Red’s Planet will be returning to this screen on May 2 with the conclusion of Chapter Two!

What happens when Red awakes to find herself on a giant space ship millions of miles from home?  Will she be discovered? And who the heck are the mysterious Aquilari?  And what’s up with this buying spree they’re on?

Find the answers to these questions (well, maybe not all of them) in just two weeks, when Red’s Planet returns with new pages updating twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays!

A Personal Note to Fans:

Thanks everyone for the support and encouragement over the past few months. Though my time away has been much longer than I anticipated, I’ve made some slow but steady progress on Red’s Planet and I’m very ready to jump back in full force with the exciting conclusion to Chapter Two.

I also thought some of you might like an little creative update on the from the behind the scenes.

Over the past weeks, not only have I been scripting and designing the rest of the current chapter, but even more important, I have been writing the entire story. I can now say that the first draft of Red’s Planet is nearly finished — with only two or three scenes left to complete.

Since my influence and area of study is film, I like to write in screenplay form as it’s easier for me to visualize the story and the story structure. From that point, I adapt the script for comic pages. For a movie script, it is still a little long at 127 pages, but after a rewrite, I think it will balance out at 120 pages — perfect screenplay length.  Now the first act of the story (roughly chapters One through Four), have been locked for some time. It was the remainder of the story that I needed to tie-down and really know where we are going.

Following the rewrite, my plan is to find some trusted individuals — hopefully  colleagues of mine in the film and animation industry — to read it and give me honest feedback.

And for those who are curious  — if you were watching Red’s Planet the movie, chapter Two begins somewhere around 15 minutes into the film and ends near the 30 minute mark.

Just sayin’.

The first stage is thumbnails (which obviously, I didn’t post since no one but I can decipher it). This part can be extremely rough (like it is here) or detail depending on how much I have to work out visually.

The next stage is a layout stage, where I work out my staging and poses. This is done digitally and often times I will incorporate CG sets that I have created in Google Sketchup. This stage is created digitally using Sketchbook Pro and Photoshop.

I print out my layout and trace it off in light blue Col-erase pencil onto a piece of 2-ply Strathmore Bristol. At this point I am paying special attention to putting the characters on model and adding character to the environment.

I ink the art mainly with a Windsor Newton Series 7 #2 brush with a little bit of Rapidiograph and various dip pens.

After I scan my inks as 1200 dpi line art, I “flat” the colors in Photoshop by selecting and filling areas with the lasso tool. Here is the image without the line art.

Last I add shadows, highlights, a few textures, salt and pepper, and it’s good to go.

The final model of Zeke Hainey and his dog.

Originally, I saw Zeke as a Jed Clampett type of character with the tattered hat and clothes; more of a back woods type. But the sequence eventually merged with a previous project of mine—an 8mm film I made in High School called They Say There’s Something Out There— a kind of Twilight Zone/Creep Show story about an old man who discovers something strange in the woods after his truck breaks down on the road (sound familiar?). So, once the character was a little more solid in my mind, I needed to “cast” the role by looking for the perfect visual personality for the character. In the short film, I dressed myself as the character ( I fired the original actor. Sorry Darrin!), complete with old age make-up and Ben Nye gray in my hair. So the perfect casting this time around just might be someone related to the original actor—my father.

A reference sheet of my inspiration for Zeke Hainey.

I wasn’t sure how my dad would take being cast in my story, but since I was using his truck as well—a 1964 Ford F100 (more on that some other time)—there was a chance he just might go for it. I made up a few reference sheets from recent photos of my dad and started to work out some rough ideas for Zeke. I eventually nailed the final model right before production on the pages by bringing the design a little more in line with the style of Red’s character.

Here are a few sketches and roughs of the character in progress.

Some expressions for an earlier model of Zeke.

Sketchbook and roughs for the red's Planet prologue pages.