I had a really hard time trying to settle on a composition for this opening panel of the fight. I kept trying shots of her in the thick of fighting multiple Zahari, but they all felt like shots I had already done before, either in the previous chapter or back in Chapter 3, where Jayd faced off against Roka and the crew back on the ship.
Once I thought about the profile shot from the side, that solved the problem. It immediately felt like an angle I hadn’t done before and I quite like how it turned out.
It’s been a long while since the last page upload, so I wanted to pop in for a quick update and apology for the long delay. Rest assured the the next chapter is still on its way! About 2/3 of the chapter is fully penciled and inked, with the first batch at the colorist. The original plan was to start posting pages back in early December 2023, but I guess the art is a bit complex, and one of the colorists I work with is taking a longer time getting them done. At this point, I’m waiting to have enough banked so I can post again without interruptions, but I honestly have no idea when that will be. Hopefully soon.
On top of that nebulous production delay, this past November and December were filled on my end with the usual holiday-related interruptions and travel time sucks. And a portion of January was spent dealing with things related to my mom’s health issues and taking care of things pertaining to her house.
So time has been short the past few months, on top of a 2023 filled in general with other mom-related tasks that needed doing. But production continues. I am about 7 pages away from finishing Chapter 6, and then I move onto the FINAL CHAPTER of Volume 3. Then Kickstarter time to get the book printed!
Thanks as always for your patience. I’m hoping most of the major time sucks are over at this point, but life tends to have other plans. We shall see. In the meantime, I’m hoping to start getting those colored pages soon. The next batch of inked pages will soon be going to a second colorist, where I expect turnaround to be much quicker, fingers crossed.
I’ll be set up at DragonCon in Atlanta, September 2-5! Come find me in Comic and Pop Artist Alley (Americas Mart, Building 2, 4th Floor) at Table 407. I’ll have RUNNERS books (assuming the post office does its job, which I am becoming more skeptical of with each passing day of no tracking update whatsoever), stickers, prints, and possibly some original toned-paper artwork for sale. Hope to see you there, especially you, RUNNERS books. I hope you make it.
I’m very excited to announce that I will be a part of ONLINECON this April! The event is a free streaming online comic convention, organized by MouseGuard‘s David Petersen. David will be splitting the time between live drawing and panels with special guests. Like me!
I’ll be joining David on Wednesday, April 6 at 9pm for a talk about sci-fi world-building, alien and ship designs, and whatever else comes to mind. Join us for a look at the RUNNERS creative process. And be sure to check out all the other great guests lined up for the show!
The January hiatus is almost over and story pages will be resuming in February! Thank you, everyone, for your patience while I’ve been getting the next chapter finished and ready to post. First up will be the cover to Chapter 3, which I just finished this week. Here’s a peek at the art process…
As always, I start with blue lead pencils. For many of the Jayd panels in the story and on this cover, I did the energy armor on a separate piece of tracing paper in order to keep it as a separate layer in Photoshop. That way, I’d have the most flexibility in changing its opacity and doing FX with it, if need be. In the line art image above, you can see the armor as a grayscale semi-transparent element.
For the coloring, the image on the left shows the art with just color flats. After that, I do all the shading, highlights, and ship interior details and grunge. The last part is adding the various FX and lighting effects. In this case, I wanted a strong glow on the armor, and in order to really punch it up, I added a blue tint to the rest of the scene to de-emphasize everything but Jayd and Bocce.
As always, a more detailed breakdown is available on my Patreon. Feel free to support the series there to get more behind-the-scenes goodies like this!
For this week’s post, I thought it would be fun to share some of the steps in translating a RUNNERS script to actual art. As always, I start with a fully written script, complete with all dialogue and stage direction. I then divide that script into actual comic pages, first by scene breaks and then by individual pages within those scenes. In some cases, I will further break the page down in specific panels if it’s important to know exactly how I will divide the various word balloons between them.
After that, it’s on to the thumbnailing process. I tend to do very loose sketches for the thumbnails in order to figure out poses, angles, and compositions. These sketches are so loose that I don’t think anyone would be able to read them without seeing the finished art next to them. But I guess they make sense to me! Below is a sample of the thumbnails done for one of the pages from the first scene from Volume 3, Chapter 1.
For a much longer post that covers the script and thumbnails for the entire 6 pages of this scene, please visit my Patreon. This will be a free PUBLIC post, so you will be able to read it without being a backer. It goes into the changes to the script as well as individual page breakdowns of the various challenges of doing the thumbnails for the sequence.
