Get your mango on.

mangonom

You know, we’re not only about moody witches, giant flying whale sci-fi, or pretentiously deep thoughts on the act of creation. We’re also particular about good food and the art of cooking.

And so today, we’d like to share with you a super simple, super fun food hack we just learned from the youtuber-chef Katie, who made our mango peeling just a lot more easier. It’s not like we eat mangos everyday, but when we do – we’d rather do it well. This incredibly silly little trick saves time and makes things a lot cleaner. Just check it out yourself.

Mind-blowning, right? All of Katie’s videos are great, so keep on watching. Here’s another pro-tip for the curious: after you’ve got the mango in a cup, add some yogurt, mix it up, and you’ve got a delicious mango-lassi on your hands.

“Studies have shown that people who cook are 169% happier than people who don’t.”

Nom nom nom,
Silver

Tweet tweet me your mango-tricks at @runfreakrun or just email us at silverandkaija[at]gmail.com or don’t, whatever.

Sci-fi coolness: The Leviathan

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I’ve always been a big lover of science-fiction, especially anything that has this sense of fantastical culture mixed with gritty technology, usually touching the classic debate of man vs. nature, and always with dire consequences. Original pieces like Dune, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and the Hyperion speak volumes to me. I’ve probably been inspired by them on more than one occasion in my own concept art career, and will most likely be inspired many more times in the future.

And so, today I wanted to share this teaser-trailer of The Leviathan that has been spreading around the internet like wildfire. And deservedly so – for it is fantastic, it has all the elements of science-fiction that I love; from gritty technology, sense of culture, man vs. nature, and dire consequences. I hope you will enjoy it too.

It was the brain-child of the director Ruairi Robinson, script written by Jim Uhls, and it is a proof of concept for a larger project – that I truly hope will come to life. For there is never enough great sci-fi.

In other news – we’re almost at an end with internal edits for Part 2 of Daughters of the Witch Queen, after a week or so we’ll begin proofreading and go into full-time illustration mode. Like last time, we’ll tease our mailing list -members with concept art and ask you guys to participate as advance readers in exchange for a free copy. And most importantly, we look forward to chatting with you again. :)

Love,
Silver

Tweet, tweet me all your sci-fi recommendations @runfreakrun or drop us an email at silverandkaija (at) gmail.com

Play this game: Ori and the Blind Forest

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Oww…

Every now and then a game gets out that’s just so captivating, magical, and full of emotion that you’re not even sure that it’s real. I’ve been geeking out about Ori and the Blind Forest for a year now, since I first saw their first teaser-trailers – hoping that it would be everything it promises – dreading that it will just let me down like oh so many other games.

But it didn’t! It has everything I first fell in love with and more. It doesn’t just have a stunning unique art style, great consistent game play, but also a heart-wrecking story set in a mystical forest, taken over by dark beings. Also, there’s a world-tree, and if you’ve been reading RFR for a while, then this just might be the kind of a thing that fancies you.

I know you guys can make your own decisions, so I’ll just leave a trailer and few screenshots, and let you do the right thing.

It’s a beautiful game. Everything has a hand-painted feel to it, and the lighting is just spectacular.

Ori-And-The-Blind-Forest-Game-Free-Download

It’s kind of like the game Limbo, but with colors and cute creatures. There’s plenty of things to be terrified of though.

You can get Ori and the Blind Forest on Steam, Xbox One, and Xbox 360.

After I’m good with Ori, I want to try Life is Strange. It’s a story-heavy episodic game with an interesting time travelling aspect and geeky high schoolers on a journey to finding them selves. It’s got that indie movie vibe that I often like, and I really have high expectations for it. I’ll just leave a trailer for it too.

Let me know if there’s any great games you’ve come across lately, for as a lifelong gamer I’m always looking for good reasons not to be writing or drawing.

Love,

Silver
Catch up with me on Twitter @runfreakrun or Instagram @Silver_was_here , and get our new book Daughters of the Witch Queen, because it too will have a World-tree.

Art give-away finished – looking for next ideas!

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update1

Just before last December we announced a Run Freak Run winter art give-away, where we randomly picked out a winner of one of our favorite RFR pieces to date. The only thing you had to do to be included in the lottery was to be signed up for our newsletter.

Today we’re happy to announce that Two and Priscilla are making their way to Jared in Massachusetts, and based on talking to Jared we’re more than confident they’ll get a great home from him. :)

Now we’re on a lookout for new ideas for giveaways, or competitions. If you guys have anything in mind, please let us know and we’ll steal it, and take all the credit.

We’ll miss you guys. – Click to open in full size.

We’ve also been doing some new RFR inking recording, but due to some technical problems we lost our last recording. But we’ll keep trying and no doubt succeed with the next page, and like always, send it to our newsletter first and then get it on the blog too.

Sometimes the record sizes grow out of whack and our software crashes. Might be time to look in to new codecs.

But the inked page itself is safe from any harm; you’ll see it in its full glory eventually in the comic, but here’s a couple of sneak peeks of the work in progress. :)

Sketch vs. inked page. Everything is drawn at least thrice.

“Har har har STOMP!”

On Daughters of the Witch Queen side we’re working on the first editing passes for part 2, and we’ve just began the second pass on part 3. The novelettes are growing larger and larger with each part because there’s more story to unravel, new characters to meet, and information to reveal. We also have a full magic system to make sense of.

We’re consciously trying to limit ourselves to the 40-60 pages/part so we can keep releasing them with a reasonable speed, while also leaving some time aside for illustrations, since that’s something we love doing too.

We’re not quite ready to announce part 2 release date yet, but -soon-.

Oh, and we’ve also started to work on DotWQ website – We’re aiming to blow your minds with it.

Love,

Silver

Hit me up at twitter @runfreakrun or send us an email anytime, it’s extremely fun to talk you guys. :)

Creature concept and one day free Amazon promotion

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First of all, let me start by letting you know that today Amazon has a one day free promotion for Daughters of the Witch Queen. Go get it while it’s still possible!

You can read the story on either your Kindle-device, or on Amazon’s browser-reader at http://read.amazon.com/, or on any Apple or Android device that has the Kindle-app installed.

As you may have noticed, we love telling stories through pictures. And, as you may have noticed also, even though the next project we’re working on (Daughters of the Witch Queen) is a novel, we’ve been creating concepts and illustrations for the story as much as time allows. But it’s not just all about the pictures: we’re taking on a mindset of sprinkling information in with them, and widening the world beyond the story we’re creating.

And for anyone who’s not interested in the story itself, these pictures can act like puzzle pieces to the world; a little random at first, but soon you’ll be able to piece together the big picture.

_White Lie_SMALL

Smiles,

Kaija

Some unplanned sketching

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On Friday Silver found an app for drawing on your iPad, and I’ve taken to it for some reason. For two days straight, instead of absent mindedly picking up the iPad and playing a round of Alto or Two Dots, I’ve gone to draw a new sketch. The app is called “Forge” and it’s been really fun to play around with, so I thought I’d share the love:

Sketches_01

If you happen to pick up Forge, I’d love to see what you’ve created with it :) And if you’re interested, I’ll be posting these sketches regularly on instagram and twitter.

https://instagram.com/nonsense_and_sense/

https://twitter.com/KaijaRudkiewicz

Smiles,

Kaija

Daughters of the Witch Queen part 1 released!

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The first part of our new dark fantasy series Daughters of Witch Queen is out.

There are two kinds of people in this world:
Witches and humans.

Nicholas Odd is a man travelling to London in search of his happily-ever-after, when his eyes are opened to a world he never believed could exist: a magical world that operates alongside of humans, ruled by a Witch Queen. A succession war has started amongst her seven daughters, fueled by the entrance of a new, enigmatic player, the Nightwitch.

Nicholas, pulled in the middle of the conflict, is about to have his life made a lot more interesting for him, and a lot more dangerous.

Nothing will ever be the same.

Feeder, eater, dreamer, dancer, lover, singer, or painter. Which one are you?

Get Daughters of the Witch Queen or loan it on Amazon!

For those without a Kindle device, we recommend to check out a Kindle-browser reader. It’s very easy and nice.

And no release is a real release without some new work-in-progress and concept art.

Work-in-progress concept art for the White Lies. Yep we had White Lies in RFR and we have them in DotWQ. This time they’re different; they’re whiter, they reproduce by cloning, and they’re just a little bit more awkward. They still have nasty teeth and an attitude to match that.

Concept art for a location in Part 1, Maggie’s Magnolias. Click to open.

We love to hear what you’ve thought so far, and hope you’ll send us a thousand messages.

Cheers,

Silver and Kaija

DotWQ Wallpapers

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To celebrate the upcoming release of part 1, we felt inspired to create a couple of Daughters of the Witch Queen wallpapers, one of which we’ve already released to our newsletter-list.

In the future, we want to talk more about the Magic-system behind DotWQ, and will be doing blog-posts and infographics to help that. It’s very fun and inspiring to work together with text and images and we’re excited to start sharing more with you guys. It’s a long road, but the next year and more should be very full of our best concept art work; of not only of the magic-system, but of different characters, of both the humans and witches, of the world, of it’s creatures, and important scenes from the story. We don’t want those pictures to be just random images either, so we’re trying to pool them together in ways that you could enjoy the story, even without reading the books. We’ll go deeper in to our plans in future blog-posts, as we have more things planned out.

Nevertheless, we hope you enjoy the wallpapers we have now :)

tldr: We’ll try our best use our skills as concept artists to bring this project to life, but that’s a subject for another time. Enjoy the wallpapers!

Click to open!

Click to open!

Daughters of the Witch Queen available for pre-order!

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Jello, hello!

We are proud to announce that Daughters of the Witch Queen is available for pre-order on Amazon for Kindle.

The past three months have been a large hurdle for us, since we’ve never done a project like DotWQ before, but we’re finally reaching our first milestone of releasing part 1, and boy are we happy about it.

Unlike RFR, DotWQ is a serialized novel released in 9 parts. Each part will be 1h – 1.5h reading experience, and we will be drawing concept art and illustrations for it to be released on the newsletter, blog and social media.

We’d like to give a shout out to all our readers who’ve helped us with advance copy reviews, all the while taking a moment to get to know us and answer our silly questions. We’ve loved sharing with you smart peeps and geeks like no other – truly, it has been an extremely fantastic and heartwarming experience for us :)

We hope you consider pre-ordering Part 1 of Daughters of the Witch Queen, because the more sales we have on our first day, the higher our chances are of reaching a new readers. It’s priced at ~~$2.99~~ $0.99 and we’ve pimped out a nice collection of illustrations and concept art to visualize it, and if that won’t convince you to get your hands dirty – then nothing will!

Speaking of pictures, below you can find a new piece of concept art of the Dremor, a creature from DotWQ, that we finished today. Hope you enjoy it :)

Now we’re off to work on more RFR and Part 2 for DotWQ – catch you on Mondays!

dremortext

Hello, I work best in high-resolution – Click to open in new window.

Pre-ordering helps us reach new readers. Please consider reading our series part 1. It’s got Witches, London, lots of rain, and some blood in it. No nudity – yet.

Love,
Silver

Tweet, tweet me @runfreakrun

We do everything together

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Yesterday I was in the middle of drinking my coffee when I reached out for my mug only to push it over, causing the coffee to spill around the table and my keyboard. And of course – like anyone reasonable – I shouted: “YAAGH!”

This, in turn, scared the hell out of one coffee drinking Kaija, who – like anyone reasonable – spilled her coffee all over the table and the keyboard, and caused her to shout: “YAAGH!”

After a frantic cleaning effort we had a good laugh about it, because like all other things in our life, we do everything together.

During our 8.5 year relationship we’ve worked 7 years professionally together. We’ve joined three companies as a couple and done freelancing as a pair. We’ve created RFR, and now Daughters of the Witch Queen, and we have plenty of ~~evil~~ secret projects that we’re saving for the future. We’re doing them all as a couple, because that’s how we work the best.

We’ve learned to work this way by going through plenty of painful failures. During the last three years both of us have worked on our individual projects alongside of RFR, in effort to push ourselves as storytellers, and also because we had the egos of unconfident artists, still trying to prove ourselves as individual voices instead of just doing good work.

And hence we did only bad work; our stories didn’t progress: they were lost in many rounds of rewrites and days of indecision. For a project to go forward, you need momentum and constant, even if only small amount of work on it.

Daughters of the Witch Queen was one of these projects that started as an individual project for one of us; it was worked on for the past two years, and it got nowhere during that time. It was stuck in an endless limbo, bouncing through meaningless changes back and forward – until we decided to team up.

Within couple of months we managed to figure out the story for multiple book parts, make decisions that stood, paint illustrations and get the art direction of the projection down. It’s incredible how much more you can do when you have a bouncing board and some kind of a confirmation if an idea is good or bad. Someone to talk about it, constantly brainstorm, and carry it when you just want to crawl to sleep.

The problem with doing side-projects (in our case, a second side project, since RFR is our priority side project) is that you can commit only so much of your brainpower to it. When we joined forces on this story, we figuratively put our brains together, forming one stronger, more confident brain, that in cases when one part of it was wavering and tired, the other kept going, constantly pushing the project forward in ways the other couldn’t even imagine.

It’s how we worked in the past, it’s how we worked with RFR, and the only way we’re going to work in the future. We learned our lesson not to try things alone. :)

And since no blog post is complete without pictures, here’s Kaija drawing concept art for the Dremor from Daughters of Witch Queen. Part 1 will be out on the 1st of March and is available for pre-order, if you’d like to be one of the first ones to read it.

Love,
Silver

Catch me at twitter @runfreakrun or drop us an email. We love hearing back from our readers, for you truly make our days.