff that ran throughout most of the Guest Artist one-shot covers.)

On to John's pencils for the pile o' mecha, for which I sent along several annotated revision jpegs:

The final image in the gallery is my marked-up correction page flagging a bunch of problematic tangencies in the complex line art, per the Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents: 

In our next Work Stages post, folks, we finally move on to the cover inks at last. Whew! 

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure, TBH, but something should be going up on Monday, okay? (After all, I do have a veritable boatload of material  that needs to be posted this summer.)