Happy Easter everyone, hope you’re well rested now. Also, check out the little video below for few glances how it was made. Not much, but we thought you might enjoy it. :)
See you soon, cheers!
Silver and Kaija
Happy Easter everyone, hope you’re well rested now. Also, check out the little video below for few glances how it was made. Not much, but we thought you might enjoy it. :)
See you soon, cheers!
Silver and Kaija
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.
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.
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.
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.
To celebrate the end of this chapter, and the soon beginning last chapter of Run Freak Run – we made a wallpaper out of today’s comic page. We hope you enjoy it :)
Click to open up!
It looks like our chapters have just become longer and longer (besides 3 & 4 that were side-stories). I wonder how long the last one will be, for there’s still a few things to cover.
Jelou all! We’re happy to announce that we’ve added five new pages to our online store. These are inked with blood, sweat and sumi-e inks on A3 smooth bristol papers. Only one of each exist in the world, and they all come signed by the artist, Kaija.
We’re also happy to announce that we’re offering a 10% off with the coupon code AKRASIA on all art sales, because we’re not just artists here, but also capitalists.
Speaking of ALSO! Make sure you sign up for e-mail newsletter, because we’re just about ready to start about our next project with some teasers, and we’ll reveal things first to everyone on our mailing list. Besides, you might win some free art in the process.
See you on Mondays!
Silver
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:
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:
Shantell Martin: http://www.shantellmartin.com/
Krink pens here!: http://shop.krink.com/
Smiles,
Kaija
PS. HAPPY NEW YEAR GUYS!
tweet tweet me @KaijaRudkiewicz
I loved the panel Kaija made for today’s RFR, and made it in to a wallpaper. Maybe you guys like it too, so here it is!
And how it looks in action:
Love,
Silver
Help share RFR by voting us on topwebcomics (you can do this multiple times)
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!
(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!
Love,
Silver
Tweet, tweet me at @runfreakrun and join our newsletter, pronto!
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!
Love,
Silver and Kaija
Hellooooooouuuuuu!
Today I want to talk about one of our favorite books, that I thought would go really well with our readers, since like – most of you are into fairy tales and mythologies. The book in question is The Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales and it is magnificent.
It has over 700 pages of short stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, during the early 19th century. The stories are often strange in nature; often magical, divine (God and the angels do a few cameos), sometimes plain weird and always entertaining. It has all the classics from Rapunzel, Snow White and Hansel & Gretel, but also a lot of unknown delights.
I can’t really recommend this book enough, it’s a bible for story lovers and beautifully presented. Many of the stories are illustrated by Arthur Rackham and are just full wonder. Kaija got me this book last year as Christmas present and it’s been a great source of inspiration and references. I don’t know how, but I hope to use a lot of the things from it somewhere, some day.
So please, go get this book, trust me – you’ll love it – Just look at the photos below!
Love,
Silver
Twitter me or comment below your favorite fairy tale books and collections, I’m always up to talking anything books!
P.S – Please join our newsletter! It’ll make it so much easier for us to share the cool new project we’re working on. We hope to make some first sneak peaks the upcoming month. Join, join, join.