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Art

Four Disney artists painting

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If you’re one of those who has played Banner Saga, then you’ve no doubt noticed the beautiful background artwork in there. Who were they inspired by? Eyvind Earle and the classic Disney movies. While totally different mood and subject matter, the influence is clear and well executed.

As big fans of them, we just had to post this. You can see Eyvind Earle work his magic with his fellow Disney artists on few of the Sleeping Beauty background paintings, and do a personal take on a simple outdoors tree-portrait. Simply fascinating.

Love,

Silver

Drawing On Everything

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If you don’t know Shantell Martin you should check her out. She is a New York based artist, who is known for her black and white marker drawings. They adorn anything from walls to furniture, objects and clothes, and are often done live in front of an audience.

I saw her Skillshare class: Draw On Everything, where she talks a lot about her process. Hearing artist’s thought processes is almost always fascinating, but Shantell’s was particularly eye opening: “Everything is one big mistake, and you’ve got to enjoy the process.”

Personally I’m tired of having a stick up my butt about not making mistakes when drawing. So I’m creating space for spontaneous drawing on anything that stays still for enough time to fill it with squiggles.

Armed with Krink pens, I’m taking the first step of spontaneous doodling by filling my drawing board:

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Any permanent marker should do, but the Krink pens have been perfect for this. They write on most surfaces, dry quickly, and don’t come off. Not easily at least.

 

This first attempt didn’t go entirely without hiccups. You’ll notice in the video there’s a tad longer pause at about 01:30. That’s me turning to Silver and asking if he knows if you can clean out permanent markers easily because I think I ruined my drawing board, and Silver answering: probably not, time to go nuts. And I did. And I think I understand Shantell’s message. Sure it looked horrible at some point if perfection was the goal, but when you relax, give up on perfection, and instead just create a tapestry dedicated to mistakes, the outcome is impressive.

I love my new drawing board:

 

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I love how other drawings look against the texture. It creates cool synergy.

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Shantell Martin: http://www.shantellmartin.com/

 

Krink pens here!: http://shop.krink.com/

 

Smiles,

Kaija

 

PS. HAPPY NEW YEAR GUYS!
tweet tweet me @KaijaRudkiewicz

When we were horizontal

9 Comments on When we were horizontal

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We finally have the first draft of Run Freak Run available for download for free. If you’re curious to see how it was different, please check it out!

Download RFR First draft here.

(Feel free to tip us for Christmas cookies and coffee, comicking makes one hungry!)

Before Run Freak Run was what is now, it went through a few iterations. The first draft was created in horizontal web format, with gradient atmospheric inks. I remembered watching Kaija hand-cut paper masks to each panel, and painfully splatter ink. The effect was beautiful, brilliant and eerie, but ultimately too time-consuming for a project we do in the evenings and weekends. We wanted to publish more than every two weeks, and hence had to approach it differently.

We also rewrote and simplified the story. We’ve been studying storytelling for the past three years now, and while we feel like we’re finally starting to understand something, it’s been through some struggles and millions of rewrites – honestly, we had no idea what were doing in the beginning. 

Kaija actually blogged about this earlier. 

For the first draft of RFR Kaija had drawn 22 pages and I had lettered 16 pages until we decided to put on the break and start over. That was over 3 months of work reset there, but in the end we were happy with the decision. The first chapter of RFR is already quite scarce story wise, and with half the amount of panels per page it was even scarcer. We actually have plans to go over the current first chapter and re-letter it with more dialogue and sound effects (which are currently missing totally *gasp!*), hopefully we’ll be able to do that for early next year.

Great part about doing RFR like this is that it’s a living project. We can go back in and fix things as we see fit and make it a better experience.

Anyways! Check out and download the first draft and enjoy some beautiful art from Kaija!

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Click to enlarge!

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Click to enlarge!

 

Love,

Silver

Tweet, tweet me at @runfreakrun and join our newsletter, pronto!

Winter art lottery – Win a RFR original!

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Helou!

We haven’t done an art lottery since our two months anniversary lottery, which was almost two years ago (whoah!) – and we thought it’d be a great time to do a new one. It’s quite simple really – We’ll randomly draft one person from our newsletter list to win this original piece of art by Kaija, with a frame included. All shipping expenses will be taken care of by us.

Only thing you need to worry about is to get yourself signed up for newsletter by the end of February, and you’re automatically in the lottery.

We’re really keen on building our newsletter at the moment, because it allows us a more direct way to keep in touch with our readers, especially when we want to start talking about our next project.

So what are you waiting for? Get signed up for a chance to get an original!

Sign up for the lottery.

 

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A3 bristol paper, hand-inked with sumi-e inks by Kaija Rudkiewicz

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Zap, zap!

 

 

Love,

Silver and Kaija

The horizontal ones

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The first year year of making Run Freak Run was riddled with confusion, self doubt and too often pushing yourself over the edge to a free fall into burnout. So, I’d rather just be happy about having gotten mostly over the biggest hurdles of this project and for having a good rhythm going for me, instead of looking back at a harder phase of production.

Nonetheless, I was jolted back in time, when Silver dug up a stack of RFR pages. The pages. In our minds these were the infamous pages. The bittersweet ones. The ones that were our false start.

The horizontal ones.

 

22 consecutive pages never saw the light of day.

22 consecutive pages never saw the light of day.

Monsters were changed...

Monsters were changed…

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Some full page vistas were removed…

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The pace of the story was quickened…

Some techniques were dropped due to their time consuming qualities.

Some techniques were dropped due to their time consuming qualities.

 

Yes, we have 22 pages of RFR in horizontal format. I’ve always liked horizontal graphic novels and it felt like a better format to publish on the internet. We never got to try out that theory though, because we restarted the comic in vertical format after the first chapter was done.

We had given ourselves a year of preparation before we’d launch the webcomic. Out of those 12 months, only 6 were left at that point and we were in square one again.

Funnily enough I don’t remember switching to a regular format being a hard decision. We had reasons that fundamentally outweighed the “cool” factor of the horizontal pages. More affordable printing costs in the future being one of them.

The positive note in these kinds of situations is the knowledge you accumulate on the first try. Restarting something you’ve worked hard on will be demoralizing, but redoing the work will go faster than on the first try and dare I say, even better if you hunker down and just do it.

Silver got to rewrite some of the story, I got to streamline the techniques I wanted to use for drawing the pages. All in all it gave the comic a slightly better start and made our future production easier.
There’s no big morale to this story. As you already know, everything has ended well. Sometimes false starts just happen. And I guess you just have to know when to kill your darlings and restart.

 

Smiles,

Kaija

Sketches!

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I’m posting a drawing update, since this weekend I drew some cute mushroom-men for the next chapter, and thought their cuteness should earn them a spot on the blog.

This weekend's haul.

This weekend’s haul.

This has been the state of my desk for a while now. I really need to clean up.

This has been the state of my desk for a while now. I really need to clean up.

 

I simply ran out of space on the rest of the table and got squeezed out onto my wacom tablet to draw. This happens often enough, that I'm surprised it's still in as good a condition as it is.

I simply ran out of space on the rest of the table and got squeezed out onto my wacom tablet to draw. This happens often enough, that I’m surprised the wacom is still in as good a condition as it is.

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A sneak peak at a future page ;)

A sneak peak at a future page ;)

Mushroom-men!

Mushroom-men!

I tried out ink on a new kind of paper.

I tried out ink on a german etching paper.

The paper is so soft, that it ... the ink and leaves it slightly grey and looking like it's been printed or stamped on. I highly recommend trying new and different materials from time to time. You might get some really interesting results.

The paper is so soft, that it soaks up the ink and leaves it slightly grey and looking like it’s been printed or stamped on. I can’t recommend enough trying new and completely different materials from time to time. You might get some really interesting results and spark some new ideas.

 

Smiles,

Kaija

 

 

 

The Legend of the Super Turtle King and the King of Pandorea UPDATE 1

4 Comments on The Legend of the Super Turtle King and the King of Pandorea UPDATE 1

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Check out the original Super Turtle King post here!

So – I promised myself I’d put this project aside AND NOT TOUCH IT, for I have other projects that ought to come first – but who am I to fight inspiration when it hits me. So here we are with a new update to The Legend of the Super Turtle King and the Prince of Pandorea.

For this update, I made a new animated illustration that takes the journey onward another step. This time, our heroes, the Prince and his guide come face to face with the Super Turtle King. I also updated the graphic design and color grading of the first image, to bring cohesion between the two images. I also changed the project name from King of Pandorea to a Prince of Pandorea. There was too many kings in the name.

Next step for me is to figure out the outcome of this meeting with a super kick-ass story reversal that’ll start something wonderful and magical. I’m not going to promise you guys that this project will gain any footing, but for what ever it is, or becomes, I’ll keep you updated and share the progress as I go forward.

 

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“Long time ago, in a far away Kingdom there was a Prince in exile.”

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“… The legend said, the Prince could only reclaim his throne from his evil uncle, with the teachings of the Super Turtle King – guardian of the long lost secret.”

 

Love,
Silver

Tweet, tweet me your genius ideas for the next step, so I can steal them, and not do any work myself @runfreakrun !

The Legend of the Super Turtle King and the King of Pandorea

10 Comments on The Legend of the Super Turtle King and the King of Pandorea

The legend of the Super Turtle King and the King of Pandorea

Ideas are cheap.

And I got a lot of them.

Actually, I got too many ideas,  for ideas are nothing but vague statements in out of context until they’re put  to a working order and presented the right way. And that takes time that I just can’t always find.

Yet still, equipped with a fledgling idea of a world named Pandorea – a world that has a legend of a giant Super Turtle King and young hero, maybe a prince on his personal quest –  I painted this concept image.

After that I animated the camera panning and cape movement, and added a logo for a trailer-like feeling. I’ve been curious to explore more storytelling techniques for concept art and this ended up as a great experience. I think it has a lot of potential for production use and I’m quite excited to see where I can take in the future.

Concept art and games are always pushing for a more “cinematic” quality, but this far it only seems to apply to lens flares and aspect ratios. What I think we should push more is the storytelling part of movies, but that’s a whole different battle, best fought another day.

Back to the Super Turtle King.
I think I could easily imagine more scenes, characters and adventures for this world, but I’m too afraid of going deeper down the rabbit-hole, for I have other projects to finish and I don’t want to overcrowd my brain. It wouldn’t be good for what I’m working on already, and it wouldn’t be good for the Super Turtle King either.

And so, maybe one day I’ll return to Pandorea for a proper exploration, equipped with the amount of time it needs to flourish and grow, and make something out of it. But until then I’ll let it sleep with the hope that the Super Turtle King will still be there when I return.

And if not, then I guess I’ll just have to come up with a new idea.

A better idea.

 

Love,
Silver
tweet tweet me your ideas so I can steal them! @runfreakrun