DISTRESSED DAMSELS: THE CHASTE AND THE CHAIN'S "Elf vs. Chair" saga addresses the Paladin! (Patreon)

Continuing on a previous bunch of Clip Studio Paint page roughs from a kinda-but-not-really story from fantasy test project The Chaste and the Chained,  I had been noodling away on a scene of the Elf Mage finding herself bedamseled yet again by a magically animated chair.  This wasn't really a  "true" Chaste story like the sample pages I posted last summer, but more of a background-free "damsel cheesecake wallow," if you will.

Howeva, outta nowhere I thought up a way that this titillating but otherwise none too compelling scene could be warped into an actual narrative advancing the overall Chaste storyline.  And lo, in the concluding page from the previous post, the Paladin had rescued the Elf from her magical captor and was carrying her to safety when something apparently struck him (in a page sketched in analog graphite):

The saga continues with a page sketched on the ol' iPad in Clip Studio Paint, as we see what's buggin' the suddenly disconcerted Paladin:

...which spins off into a riff I figured out some time ago, in that the armor normally sported by the Paladin serves to protect him in two very different senses:

An odd format with these new CSP pages, as they're arguably closer to my old layout format (as seen in our previous post's Iron Man: Hypervelocity pages) than conventional roughs. Not sure if I'll consider doing many more like these, as they were fairly time-consuming compared to sketchier roughs.

In any event, gotta say that I don't particularly enjoy drawing the Paladin's armor (despite its prominence in that last page) or his complex outfit in general, so I don't envision myself actually drawing The Chaste and the Chained anytime soon, if ever. I'm far more likely to (attempt to) draw as well as write alternate fantasy comic The Last Party, due almost entirely to the fact that I can tolerate drawing that project's perpetually half-nekkid Dwarf Barbarian much more easily than the geared-up Paladin.

However, since first soliciting Patrons' ideas for potential artists who could handle drawing The Chaste (unlike myself) back in November of last year(!), I have made zero frickin' progress on following up on those suggestions in the almost four months since, which I find profoundly discouraging. (I don't multi-task terribly well nowadays, to put it mildly.) 

I shall struggle against inertia and force myself to investigate on that front, however, as I really do love these characters, and could start writing a few graphic novels chronicling their starcrossed misadventures at any time. Come to think of it, we're nearing the one-year anniversary of the week-long power outage (from a freak late-spring blizzard) that left me with nothing to do except shiver in the dark and crank out 30-odd pages of story notes by emergency flashlight that developed The Chaste and the Chained into a fully viable, ongoing property. Yay?

And now, back to reluctant multitasking as I work up some page roughs for yet another fantasy project, the as-yet-unnamed Unidentified Fantasy Offering, which I definitely won't be drawing. In fact, you'll likely see some of the many, many character designs worked up by that comic's potential artist next week. Yay, once more?

UPDATE: Ehh, technically this post didn't feature all that much DiD content, so here's a Chaste art request piece drawn last October, previously seen only by the Biggest Spender tiers:

'Twas a photoreferenced piece with a really interesting pose; also, I quite like the high contrast approach used to render the ropes, which was a serious change of pace from what I usually do.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure at the moment, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot, okay?