Happy Valentine's Day!

This awkward Valentine's Day moment is brought to you by Elders of the RuneStone Issue #1!

Stay tuned for Page 2 of Issue #1 to be released Monday, Feb. 18th!

The Steps to Creating a Cool Cover!

Quinn here. Today I'd like to give you all a little sneak peek into the process of creating a cover for Elders of the RuneStone, from inception to the final product. For the purpose of this article, I'm showcasing the cover for Issue #1, in production as we speak. For this piece you'll see Robert's magnificent talents as both penciler and inker, and Bob Pedroza as the colorist. This particular cover was a cool experience in that we were still in the process of finalizing the "look" of the book, including the character designs and the color schemes. It was very fun and both Robert and Bob were great sports, being very long-suffering with my constant needling and changing my mind until it fit the vision I had in mind (even when I wasn't always sure what that was).

Click on any image for a larger view.

My quick sketch for the initial layout idea. I wasn't so much worried about how good it looked as about giving Robert the basic layout and important details (you can see some of my notes). To be fair, I really can draw better than this!!

Working off my scribble, Robert knocked my socks off with this "hasty" sketch, returned to me within an hour. Man he's good!

Robert's final pencils, with everything cleaned up and detailed.

Robert's inks. Notice how much the spot blacks / shadows add to the three-dimensionality and mood of the piece. Also notice how he simplified the white pigment stripes on Monolith's face in the background, getting rid of the "old wrinkley" feel of before.

Here came the fun part! This cover was Bob Pedroza's trial by fire in whether we would take him on as our official colorist. As you can see, he did a tremendous job! He was very patient and cheerful as we kept giving him little nitpicky things to tweak, such as the color of Kat's jacket and Dain's shirt. Robert and I had a hard time deciding how the final color scheme of the characters should look, and Bob came through famously. His energy effects are amazing and really added to the power of the image.

And last but not least, the final image! Note the final "Go Team" logo that Bob added in the coloring stage. Also note the wicked bladed chains encircling the protagonists, foreshadowing a deadly foe to come...

So as you can see, creating the perfect cover is a multi-stepped process, with a lot of work put into each one. We follow a similar process with each drawn page of story, with Bob again taking our tweaks in stride. You can also look forward to Rick Ketcham's stellar inks on our interior art. As always, we look forward to hearing your comments and questions! Until next time!

Scanning Tutorial for Clean Line art

When I do a finished pencil drawing, I typically keep the drawing as clean as possible while drawing it. This saves in clean up time during the scanning process.

I do that by starting my under-drawing with a very light (hard) pencil lead. 4H Mechanical Lead Holder. After I have established the structure, perspective and loose details of the drawing I go over the drawing tightening every thing up with a darker (softer) lead. H Lead. In the past I've used 2H, but ended up drawing harder to get a nice dark line and was pressing grooves into the page. This just makes it hard to ink. Anything darker than 2H will be likely to start smearing as you rub your hand over the drawing, resulting in a general gray "haze" over the whole drawing.

TO AVOID SMEARING AS I DRAW, I place a piece of typing paper under my hand to cover portions of the underdrawing while working on it. Sometimes for pages I will even mask off, or tape pages together, leaving a window of just the panel Im working on open to draw. Then as I move to the next panel I re-tape my "mask" pages to leave the next panel open.This light underdrawing is the equivelant to using a blue line pencil or lightboxing a sketch from another page.

After working with Randy Green he had shown me that going directly to the board with a light pencil, it saves alot of time and helps keep the energy from your sketch directly on the page.So after I have used a darker lead and finished the pencil drawing, I scan in the drawing into photoshop.I do not adjust the levels in the actual scanning program. I just set the mode to gray, and typically scan everything in at 400 DPI. I scan everything so high, because even sketches might end up in a printed sketchbook later, and you can always downsize something. You cannot improve the quality of the scan though with out rescanning. So every file I have is usually a high-res and a "interenet-ready" size that is more manageable.

So I have the scanned image open in Photoshop. I enlarge the image to 12.5% or 25% to get a clear view of the line work. I then duplicate the background layer, so that I have two layers of the line art. I change the mode of the top layer to MULTIPLY. This will automatically make your drawing darker. And not just darker but you've doubled the range of grays in your drawing.

Here is the theory behind it, when you change the contrast or levels of your drawing, you are taking away the number of grays and making the line art darker and the white of the page lighter. When you start from your original scan you only have a certain number of gray levels throughout the file. When you mulitply that file, you are doubling that number of gray levels in your drawing. Basically creating twice as much information to start from. So after the top layer is set to MULITPLY, you flatten the image, and your drawing should look alot darker and the gray "haze" will increase. Now when you adjust the gray levels you are starting from a darker image and you loose less quality when you make the page lighter to eliminate the haze.

Generally I open the Level control under Image/adjustments/levels. or Cntrl L. I move the black arrow to the right and set to around 50. and move the white arrow to the left to around 225.

These numbers are very approximate, while I slide the arrows of contrast I am looking at the image to see the change that is happening. When moving the black arrow I look for the point when the line art is getting to a nice "readable" dark and when you go too far, making the smaller details too muddy. I move the white arrow looking at the white of the page and adjusting to the point where the gray "haze" is dissappearing and when I go too far and start to lose rendering details. So the numbers I mentioned above are subject to the these conditions of each drawing.

After I set the levels I have a more clear pencil drawing, sometimes nearly black line art.

RuneStone Soundtracks

Since the beginning, I've always conceived Elders of the RuneStone as both a comic book series and a movie series. (As a matter of fact, I've already written the screenplay for the first film adaptation.) Along these lines, I've always imagined what songs I'd like to be on the soundtracks that would really capture the feel for the story. Thus, over the years I've created a number of "RuneStone" soundtracks, complete with CD cover designs. I thought it might be fun to share these designs with you all, and let you see the music tracks I selected.

We'll post the image files shortly, allowing you to download them for yourself should you choose to create your own mix CD with the music listed. We'd also love to hear what music you'd like to see with the series! Email us at runestonecomic@gmail.com. Enjoy!

Click on any image for a larger view.

This is the cover for my first soundtrack idea, circa. 2002. I took a picture of a cracked sidewalk, edited out the cigarette butts, and add the blue metallic shine and shadows. Also notice the old RuneStone logo, before we add "Elders of the" to the title. The original back of the cover is not in the correct format to show here, but I've listed the tracks below:

1 - RuneStone Main Theme by Danny Elfman (at the time I used the Spider-Man main title theme)
2 - Push It by Garbage
3 - Discothecque by U2
4 - Comin' Back by The Crystal Method
5 - Go Go Dancer by Pizzicato Five
6 - You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) by Dead or Alive
7 - Firestarter by The Prodigy
8 - Hey Baby by No Doubt
9 - Temptation Waits by Garbage
10 - Blue Monday by New Order
11 - Rolling by Soul Coughing
12 - Keep Hope Alive by The Crystal Method
13 - Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz
14 - RuneStone Closing Theme by Danny Elfman (actually the Sleepy Hollow closing theme)

Volume 2 of the RuneStone movie soundtrack, again with the old logo.



The soundtrack for the second RuneStone movie. Yes, I've got that planned too. I've actually got the script for the first three and a half years of the comic book series already written.

A soundtrack for random songs that would be cool in the Elders of the RuneStone franchise somewhere.



And just for the heck of it, a scary picture.

I've affectionally titled it "OH CRAP".