Jon Cairns

Inktober VII-IX

VII. Cesar, Untitled SF: a self-contained ecosystem (2012)

VIII. Sir Knight, 2018-10-15 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post

Inktober IV-VI

IV. Garou, Untitled SF 3: wstyd (2012)

V. Jamie, O-Type Hypergiant (2015)

2018-10-13 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post

Inktober I-III

Since I'm writing at the moment, I thought it was good time to participate in Inktober on the side. I've been letting a random number generator pull from a list of characters I've made for comics, so it's been a good retrospective. At the end of the month I'll put together a zine collecting it all.

But for you guys, I'm going ...

Love Triangulation: Debriefing 2

Part 2 (of 5) in a series of design debriefings on Love Triangulation for Smut Peddler Sex Machine.

Page 3

2018-09-28 17:08:25 +0000 UTC View Post

Love Triangulation: Debriefing 1

Now that Smut Peddler has been successfully kickstarted, and I've finished my work on it, I wanted to share some more of the pages and the design ...

Alpha Flag - Hotel 09

Finally arriving at this scene was a bit surreal for me. It's the leadup to kind of the climax that marks the end of the Alpha Flag setup phase (yeah, we're still in the setup. Apologies!)

What made it personally odd is that my emotio...

Hotel 09 - Color WIP [Spoilery]

Renee sent me her work in progress colors for the next Alpha Flag page, so I thought I'd share! Whenever there's some new effect or blood color we end up discussing it a little bit, and here I think Uniform's confetti/bubble effect will be red and white to match his flag.

2018-05-26 09:24:37 +0000 UTC View Post

Alpha Flag - Hotel 08

Heeeey, look at that!

Renee's landed a new job that has given her time to do art again, so she sent me colors for this page. She's got up through 15 flatted, too so more should be forthcoming. I'll post them here first, and then on the site on the closest Thursday as per usual.

Love Triangulation: Building a Scene

There wasn't quite enough space in my process post about this page to fit in this extra step outlining how I used 3D models to build these particular shots so here's a step-by-step breakdown of how I went about it.

First, though, the why: I felt this establishing shot demanded a very specific sense of scale for the elements we...

Love Triangulation - Page 6-7 Spread Process

So one of the projects I've been hacking away at is a Smut Peddler short for the upcoming manifestation, Smut Peddler Presents: Sex Machine, billed as:

Coming from Iron Circus Comics in 2018: Smut Peddler Presents: Sex Machine. A star-studded erotic anthology about robots, AI, VR, androids, and more. The latest instal...

2018-05-08 15:39:47 +0000 UTC View Post

S17 - My Workspace

So, this is the super cute building I've been working in for the past couple months. It's a converted warehouse in Glasgow's East End. It's run by one of the many nonprofit arts organizations in Scotland that strive to maintain at-cost work spaces for artists of all types.

2018-02-25 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Life Update & Apologies - February 2018

Hey everyone! I've been really irresponsibly silent for the past couple of months--whenever season depression hits me in late fall, I tend to become withdrawn and private. Terrible for updating social media, and super irresponsible to you guys specifically, and for that I really apologize. I'm out of the blues now and I'll keep ...

Hotel 15 - Inks

Things seem to be getting a little hairy for our guys. Spoiler-heavy page again under the download.

I've had the Diver's eyes in this scene my head for so many years that, after I drew and inked them, I went back and redrew them and reinked them two more times. I don't think I quite nailed what I had in my head, but at some po...

Hotel 14 - Inks

There weren't any spoiler-free panels on this page, so it's all under the download if you want to see it!

This page posed a lot of challenges for me. Continuing from the previous page, I've been pushing action. In this page, that revolves around imbuing rendering with very specific directional energy. Be it speed lines or obje...

Hotel 13 - Inks

Hotel 13 under the download.

I haven't invested many skill points over the years into drawing action, so this chapter has been a bit of a learning experience. I feel like this page works better than some of the earlier ones in the chapter in the sense that what is happening is clearer from panel-to-panel.

And here we're ...

Hotel 12 - Inks

Another advance page hidden under the download to avoid spoilers.

I've had this encounter in my head for way, way too many years--it's been the main goal of the guys from since before the Long Hiatus. As such, I wanted to make sure I didn't cut any corners in the visualization of the Diver watching Quebec.

I also wanted ...

Typography - Terminal Hair + Paleolithic

This year, I've put out a few zines and minicomics that have hand-drawn titles--namely, the (DiNKY award nominated!) RISO printed Terminal Hair zine, and my porn minicomic Paleolithic.

A few people have complimented the font choice of these two title treatments without knowing that people can and still do dra...

Hotel 11 - Inks

This page (under the download cut for people wanting to avoid spoilers--this page is pretty spoiler light, for what it's worth) wasn't in the original script. This is an especially long chapter where we finally get to go after Quebec, so I wanted to set aside a quiet moment to reflect on the animal aspects we've encountered up t...

Hotel 10 - Inks

This segment is still spoiler heavy if you want to wait for the finished pages, but I figured I'd keep giving you the option to choose that for yourself by putting the page itself under the download link.

This page allowed me to have some kind of unexpected eyelash inking revelation. I've always struggled with rendering them i...

Hotel 09 - Inks

It's that time of the year when a random Alpha Flag page shows up out of the blue!

I've been kind of hemming and hawing about posting pages early from this point on or not, since it starts getting dramatically spoilery for big, story-changing plot events.

So I guess I'll put the page itself under the download link so you...

About Being AWOL

Hey guys! Sorry I've been silent for a while. I've been struggling with a period of some difficult anxiety that I think I'm navigating to the end of.

I've also been developing a new project for a publisher that is too early in development to say much more about, but it's been eating up a lot of time. If they continue to like i...

Poison Pen Letter - 009

Parting the mists of time, we find ourselves in the distant past--2010.

My good friend Erin and I are about to embark on long, strange comics journeys with new webcomics. Neither of us is terribly confident, but we decide that the only way to start making p...

Hotel 08

These past two months have been a little quiet from me. I've been working on something that I can't show off, but fingers crossed it goes over well and I can share it with you guys here first and foremost.

That aside, I've also spend some extra time running through the thumbnails that go to the end of the chapter. It's the lon...

PDF Download/Comics Master List

Here's a list of all of the comics and PDFs released so far, as of Feb 1, 2017.

Free+

The Animal: The Animal 

$2+

Alpha Flag: 2017-02-01 21:35:07 +0000 UTC View Post

Soil [Remaster]

Having finally rediscovered some of the old Soil art, I was able to put a new site for it together. In the process, I updated some of the dialogue that had bothered me over the years, and touched up some of the worldbuilding elements (namely the ranks of nobility). I think it reads as a less confusing, tighter short sto...

Soil [Remaster] - PDF Download

To celebrate finally finding a piece of Soil art that I'd considered long forgotten, I'm re-releasing Soil, a science fiction short from 2011 written and drawn by me, colored by Renee Keyes and Ray Bruwelheide.

Since it's been available for free to read since forever, I'm releasing the PDF to all patrons regardless of backer l...

Paleolithic - Adults Only

I spent a couple weeks this month finishing off a Terminal Hair comic that I had started in 2016. With anxiety running high on account of events, I needed to have a small victory in the form of completing something to salvage my fragile emotional state.

2017-01-29 16:30:15 +0000 UTC View Post

The Animal, 2014

Here's a single page story I wrote and drew in 2014 so I could experiment with the toning technique that I would later use in O-Type Hypergiant. I was in the middle of moving apartments in San Diego while preparing to move to England. Life was in general chaos, so a more existential horror-tinged form of science fiction really a...

Alpha Flag: Alpha - PDF Download

And finally the last one! The beginning.

2010 was a year of change for me. I'd finished college in 2008 while working an office PR job alongside it. With my studio art degree in my hand, I was kind of thrown out into the chaotic economic landscape of the Great Recession. I clung to the PR job because I had no idea how to even ...

Hotel 07

The action always ends up being kinda clumsy and goofy. I think I have a complex about making the Diver and Charlie look cool or confident (WINK). It's interesting how the lines are starting to get a little more graphic, too.

In case you missed it, Hotel 06 is up on the...