I hear him every night on every street the scales that do slither

EDIT: Here are the final image and line art:





Warm-up drawing: Olivia!

The dark side of the moon

We are having a Moonpocalypse viewing party. We broke out this new game, Pit, which is a suuuuper fun all-ages party game:

Pit
Originally uploaded by tallychyck

Turning traffic away

More vacation comics~

Poor Neil. You can't choose your family xD;
[Nothing that Nick and I joke around about should be taken seriously...! (Obviously...??)]

Everyone who sees us greets us as we fly

I. Love. This movie. We watch it every December!

My favorite part (besides the song, OF COURSE) is when they ride the motorcycle through the trees. <3 So cool.

Don't let me down

Fun times on family vacation: cute cousins galore!

It seems so long ago I would see your writing

Yaaaay! The 2011 Monsters & Dames book has been announced on Emerald City Comicon's website. My piece and several of my friends' pieces made the book! :D

Oh I'm hoping you'll understand

Reese Witherspoon sketches:


She has a difficult face to draw ;__;

Give me some rope tie me to the dream

Check out my fan art on Briar Hollow this week!

Dude, best commission ever: Catbus + koala + panda for David Harper. So ridiculously much fun.




as;dlkfjalskdmf;laskdfj I have so much love for Fringe.
SO.
MUCH.
LOVE.
My latest obsession is this full-length, piano version of the theme song:

If I find sheet music I like, I'd love to try learning this song on my keyboard! I also reeeeeeally want to do fan art, but that is just something that will have to wait. ;__; It will be so sweet when I finally find the time. <3

Holiday cards!

***EDIT: If this wasn't clear, you do not have to pay to get a card! It's just something I'm doing for fun! :)***

A lot of artists I follow have made it a tradition to send out postcards to friends and fans around the holidays. I think it's lovely as a fan to receive them, and they look like a lot of fun to send as well. I'm reeeeeally excited to say that this year I'll be mailing my own for the first time!

If you'd like one, just email me (Tally at farbeyond dot com) with your street address before December 10. Anyone who would like to receive one is more than welcome, so don't be shy! :D Yaaaaaay, I am super excited for this!

The problem is all inside your head she said to me

I remembered this October post today, and went back to look at the now-complete second and third installments. It's interesting to read the reactions of women from so many different levels of familiarity with comics, ages, and occupations. I love that they selected their comics based on the covers, haha!
I would love to see this as a regular installment on a major comics journalism website like CBR, and not just for women, but the biggest variety of people possible.

I touch the fire and it freezes me

I squeezed in a fun character design job this weekend for Robert B. Fortney, and he's been nice enough to let me post those designs here! Keep an eye out for his graphic novel series, Arclight~! :D

You can't step in the same river twice

Photo dump from my morning walk:


The NW hills have all of these awesome shortcut stairwells. I keep finding new ones and being very excited.

There are so many dead-end streets...this one lead into this steep, forested hillside. There's a lot of undeveloped land in this area, and it's fun when you run into it unexpectedly.





I like dis house.

You make me complete

I've just put 9 new originals up for sale at my Comic Art Fans account. You've seen them over the last few months like this:

The stories would excite me

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

I have been waiting so long to watch these episodes again.

Ego side story: when you search Google Images for "Tom Haverford", "Ron Swanson", or "April Ludgate", you get my fan art. <3 This pleases me. You can bet there will be new fan art after rewatching season 2. I remember there was a Tammy drawing for "I'd rather be Cleopatra" that I never finished...

It'll all get better in time

I drew my holiday card design last night, and thought I'd post the process for those interested:


I came up with a couple of ideas that I thought would work for the card, but as soon as I drew the girl with her reindeer, I didn't want to draw anything else.

I searched Google Image for reference. I liked this site a lot, and I found my reindeer's pose here.


I posed for a reference shot to use for the girl. Necks, shoulders, and arms are the most difficult for me to draw correctly from imagination. Even a somewhat similar reference pose is a big help. I used things like my hood and wrinkles around my elbows in the final drawing as well. I used this expression, but tried to change the face shape.


I penciled with non-photo blue lead. Pros: don't have to erase after inking, so ink scans nice and dark, paper doesn't degrade from erasing, and I save time and energy. Cons: can't erase, so pretty much have to get it right the first time, and the original will have lots of visible blue lines.
At this point, I generally know what the setting will be, but I get my characters in place first and leave drawing the background for later, since it should complement their pose and composition.




I inked the foreground first, and went left to right whenever possible.


I inked her hair without clear pencil lines, and ended up with the braid being out of perspective. I have to remember it's worth the time to put down my brush and tighten up my pencils when I run into these areas...






I started to stray from my pencils in the background. I realized that the hay/wall division was too high for the perspective I was using.


I used a photo of the image and messed around with it in Photoshop to test out a new background composition.






I added a spot black in the background to help frame the important part of the composition (reindeer face, girl face, hands). That left hand looked ungrounded, so I increased the shadow that it cast.


I scanned the image into Photoshop, cropped, adjusted the levels to get rid of any visible pencil lines and make the ink dark, converted to bitmap, and saved as a Photoshop file. I closed and reopened it, edited the line art, and converted to grayscale.


I converted the image mode to CMYK, added a layer set to 'multiply' called 'flats', and began flatting the image. My black and white line art stayed untouched on the background layer.


I colored the reindeer on a new layer so I could push color around with the brush tool and not ruin the flats around it. Then I selected the areas around the reindeer on the flats layer, moved back to the reindeer layer, and deleted where I went outside of the lines. I merged the reindeer layer down onto the flats.

I made some adjustments to the flats like differentiating the foreground and background wood and changing the levels and saturation of different areas to complement the girl and reindeer.


I added some highlights and color to the flat layer (blue reflection in sleighbells, pink flush on her cheek, white highlights on reindeer and her hair). On a new layer called 'shadow' set to multiply, I add shadows in a reddish gray.


I made a final layer called 'effect' set to multiply and added a radial gradient in the same tone that I used for shadows. This is a little cheat to pull the eye to the center of the image.