Looking for an Artist, for Shadowrun webcomic Options

[Kagetenshi]

Essentially what the title says. I'm looking for someone who's willing to work with me to churn out a regular comic (page-length) between one and three times a week (depending on preference—I'd love to go with three, but two or one seems more realistic).

What I'm doing:

Scriptwriting, plotline/storyline, hosting, update script, and all of those other details.

What I need from you, the prospective applicant:

• Willingness to commit to a schedule. This is flexible (as mentioned, depending on your schedule this could be anywhere from a three-a-week to a once-a-week), and while I'd like to avoid it I can deal with the occasional late strip or similar or, if prearranged, missed week, but I'd like to have a fairly dependable schedule.
  
• Must be comfortable or willing to become comfortable drawing mechanical bits (vehicles, drones, cyberlimbs, so on and soforth). There will be a lot of these.
  
• Willingness to commit for a sustained duration. While the storyline I have in mind has a definite ending, I can't at this point say how long it will take to reach that ending—a few years at least, especially on a one-a-week schedule. That doesn't mean you'll be stuck 'till the end, but if you eventually decide to leave the project I'd greatly appreciate at least a few months notice to arrange a replacement.
  
• Willingness to redo scenes as necessary. I'll do my best to outline what's necessary so that we can avoid this, but especially early on while we're getting used to each other's styles this may become necessary.
  
• A drawing of one or both of the sample pages below.

In return for all this, you will get:

• Scripts well in advance. I'm planning on trying to stay at least six scripts ahead of the current comic, more if possible, and will also try to stay at least a script or two ahead of you if you overflow the buffer above.
  
• Creative direction to suit your working style. If a visual detail is important to the comic I'll make it explicit, and I'll provide general direction, but beyond that it's your call. Take drawing a city: if you want me to give you descriptions down to the building, complete with pictures of similar-looking buildings, I can do that. If you'd prefer I just say "It's a city" and let you do the rest, I can do that too. If you've got all the Shadowrun material at your command and can pull descriptions of canon buildings on request, I can work that way. If you'll need pictures of three different angles of the Renraku Arcology or the Seattle Space Needle when it shows up in a comic, I can provide them.
  
• Freedom from site maintenance, hosting, etc. issues.
  
• Of course, full intellectual property rights to your creative work.
  
• Personal satisfaction?

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. This will be a fair amount of work for not all that much reward, but I'm hoping that someone out there will be interested.

Sample pages:

If you're interested, draw up one or both of the pages described below and send to my username at kanshishakage.net . The image can be in any common format for purposes of this sample (TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc. etc. etc.)—resolution is not terribly important at the moment except insofar as it should show off your work and scale to a browser-viewable resolution without losing important information (no giant resolutions with tiny words that will be lost if the image is prepared for web delivery, for example). Other than that, feel free to ask for more detail about any part of the samples.

You'll notice that the title is not set in stone yet. Make sure to leave someplace to put the title, whether superimposed over an area of the picture without anything important or in a box below or above the main picture. Feel free to put in a placeholder, but make sure it's something that can be removed.

Page One:

Scene, full-page: Seattle, view slightly below isometric, sunset, office parks in the foreground with fountains and fake hills and soforth, downtown skyscrapers in the background, maybe the Renraku Arcology somewhere in the distance. Space Needle if necessary, I don't know the city geography that well. Miscellaneous background drone or air traffic as desired. Foreground, a Strato-9 winging its way across the office parks.

Title. Need to think this up.

Page Two:

Slightly less than Page-width, third-height panel floating on top of main panel: Boardroom, somewhere in one of the office parks of page 1. Shot from outside the window, a number of people in suits. One man is standing, leaning over the table, apparently shouting at another man—optionally, one of them (but not both) could be an Elf. A younger-looking man stares out the window somewhere just to the side of the "camera".

Main panel, spanning the entire page: shot of the building from the same side as the above panel, Strato-9 visible some distance away from the building but approaching. Style of building something like a less wide, taller version of this or a more angular version of this. Not much in terms of people around—it's summertime, and at sundown most employees are long gone.

Smaller panel floating towards bottom center of page: dim view of the interior of a van with no windows (no need to make it clear to the viewer that that's what it is at this point), with a bucket seat and a woman with a cable running to her head—metatype and perhaps even gender should be mostly concealed by lighting. Text associated with this panel: dialogue, transduced: "Ready when you are." Dialogue, transduced: "Almost."

Smaller panel floating towards bottom right of page, slightly below previous panel and similarly sized: same view as top panel on this page, tightened significantly on the young man looking out the window. Should be clearly identifiable as some form of targeting mechanism—not necessarily crosshairs, but a circular view with perhaps a circular reticle. Text above reticle: ACQUIRING (in small caps, probably monospaced), other text nearby including details like range (something in the 80-meter range), wind speed (~3 kilometers per hour), rounds remaining (500), so on and soforth—this panel should be extremely information-dense, though there's no need for any of these items to be spelled out as such. We'll be using this format again for vehicle gunnery, so make sure you've got an explanation for what each piece of data is so it can change appropriately (if you add stuff beyond what I've outlined). Do what you can to keep the center uncluttered.

~J

[nick012000]

While I can't draw (at all), I do read a large number of webcomics (and post on the boards of a fair few of them), and once you guys get started, I'll do my best to spread the word.

[Crimson Jack]

I may be interested in teaming up with you on this, Kage. I'm an illustrator by trade, but trained in graphic design and cel animation as well.

A few questions first:

1. Do you want color pages? If so, 3/week is definitely out. With a 45+ hour job a week, that would be too daunting to undertake. There are some options with color that we could discuss though.

2. What's the tone of the story? Dark and gritty or highly polished uber runners? I should be able to accomodate, but it would be nice to know for the sample page I send you.

3. Personal preference of mine would be to have you do the lettering. That's one thing that I can't stand in comics... when the artist himself does the letters. They never come out looking right. Do you have something in mind here?

Other than that, I could safely promise 1 page a week, which would entail fairly detailed inks, and only foresee two weeks off during the year ahead (Christmas week and the week of my birthday Oct/31).

[Kagetenshi]

Regarding:

1) Colour is not important, though if you're up for it an occasional (once or twice yearly, probably) colour splash page may be a possibility.

2) It's a lot closer to the "dark and gritty" end of the spectrum, with a few dashes of overly-immaculate gleaming corporate edifice thrown in. While certainly well along the power spectrum, the characters I've got in mind are definitely neither polished nor uber-runners. Hopefully that's more helpful than it sounds when I reread it, if not feel free to try asking again (preferably in a slightly different way so I can get a better read on what kind of response you're looking for).

3) I can do that. I'm already planning to start work at least a month before the comic launch to build a buffer and establish a working rhythm, which will definitely give me time to properly figure out how to do the lettering.

Anything else?

~J

[Wounded Ronin]

Wow, a webcomic without an artist.

[Crimson Jack]

Nope, that about covers it as far as I'm concerned. Gritty will be nice.

I'll do up a sample page for you. I'm favoring the second one as it has some panel work involved in it. With paying work and all, I'll most likely have it to you by Saturday. Shoot me an email through my DSF info and I'll add you to my contacts list. 8)

[Kagetenshi]

Fired.

~J

[fistandantilus4....]

For what it's worth, I would love to help, except that I'm mostly good at people, only do pencil paper at this point, and own no scanner, and would probably be generally useless for what your looking for. Otherwise I'd love to!

Didn't want ya' to feel un-loved! ;)

[Kenshi]

If you're still looking for someone, I'm definately interested.

I've sent you a PM.

[Jrayjoker]

Competition for the artist's slot. Nice to see it.

[Crimson Jack]

Okay, submitted for approval. Let me know what you think. :)

[Kagetenshi]

Got it, writing up notes/comments now :)

~J