Michael Tierney on the Evolution of the Publishing Process {Part 3}

I had previously done all the illustrations for my early Wild Stars comics, like I had for The Multiversal Scribe. But being handicapped by the time constraints of operating multiple businesses, for the new millennium issues I hired professional artists to do the pencils, and then finished them out by adding tonal shading with Photoshop.

Photoshop was invaluable when I processed 12,000 images for my Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard Art Chronologies. I sometimes spent as much as a 40 work week on a single image, repairing 100-plus year old magazine covers by going all the way down to the single pixel level to restore the dot patterns of the old letterpress printing process. Repairs of this type were previously impossible in a home setting, and came in handy again when I did the cover restorations for Julian Hawthorne’s previously lost classics.

Another new tool that revolutionized the process of making those Art Chronologies was the program InDesign, which automated the pasting and assembly that I once did with a T-square and art board. This saved an immeasurable amount of time by easily assembling the nearly 3,000 pages of text and art.

I honed my computer coloring skills by airbrush painting over the inked art for the first 100 episodes of the online comic strip, Beyond the Farthest Star, that I also write and letter for ERB, Inc., then deliver in both print and web formats.