DISTRESSED DAMSEL: S'more semi-recent sketch sets of alt superheroine EMERALD! (Patreon)

Behold! Another few sketch sets—mostly drawn as pencil tests for a new-to-me lead—feature a new appearance by a maskless superheroine originally created for a bunch of DiD rough-sketch commissions well before Empowered came about. 

This character, who I've unofficially nicknamed "Emerald" as a supranym after I drew her in a green proto-Empsuit for a color piece, was one of the early forerunners to Emp, along with "Dirty Pair: A Plague of Angels' Cory Emerson as superheroic damsel" seen in the Bonus Features for vol. 1 of Empowered Deluxe Edition. (Yeah, I'll need to dig up those old files for a future Distressed Damsels post, or at least scan the images out of the Deluxe Edition.)

Anyhoo, here's a random set of recent Emerald rough sketches, pretty much sporting Emp's physique and extra-ragged supersuit with a marginally different hairstyle (and no mask):

As will be discussed in more detail on next Monday's Work Stages post of a test illo for The Chaste and the Chained, I've been trying out a different 2mm pencil lead to replace my dwindling supply of long-ago-discontinued Prismacolor Turquoise 5Bs.

The defining use of pencil leads has, for me, been the rendering of Emp's supersuit, so these sketches with a different damsel in (mostly) the same outfit were tests to see if a new lead could pull that off without setting my g-d drawing arm on fire.

The tests were a bit inconclusive, alas. The new lead's output looks okay, but the process did create some degree of irritation to my drawing arm; so, further testing will continue in the near future. In any event, these sketches worked up some DiD poses I can later reuse in The Chaste and the Chained or Empowered down the road, which should be handy.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Had planned to go "every weekday" with posts to finish off the month, but that just wasn't happening, folks. So, tomorrow morning will feature April's Exclusive Monthly Bonus Post for the Biggest Spenders of the $10 and $20 tiers, this time burning through the rest of the outstanding art requests from the $20 tier. Yay?

Then, next Monday, time for that previously mentioned test illo from The Chaste and the Chained as May kicks off!