A query for Patrons: Who (other than yrs truly) could potentially handle the art chores on THE CHASTE AND THE CHAINED? (Patreon)
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Some background: Of the four(!) different fantasy-comic pitches I've worked up, oddly enough romantic action-comedy-with-a-kink The Chaste and the Chained has advanced the furthest in terms of being "ready to roll" as an ongoing property.
While Chaste was originally intended as a Patreon-only, cheesecake-intensive test bed for digital-art workflow tests intended to clear the way for the more "serious" fantasy project The Last Party, I've developed far more "ready-to-script" story ideas, action choreography and dialogue scenes for Chaste than any of the other would-be comics.
As hinted at by the dozen or so Chaste pages I've roughed and/or finished since last summer, I could script and lay out several graphic novels worth of stories featuring this uniquely starcrossed couple at any time. The problem, however, is that I'm still nowhere near having figured out an artistic workflow that would produce aesthetically acceptable artwork on a timely basis, so drawing this comic myself ain't happening anytime soon, if ever.
So, as I noodle around with a number of writing-only comic pitches (including another fantasy project that's slowly getting underway with some very promising character designs from an artist whose work I like a lot), it's occurred to me that I could try to pitch another artist or art team on drawing The Chaste and the Chained instead of me, despite how much I've come to love these two characters.
Handling Chaste's art chores would require several artistic skill sets:
*Ability to draw fantasy and/or FRPG imagery such as costumes, weapons & equipment, monsters, environments and so on
*Ability to draw aesthetically pleasing cheesecake-y content (and beefcake-y too, when the Paladin gets outta his g-d armor)
*Ability to handle both fantasy action scenes and romantic-comedy (dialogue-based) scenes
*NOTE: Even though the series features frequent "damsel-in-distress" imagery (similar to Empowered) baked into the premise, as noted below...
...I don't believe that any particular pre-existing skill with depicting "DiD" imagery is required.
In theory, I could try to rework the premise to avoid such imagery and leave the project as strictly a spicy but not explicit "sexy romantic action-comedy" (which it would remain, in either case), but I dunno if I'd want to bother with such a major restructuring, as the Elf's very, very specific set of kinks and desires is pretty much baked into the premise.
So, given my profound detachment from whatever the hell's going on in the comics field nowadays, I thought I'd ask you kind Patrons if any existing artists or art teams struck you as potentially appropriate to work on The Chaste and the Chained, however unlikely it might be that they'd actually be interested in doing so.
Y'see, back in 2017-18, after I experienced great difficulties with wrangling other freelancers on a series of failed projects and ill-fated proposals, I pretty much decided to focus on comics projects I would write and draw entirely by myself. Ah, but I eventually discovered that Artist Me proved to be the ultimate slow-paced and unreliable freelancer, so now I'm looking into some writing-only work while trying to reboot Artist Me's workflow into a more viable proposition; and that means I need to refamiliarize myself with what's going on in the comics art scene, which is why I'm asking you fine folk for your opinions.
So, if you please, feel free to fire away in the comments below with any artist suggestions that occur to you, even if (to repeat) there's no way in hell they'd likely be interested in working on a goofy, creator-owned concept such as this; as I said, I need to educate myself on artists of the present day, rather than just the wee handful of artists I remember and interacted with back in the begone eras of the 2000s and 2010s. Huzzah!