All 14 pages of THE CHASTE AND THE CHAINED's first story, now with a final pair of revised page roughs! (Patreon)

So!

After a long, grueling struggle of failed "hybrid workflow" tests that kicked off in the summer and dragged on into the fall, here's the now-complete set of 14 pages worth of both finished art and roughs from my first stab at a story introducing fantasy test comic The Chaste and the Chained. Most if not all of these pages have been seen here before in one form or another, but this is the first time I've assembled them all together in a single post for your reading convenience. Yay?

Enjoy my flailing attempts at a series of different formats (mostly) combining digital-art roughs in Clip Studio Paint with analog-media original artwork, some of which produced better results than others—but all of which proved too slow and cumbersome to be viable for producing a comic on a regular basis.

Nowadays, the way forward for my potential projects as both writer and artist seems to be on the digital front, which has seen a few promising advances of late, but remains far from a certainty as yet; I still need to work up a finished-art approach in digital that can somehow be carried out on a timely basis.

In the meantime, though, I'm putting this particular story from The Chaste and the Chained on indefinite hiatus, as I'm now thoroughly sick of drawing all those g-d cultists and their underground lair; even worse, this introductory episode would've gone on for another 25-30 pages(!), which is definitely not happening, folks. If and/or when I continue Chaste as a "real comic" someday, I'll have to introduce our starcrossed couple and their fraught, sexually charged situation in a much more narratively compact story. 

I did, however, tighten up the roughs for the final two existing pages to facilitate your reading experience; BTW, the page numbers on these files are completely borked due to all the inserts and edits I've done throughout the sequence.

Those bluelines above are visible because that particular rough was based on a scan of a piece of DC artboard; the next and final page lacks those lines because it was sketched in a native Clip Studio Paint file.

The next page in this scene would've featured the Paladin charging to the captive Elf Mage's rescue, but we're not likely to ever see that sequence, I'm afraid.

I should close this post out (after 1.5 g-d hours of work on it, ouch) by saying that The Chaste and the Chained was originally spawned as a strictly Patreon-based testbed project trafficking in cheesecake-intensive "damsel-in-distress" imagery while I tried to puzzle out digital-art techniques for non-"DiD" fantasy project The Last Party. Similar to what happened with my spawned-from-commissions comic Empowered, though, Chaste has grown more and more complex and taken on a life of its own, to the point that I'd very much like to continue these characters' story in some form down the road.

Hell, I have enough story notes worked up that I could script and rough out probably two or three OGNs worth of Chaste stories starting tomorrow; alas, as always for me, producing the finished artwork for those theoretical OGNs is the g-d problem. I suppose I could try to find an artist to draw these stories with me, but the project's combo of fantasy milieu, heavy-duty cheesecake and baked-into-the-concept "damsel-y" imagery would likely make that prospect a tough sell indeed for many or most artists—not that I actually know very many comic artists nowadays, sad to say.

Anyhoo, digital art testing will continue—at present, I'm on page 6 of roughs for an even cheesecakier episode of the hapless Elf Mage imperiled—and so will The Chaste and and The Chained continue as well, someday.  Huzzah?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?