Ugh. Drawing this guy was a nightmare. I don’t know why but I had the worst time trying to capture the pose of him making guns with his hands. First I drew the pose with him holding both hands together to make a single gun with interlaced fingers, but it didn’t quite look right. So I re-drew it and it came out better.  But then I realized that he should really be pointing at both of them separately with two “guns.” So I drew it a third time. And that’s not counting the head, which I originally drew one way in every panel he appears in before later doing a slight proportion redesign that necessitated fixing his head in every panel. I should have just made him an amorphous blob alien. It would have been so much easier.

To see a more detailed post about the revisions, you can check out this public post on my Patreon, which includes pencils of the previous versions of the Aziri pose. As always, feel free to support me on Patreon for more behind-the-scenes sketch content like this.

Back to this page, Aziri’s outfit is based on the Unified Space Patrol flight suits that appeared in the very first RUNNERS story in the SPX 2000 Anthology (also mentioned several pages back). One of the things I’m looking forward to as I get further into the series is having more and more stuff already designed from previous stories, since the initial concept work for each book is a huge time suck. It’s a lot of fun and I love the process and the results (usually), but sometimes I just want to get to drawing the actual story pages, so it’s really nice when something is already established as canon!