Happy holidays from Run Freak Run!

Hiya! We hope you a merry and warm Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This is the time to remember those you truly care about, to be good to them, and set plans for upcoming epic adventures. This year you’ve been truly great to us in ways we couldn’t have imagined: you’ve helped us out when we were in a pinch, gave us support when we were out of energy, and stuck with us until the end and never gave up. It’s something we don’t always feel like we deserve, but we’ll take it with honor hoping to earn your trust in the future, because we’re planning to take you on a brand new journey again next year.

It will be larger than anything we’ve ever done before, more ambitious than it’s healthy, and it’ll stretch us to our limits. We couldn’t be more excited. :)

It’ll take a while before we’ll start sharing, but until then rest well, eat a lot, sleep plenty, and enjoy your well earned holiday!
With love,

Silver Saaremaeel and Kaija Rudkiewicz
2015, Berlin
merryyule

RFR page sketches

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Preaparation is the key small

In the beginning of RFR’s production Silver bought me a Moleskine storyboarding notebook which I started using right away to sketch out the first couple of chapters. Over time, as we had more and more of the story written out, I kept adding new chapters to it.

It’s full of scribbles, each uglier than the previous, only readable to me, even if just barely. Still, this notebook marks the first, and possibly most important stage in drawing a comic book: thumbnailing the story.

Thumbnailing is not about pretty pictures; it’s your roadmap and your comic’s visual plotline. It’s crucial to be prepared and ready, knowing your overall goals and each page’s content before you zoom in on the individual panels. It’s all about story pacing, and page composition and flow, already marking places for drama and suspense. This is where I decide between a silent, one panel page, and a ten panel, action packed sequence, or how to best compose the blacks and whites and lights and shadows that the comic is basically made out of.

You will add the character acting and nuances when you get to drawing the actual panels, but for storyboarding you’ll have to think more like a storyteller than a portrait painter. The key is to always understand how each page works with multiple pages forward and back. If you have this, 80% of your decision making is basically done.

Optimally, you’d have all your story written out by the time you start thumbnailing. This is one thing we learned from RFR: have a script or at least a plotline ready before you start drawing anything. Having to make changes in writing is much easier than having to decide to throw ten inked pages out the window because the story needs to go a different way after all.

All that said, I wanted to give you a little peak into this scribbled mess I’ve been calling “RFR thumbnails”:

Smiles,
Kaya

How to paint – A misty environment

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For some time now we’ve been wanting to get back into making youtube process-videos, but since we were always pinned down by RFR and DotWQ release deadlines we pushed it off in order to keep our sanity. Now that we’re still in the early pre-production of two of our next projects we have some time to experiment, and I recorded the process of a quick painting to see what are the technical challenges we’d have to overcome.

It all seems pretty straight forward; just get FRAPS, press record, and edit. It’s pretty heavy on our old hard-drives but it’s manageable, and we still haven’t tried voice-over which is absolutely essential for any real educational videos.

We’ll keep on experimenting, uploading the videos, and posting them here as we go. I will probably continue doing tutorials on environments, composition, and light and shadow, while Kaija will most likely cover the character related things, like anatomy, fabrics, portraits, photographic compositions, light, and so on. To be honest, we don’t know what we’ll achieve with this, but it should nevertheless be a fun experiment. :)

And we hope you will enjoy it.

Love,
Silver

tweet tweet me @runfreakrun

Sharing is Caring: Hardcore History by Dan Carlin

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We’ve mentioned a few times on this blog what big fans of history we are. Like a lot of authors we find inspiration for locations, themes for drama, and even character quirks by turning to what was before. Knowledge of history is an extremely useful tool full of free source material, but more important than that: it’s fun!

To help you take the next step into the mysteries of history, we’d love to introduce you to one of our all time favorite podcast series by Dan Carlin: Hardcore History. Like its name suggests, it is a fascinating look into the craziest, most explosive, and always brutally violent phases of mankind’s history. But it’s not all guts and glory; it has a reflective nature that doesn’t only tell about the horrors have happened, but also explains why in a very clear way. And best of all, most episodes are totally free to listen to. Just press play.

We have two suggestions to start with: one is a strange but interesting story about a small town named Munster in Germany, and how the beginning of Protestantism affected the whole of Europe ripping it apart into a whirlwind of witch-hunts and social chaos. If you are fan of the time period Run Freak Run is based on, then we really recommend listening to this show, for it truly shows how messed up this era was.

Hardcore History 48 – Prophets of Doom

The second suggestion we have is a series of episodes on the First World War which engulfed the planet, killing millions in a matter of weeks. It’s truly a heart wrenching story of how quickly and efficiently we as a species can destroy each other, but also how ridiculous the predicament was that lead to it. If there ever has been a better example of human idiocy, the beginning of World War 1 was exactly that. This podcast has six episodes, each lasting several hours. It does go very in-depth at times, but it’s important to remember that only by studying properly, we can learn from our mistakes and hope to never repeat them.

Hardcore History 50 – Blueprint For Armageddon

If you have any podcasts or vlogs that you follow and would like to share, please drop me a message on Twitter or Facebook and I’ll check them out!

Love,
Silver

Wallpaper: “…Sleep tight, nun-girl.”

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“Click to open in full size!”

We had requests to make wallpaper out of the final Run Freak Run panel, and who were we to deny you this pleasure. So here it is, we hope you enjoy it! :)

Love,
Silver and Kaija

Run Freak Run book is out! (Print and Digital)

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Click to order one! Extra hugs to everyone who gets one for their friends!

What’s in the book?

– 215 pages of Run Freak Run!
– Chapters 1-9, plus the book exclusive “The one with the Mermaids”!
– Illustrations and posters-designs!
– “Making of”-material and our favorite articles from the blog!

Get the print version
$24.90

Download the high resolution e-book
$7.99

“The book includes a small exclusive chapter that we never published on the website before. It’s about how Two met up with the mysterious mermen in the first place.”

“The fine details of the inks read perfectly on the paper.”

“While we paid great detail to how RFR was published online, we always aimed for physical end product. There’s something in the weight and sense of paper that just can not be replaced.”

“Early sketches of Inquisitor Two. Kaija goes into great detail in the book about how we came up with her persona and look.”

“We included 7 of our favorite articles from the past three years. They range from design, to inspiration, to life-hacking.”

“Run Freak Run – the best book you’ll ever own.”

Start reading now!
Print | Digital

The tale of two mugs

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Mugandcoffee

I’d like to unveil our new and improved RFR Society6 store!

We’ve uploaded new posters – amongst which is the “Mushroom men” poster that was requested on facebook – but what we’re most giddy about are the mugs. Society6 does a great job with those; we know, because the first thing we did after uploading the designs was buying a couple of them.

Full disclosure, there was a disappointing mishap with the first two mugs we got: they arrived in a dozen tiny pieces – a ceramics slaughter! The mugs were clinking in one corner of the box and the meagre amount of bubble wrap sat in the other. Looked like someone at the warehouse was having a bad day. We contacted the store and they sent us new ones along with their apologies, this time securely packed and whole. No harm done.

Presently the broken mugs serve as pretty cool pen holders, but not before we had our fun with them:

We kinsugied the shit out of them!

_Fixing-mug-gif

It’s not as easy as it looks…

_Finished_kintsugi_mugs

The store has more designs with mermen, mushroom men, cats, etc, and we’d love to see pictures if anyone buys some of the other mugs! A photo will always beat a mockup picture in a store :)

2015-09-23_071842

Cheers,

Kaija

Twitter me at @KaijaRudkiewicz

Try harder – Run Freak Run wallpaper

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Due to requests, here is a wallpaper from today’s Run Freak Run. We hope you enjoy it. :)

Click to open in new window.

Let’s do an ask us anything!

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Let’s leave no stone unturned.

We put up an ask us anything over at ask.fm – where we hope you’ll ask us anything from our favorite comics, movies, favorite foods, to how to get up earlier, writing on walls, or how to grind coffee beans like a true Berlin hipster. Also, we wouldn’t mind answering questions about RFR, Two, and our upcoming and ongoing projects. Honestly, this is a little new for us too, so let’s see what comes out of it? :)

Ask us Anything at ask.fm

What wonderful readers we have!

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We have the best readers. Why? Because only the best readers in the world would gift us with fan art such as what I’m going to show you today. Today’s blog post is a reminder that creating stories is not just a one-way monologue, but a dialogue where both parties can inspire and push each other forward and make something that’s bigger than they ever imagined.

So without further ado, let me show you what’s inspiring me this morning.

A sword!

A holy-shit sword! One of our readers, Terminalvelocipede, actually hand-crafted and built Inquisitor Six’s Sword of the Lord!!! This is incredibly awesome for us, and we hope you enjoy it too. The best part is that the artist has shared making of posts on his blog (PART 1 & PART 2), and we really encourage you to check them out – it’s amazing. :)
http://terminalvelocipede.tumblr.com/

GRRYYAAAYYOOOR!

This is just tooooooo cool.

“Inquisitor Six approves.”

Like I mentioned, the making of process is really great and worth checking out!

Tattoos!

Yep, that’s right, our reader and friend Occams-Lazer went and got a Daughters of the Witch Queen tattoo. We’re speechless: the amount of cheer and support this gives us is breathtaking. It’s also pressuring, because now we really have to step up our game and make stories that are worth this kind of love. :)

dotwq_tattoo

The source material.

daughters_minimalistic

Fan art!

We really love getting fan art in our inboxes, and it seems like Priscilla is getting a lot of traction lately. No wonder why; after all she’s feisty, can polymorph into a giant bird, and has the coolest hair in medieval Spain. Who wouldn’t want to draw her? Today I’m going to show you two versions of her by two different artists!

First let’s take a look at a Pris created by Spwyll who made this mid-spell casting Priscilla with the fanciest feather cape! We really love the intensity of the picture and can’t wait to see more. :) The artist blogs on Tumblr, where you can see more of his art that’s both creepy and beautiful. http://spwyll.tumblr.com/

“Ommmm!”

And for second we have this adorable chibi-Priscilla by Death G. Reaper, that just lights up morning with a big smile. She really captured the nonchalant and effortless charm that Pris carries around her, and which makes her so irresistible. The artist blogs on twitter, pretty much about everything from her own art to anything cool and fascinating. http://death-g-reaper.tumblr.com/

deathgreaperpris

And so, once again big thank you’s to all our readers who’ve sent us fan art, questions, and their support through the years. Now the closer we get to RFR ending, the harder it hurts to lose it all. But I guess we just have to make something new that will capture you all again.

P.S: I really want to see Inquisitor Two cosplay.

Love,

Silver

Twitter me at @runfreakrun