DESIGNS AHOY: THE LARA CHRONICLES, part 3: Flailing towards a final rough! (Patreon)

[Here's a link to our previous installment in this series, dating back to over a month ago.]

Whilst desperately flailing around for a post on short notice a few months back, just realized that I've never shown anything from the whooooole bunch of Tomb Raider design sketches I cranked out for the sadly defunct videogame magazine PSM back in 2003 or so. Much like the RPG-related article I contributed to a few years earlier, this time around I worked up a bunch of design ideas for  a somewhat technologically upgraded version of Tomb Raider, as seen in our previous two installments of this sadly none-too-popular feature. (13 likes = not great.)

By this point in the effort, I was struggling to work up a viable pose rough for the full-color illo that would accompany the planned article. We continue the saga with a distressingly low-res jpeg of my third or forth attempt at a layout depicting "Lara hanging from... something":

The rough's failure was not surprising, given what a tricky angle at which I was attempting to depict Lara's upper torso. So, next up I flopped her around to face the camera a bit more:

...which worked out not very much better.

So, I abandoned the climbing-based pose for something different:

...and didn't like the results, either. So, next up I tried out something more static:

No, wait, judging by the "#8" scribbled in the corner, I was actually reverting to an earlier rough I had eschewed previously, and had tried to rework with iteration #12. Wellp, by this point I was g-d desperate to have some kinda g-d rough to work up, so I rolled with this pose after all.

Here's a scan of the very light pencils for the illo, leveled up in Photoshop for clarity:

...and here are the inks:

(Firearms enthusiasts will perhaps recognize the Ruger P89 semiauto pistol that's appeared off and on in my work for almost three decades, albeit with a custom flashlight mount of some sort. Lordy loo, would that I had instead bought a simple, boxy Glock 17 or 19 for reference back in the 90s, given how bizarrely complicated the P89 proved to depict.)

Ah, but as we will see in our fourth and final installment of this feature next month, disaster lay in store for this illustration as it neared the finish line represented by my bud Ryan Kinnaird coloring the piece. Lo, my lurking perfectionist streak was about to strike from the shadows and direly complicate this freelance gig's final stages...

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?