The Tao of Workflow

Like most webcomics on their first year, The Tao of I.T. Al has changed over the months, as the workflow has been changed and refined.

Originally I had followed the current "traditional" comics art route with pencils and inked work done with actual graphite, ink and paper.  These were then scanned, cleaned up, and then painted digitally.  Now I work entirely digitally using Corel’s Painter for pencils and Adobe Illustrator for inking and coloring. Some backgrounds are hand drawn, but I primarily rely on a growing library of scratch-made resources made in Illustrator. Workflow is important to me because it the more it speeds up the processes, the more time I can spend drawing!

October’s batch of Al is done, and he’s back in action. Much of the recent material has been concentrating on the supporting characters, but Al has reasserted himself recently. It’s good to draw him in full martial arts mode. And it comes out so easily.  It’s rather odd that one of my major skills is to draw a large armadillo in a hakama! The hakama, sometimes known as "samurai pants", is a very elegant traditional garment worn by aikido, kendo, kenjitsu, iado, and Japanese archery practitioners.  Back when I was practicing aikido, I thought it made my technique look ten times better than it did. Read more