runnersuniverse.com

FYI, the final banner image has a very long vertical dimension, so rather than post obnoxiously long vertical images, I decided to double them up, to make the overall image more squarish. So lucky you, each week you’ll be getting two for the price of one!

Here we have the pencil and ink stages. As you can see, I went with my favorite layout from the previous Thumbnails post, but I switched Roka out for Sky as the central figure. I did it because (a) she will become increasingly important to the central story of the series as it develops, and (b) it’s always nice to have an eye-catching cute female character front and center. It definitely seems like comic fans (both male and female) love their female characters, almost as much as most artists seem to enjoy drawing them. So I guess everybody’s happy! Well, except Ril, who ended up stuck behind her ankle. Sorry, Ril.

As a compositional consideration, I deliberately wanted the character on the bottom left (which ended up being Roka) to be the largest of the background characters. I knew the bottom would be very close to the eye-line cut-off once the banner was set up behind a convention table, so I wanted to make sure there was something a tad bigger to “mark” that edge of the main image. So all the characters are visually bracketed vertically between Roka and the Khoruysa Brimia. I think if Roka were smaller, it would have felt like the art was just “running out” towards the bottom and not “contained.”

Random note: the image obviously isn’t meant to be scene specific, but eagle-eyed readers may notice that they’re all wearing their outfits from the Arqq-Olem port and the root beetle dinner scene from The Big Snow Job #1. Basically, I was in a major time crunch and didn’t feel like designing all new outfits just for this one image. And I really liked all those Arqq-Olem outfits, so I figured, why not?

Next up, resizing and color flats…

For this year’s Baltimore Comic-Con, I finally decided it was time to ditch my old-school PVC-pipe booth display monstrosity and go for one of them new-fangled retractable banners that everyone seems to have nowadays. I figured it would be a good time to whip up a completely new banner image as well, and the next few Bonus Material posts will show the various stages of the art process for that image.

I did a bit of research before starting the thumbnails and I found that the most striking banners I saw were the simplest. Generally, a single figure pops much more than a group of characters. But with RUNNERS, I didn’t really think that approach would work, given the heavy emphasis of my series on the motley crew of different aliens. Just showing one or two of them wouldn’t really get that across. I also felt I needed the ship in there to make sure it came across as a sci-fi series, so I basically went into the thumbnails knowing it would be a pretty busy piece of art.

For the most part, I stuck with variations of one full-body character (Roka), surrounded by all the other characters. I did toy around with a couple Drew Stuzan-y compositions (#3 & 4), but they just ended up compounding the already busy look. Ultimately, I decided to settle on one of the full-body compositions since I figured that full body would at least give the banner a strong focal point.

I really like the three horizontal bands in the background and especially liked the idea of certain characters breaking the borders of their own bands and spilling over on top of others, just to add a bit of visual flair. I also knew I wanted a good chunk of the bottom to be relatively empty of important art since that area would tend to fall below the eye line of a con attendee once the banner was set up behind my table at a show.

In the end, I settled on thumbnail #2, but with one major change, as you’ll see in the next post…