T.O.S. Artists Tirade

T.O.S. Zero ISSUE #1

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Dan Ali - Artist

Hello to anyone who might be reading this, I really don't know where to start. This being the first issue of t.o.s., there is a lot to cover, I guess I should begin with the basic platform for t.o.s's look.

When I first came up with the idea for an enhanced comicbook, I thought it would be simple, I was sooo wrong! There were about a million small details that never entered my mind when I started this thing. To begin with, upon starting to pencil the first issue I realized that my artwork well.. needed some work, a whole lot of work!
As a result, the comic has a fairly inconsistent look as I was experimenting with style from time to time. It also didn't help that the insane writer(Dan Ali) for this comic kept changing his mind and rewriting the whole damned saga. The result of that is that the first draft was initially penciled in about 2 months, but the final version wasn't done until about 2yrs after the start. Also, due to the multiple duties I have taken on, I really had to rush through pretty much all of the artwork.

But let's be honest, I don't expect too many people to come here looking for my stunning pencil work, what makes tapestry and our style of comics special are the enhancements that we do to them. Which opens up the problem of animation and the web. Firstly I had to take a realistic look at what was possible without making each issues download size too insanely huge(very difficult). After experimenting, finally I refrenced the skillset that I aquired years ago in the gaming industry, basically back in the day of 2-D, gaming systems were not really that powerful(downright weak!). What this meant was that storage space was small for things like pictures and animations inside games, gaming engineers had to think of creative ways to achieve visual goals without making their games ballon up in size. So basically we tried to emulate old school gamings visual techniques. On that front, I think we did okay, but it's a work in progress.

Lastly, theres this whole 3d backrounds and effects thing...IT WAS HARD AS HELL TO DEVELOP!!! I would say that this aspect took some of the most time to figure out. the problem is that 3-D and 2-D don't really like each other, what that means is that when you try and get them to coexist on a page, well they start to clash. It didn't help that when I started this thing my 3D skills were about as good as my artwork(not good). But with many months of practice and experimentation with visuals, I think we found a happy medium where 2D and 3D can at least share a page.
Okay, to summarize, creating the visual look and style for T.O.S. was challenging, but the end results and the systems we have developed were well worth the headaches. Now we just hope that people show up to see this thing! well until my next entry into my little journal here, I bid you farewell and enjoy T.O.S.