Tally Road

Tally Road was done in a wide variety of media over its initial nearly two year run of 442 episodes.
The very first ones were drawn in Manga Studio over backgrounds generated in the games X-Plane and Aleph One, itself an open source version of the classic Bungie game Marathon Infinity (“Frog blast the vent core!”), after which the backgrounds were run through a cel-shader program I wrote myself to make a grayscale, more ‘artistic’ looking appearance. This didn’t go over well with anybody, but by God it was interesting to do :)
Then, in reaction to vociferous complaints, Tally Road went natural media and daily, first in line-art drawn with Pigma Microns of different sizes, then into heavy crosshatching with the finest Pigma, and after that into line-art inked with a nib pen (various nibs), usually not crowquills. All of this was done on 9″ x 4″ bristol, got by purchasing 9″ x 12″ pads and chopping them diligently up into little rectangles. Some people like drawing really huge, and I can see how that would help, but have always been fond of itty bitty art :)
There was a brief period where I was trying to pencil, ink, and watercolor daily comics without actually being able to draw and paint. This madness didn’t last long- the scenes were taking place in a grey concrete parking garage, so it wasn’t too jarring when it stopped. We never got to see green trees and blue sky- but since we were on the Runge main homeworld, there weren’t those things to be seen in the first place…
Eventually, Tally Road got probably to its peak when doing inked lines and ink-wash for shading. It didn’t feel like it at the time, but some of the strips ended up looking quite nice, using several nib pens, a detail crow-quill, and using up several Kolisky Sable brushes. In an effort to go quicker, I picked up water-brushes and started putting ink-wash inside them, in the hopes they’d act like some sort of felt-tip marker. This was less controllable, though it’s led to a nice trick of using water-brushes for full-on inking in white and black (one dip and the line will go forever!)
In the end, trying to keep up with felt expectation, Tally Road took to inking, scanning, and then compositing the inked stuff with previously drawn backgrounds in full color with distinct lighting and shading layers, in Photoshop, still daily, though down to weekdays from the former seven days a week. It was all about trying to win with a flashy process at this point, refining the look of everything, but it’d gone past the comfort zone, past what the muse preferred- and after one last awkward but ambitious action scene with Magarce, Siertes and a crowd of Runge policemen, it was down for the count.
I still have all the tools, such as Photoshop brushes, I developed for this period. They’ll probably find use somewhere.
Currently when I draw or paint, it’s inking with the ink waterbrush (no more nib pens), shading with ink wash, coloring most likely with watercolors if at all. Comicing of any frequency is going to be ink and watercolor wash, in lamp black, that being my first love- perhaps with some pencil to add texture. Not ink wash again- it was just too uncontrollable.
Almost everything in the middle period is drawn and inked and lettered right on the bristol board, and could be sold off as original art. I have the stack of comics on a shelf behind my head. It’s about an eight inch stack. That said, Charles Shulz’s entire life drawing Peanuts would be maybe a twelve foot stack of comics, so it’s all relative…