Jay Eaton

André overhears a group of shady people discussing contraband while trying to find a place to sit and eat at the most touristy spot on Luna's largest city, Babylon. The hanging gardens feature several tiers of housing, hotels, and storefronts surrounding four enormous glass bowls full of water. Glass is one of the primary industries on the moon, originally a byproduct of their mining industry. In the park directly underneath the 4 bowls, visitors can see up through all of them as concentric, illuminated circles. 1g tourists are notorious for getting too excited about the low gravity and breaking their ankles from poorly landing ambitious jumps.

A multi-attack for Artfight this year. Since I am a contrarian and people mostly make alien OCs for Runaway to the Stars, I drew all the human/GMH characters I could find or remember people having. Feat. tickflea's Oscar, Sully, and Bull; BeepieSheepie's Nera, and foca's André.

Hi. I'm very late to Webcomics Day. The concept this year was to nicely showcase what the progression of your work looks like through layers of completion on a single page, but because of the way I am, this is not very easy.

The first thing I do is sketch the page. This can be anything between thumbnail scribbles, nice pencil drawings with panels, or a bunch of floating character headshots with speech bubbles on a random piece of paper. I then scan these and add them to the page document. I usually do digital tweaks to the scans until I am satisfied with the panel layout and composition. I add vector speech bubbles at this stage too. The goal is (was... it's done) to make the entire book comprehensibly readable, so editors can read it and suggest changes before I put in actual elbow grease.

Second stage is modelling important background elements in Blender. I'm not very good at this, mostly because I am new to Blender and terribly impatient. My models are usually a vague sketch of a hardscape environment that I then draw clutter over. My vehicle models are much nicer and that's because they were commissioned from people who have years of learned skill that I don't.

Third step is when I actually start the finished page. I usually draw the character lines and flats (unshaded tones) before anything else because I find it fun and easy. I don't recommend this, it sometimes makes the next step inconvenient. I frequently start flats or shading before I've finished lines, because I get bored of doing lines. I don't recommend this either.

Last step is backgrounds, and etc. If I need a Blender model, first I load an .fbx copy into the Clip Studio file and position it; then I often have to resize and reposition the characters I've already drawn, and then I grind out all the background lines and tones. Usually shade the characters around this time. This is also the time when I finally fill in miscellaneous stuff I've been dreading; like conlangs, technical details of equipment and props, conlangs, time conversions, and computer screen displays.

Then the page is done. And I move on to the next one. Someday, perhaps, I will be done with all of them (so that I can work on the next book). Hope this was insightful. Take a peek at some of the other great artists making online comics, who posted in the #WebcomicsDay tag yesterday. Read Runaway to the Stars over here.

Back to the drawing little thingies on stream grindstone.

My conlangs are extremely slapdash and this mess is the closest thing I have to a key, but this centaur script does have logographic characters with assigned meanings and a puzzling non-linear grammar structure. It is used as a signage script for communication between nomadic tribes who speak related but non-identical languages, and as a result doesn't have a lot of unified standards. Sentences can often be read in more than one word order. The second image has sentences for good luck charms written inside the utility spine of the ship later in the story.