DISTRESSED DAMSELS: Rejected commission concept of "BARBARIENNE & GOBBOS" repurposed as a CSP brush test! (Patreon)

So!

Recently, I worked up a rough sketch concept for a commission that wound up going nowhere, so I decided to finish the piece as a Clip Studio Paint brush test... which proved educational, though almost entirely in a negative manner.

The basic idea was to feature a barbarian warrior forced to dance for a troupe of goblins who had captured her:

...with the punchline I worked in being that the "barbarienne" would, in fact, prefer to be a fantasy-milieu exotic dancer but has never before had the opportunity, nor the nerve to embrace that opportunity if it had arisen. (In fact, I worked up a whole short story exploring this concept, though it would've skewed juuuuust a tad explicit.)

Work Stages continued with me turning the illo's rough sketch layer to "non-repro blue" in CSP, like so:

...and then attempting to "ink" the line art with various CSP brushes, ranging from the program's default tools to a dozen or so different brushes I downloaded online:

And here are the inks with the blue pencil "underdrawing" layer turned off:

Gotta say that I had a horrendous time desperately trying to find CSP brushes that could give me the finished-art results I was looking for. In truth, none of the tools I tried out gave me anything of even vaguely acceptable quality; in the end, a few of the brushes were less crappy than the rest (such as the default "turnip pen" and a CSP market asset labeled "6pencil-soft"), but still proved far from being viable for published artwork.

Clearly, my so-far fruitless quest for workable CSP brushes to produce finished work has a long, long way to go, folks.

Finally, I grabbed my (semi-)beloved "design pencil" brush from the CSP default toolset and slathered on some gray tones using the "tilt" option on the stylus:

Anyhoo, CSP tests will continue, though I might switch over to the iPad version for a while, as I need to take a break from trying and failing ignominiously with the ol' Cintiq and PC.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure at the moment as to exactly what's coming up in the next M/W/F slot, TBH. Let's find out together, shall we?

UPDATE: In fact, stand by for plenty mo' Distressed Damsels content in Friday's Monthly Exclusive Bonus post for the $10 & $20 tiers, as I knocked off all the remaining DiD art reqs from February's post in a single series of CSP pieces.

Meanwhile, one mo' M/W/F regularly scheduled post on Wednesday, okay? (Alas, I don't have enough content prepared right now to go "every-weekday" to finish out this month.)