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!
More info about ONLINECON and the full schedule can be found here: https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2022/03/onlinecon-2022.html
Be sure to check it out. Should be lot of fun!!
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!
Look for Chapter 3 to start posting next week!
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.
As I mentioned recently, there will be a short pause in new story pages for the month of January 2022 while I get caught up on the next chapter. In the meantime, I’ll be doing new posts each week featuring various bonus content.
Today’s post features some toned paper commissions I recently completed for my Patreon backers. First up is an 8×10″ piece with Roka in action, manning the consoles of the Khoruysa Brimia. I usually like to do head-and-shoulders shots, but I thought it would be fun to try something new and put the character in an environment.
And here are two smaller (5×7″) commissions of Cember and Roka:
The commissions were done as annual rewards for Patreon backers at the $10 and $20 tiers. As always, the pieces are a lot of fun for me and let me do something a little different to break up the usual production work. If you’re interested in supporting the series on Patreon ($1 and $5 tiers are also available), please feel free! All support is immensely appreciated, helps fund the ongoing creation of the series, and you’ll get cool exclusive content to boot!
