Process Post: Cayrel’s Ring #3
A couple years ago I backed a cool project on Kickstarter: Cayrel’s Ring #1, an anthology of linked short stories by the writer Shannon Lentz and a rotating roster of artists, including Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, and more. I thought the book was a lot of fun and reached out to Shannon to say that if was ever looking for more collaborators I’d be happy to be part of it… Shannon happily had already seen and liked my work, and he brought me in to draw one of the stories from issue #3 of the series.
One interesting aspect of the book is that I was working with characters that had already appeared briefly in other stories, which meant respecting and further developing existing designs… For instance, the main character in this tale is Sori Val, a female Tromi Veri, a species of four-armed reptilian aliens, and she had made a brief appearance in an earlier scene (drawn by Alchemichael) , which was then restaged in this story:
On this page, Sori visits a printshop to pick up a highly-illegal, 3D-printed firearm. Working from Shannon’s script, I roughed out the page, and made a few suggestions/tweaks, like having the owner of the print shop also be a Tromi Veri (after all, if you were an immigrant minority involved in some illegal activities wouldn’t you wanna go to someone in your own community/species?).
I then started drawing out the scene in detail, starting with the bustling street scene outside (where you can see other examples of Cayrel’s Rings varied inhabitants, both human and alien), before moving into the cramped interior of the printshop:
The printshop features a massive 3D printer that was used to create the gun, plus lots of electronic parts and other assorted junk. The owner is a Tromi Veri male, and I got to establish the sexual dimorphism of the species with the males having their spiny crest and an overall more lean shape than the females like Sori. Don’t forget this, future artists of Cayrel’s Ring! Haha.
Once I had inked in all those little details I went to work on the colors:
Adding in shadows and patterns and tweaking things to try to keep it all clear despite the murky interior, and removing the panel borders since this is all happening in a flashback:
Then Shannon (who does his own lettering) went in and made some adjustments to the script for the final:
Overall this was a really fun collaborative project, loved Shannon’s great concepts… And the other artists he roped into this issue are an all-star bunch, too: Dustin Weaver, Alchemichael, John Le, Simon Roy, and Pablo Clark. You can pick up the new 48-page issue online at Shannon’s Big Cartel shop, and on Comixology as well.