One of the most prolific Web-focused comics creators, Ryan Estrada has produced dozens of short works, utilizing a variety of methods, from hand-drawn illustrations to Flash-based navigational mechanisms. He is currently maintaining three separate ongoing series: Aki Alliance, published by Girlamatic.com; Welton Colbert, a satirical webcomics review published monthly by the webcomics news magazine Comixpedia; and Frank: The Comic Strip, the official comic strip of the LiveJournal community. Many of his shorter works are archived at ryanestrada.com.

Aki Akuyama as she appears on the cover of Aki Alliance. The story begins with Aki’s entire school mad at her because of her penchant for joining various activities, dropping one and moving on to the next just as her teammates are beginning to rely on her. This leads to her quest to befriend every girl in her school, one at a time.

Inspired by the 24-hour comics challenge created by Scott McCloud, Estrada has repeatedly set records for "consecutive comic making." His most recent achievement in this regard is Ped-Xing—a 175-page graphic novel, hand-drawn and inked in 175 contiguous hours.

Aki Alliance is perhaps Estrada’s most artistically ambitious work to date, combining a large cast, a quest-like narrative, and an array of artistic methods. Most of the comic is created digitally, including backgrounds, colors, and such elements as the clear tape and shadows between the panels and the scrapbook "pages." The characters themselves are usually hand-drawn, except when they are abstracted to reflect character perceptions in contrast to the "actual" situations. The elements are compiled in Photoshop as a digital collage, to create the effect of the comic itself being a scrapbook maintained by the lead character, Aki, whose first appearance was in Estrada’s previous book, Ped-Xing.

According to Estrada, "The book itself is as much a character as anyone in it. Reading it is like getting into Aki’s mind. So I designed the two as one and the same. Aki’s uniform is a dark and light gray, with a pink tie for accent. Each page of the comic is filled with a pattern of the same two colors, with accents of the same pink in text blocks and backgrounds. I also use a lot of patterns in the designs, like the plaid on Aki’s skirt, and the crosshatching in some of the hairstyles to add to the crafty feel of the book. I want everything to feel handmade so that the characters don’t clash with the tape, glue, and faux cut paper that the pages are designed with."

"Working on a digital canvas helps me keep my characters more true to my original sketches. If I’m working on a conventional comics page, and I’ve doodled a character design I really like in the margin of some document from work, I’ll then redraw the character in the right size and position on the page, but it may be difficult to recapture exactly what I liked about the original drawing. With Aki Alliance, though, I can just scan that drawing directly from the report I sketched it on, and paste it right onto the page."

The faux cut-paper characters are created digitally, using a Wacom tablet and Photoshop tools, including a selection of filters and texture fills. The visual presentation of these supporting characters, who appear as they are perceived by Aki rather than as they actually are, adds depth to Aki’s own character development.

The following step-by-step walk-through by Ryan Estrada details his creation of a recent page of Aki Alliance using a mix of digital and traditional art tools. All of the characters in Aki Alliance are drawn on paper, but the backgrounds, props, text, and all other elements on the page are done digitally in Adobe Photoshop with a Wacom tablet. "The characters are not necessarily drawn the way they’ll appear on the page, but rather doodled out on whatever scrap of paper I have handy, and compiled at a later stage." At left is a selection of the original art for the first half of Chapter 2.

"I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted the page laid out, so the drawings are fairly close to where they’ll be on the finished page. I decided afterward, though, that I needed one more character in the top row, so I added her on another sheet. The materials used at this stage are a pencil, Uniball Visions (both fine and ultra-fine), and whatever black marker I have to hand."

"I scan these pages into Photoshop as grayscale, then I darken the inks and drop out the pencil lines using Levels. I set this layer to "multiply," which allows me to color on a separate layer underneath. I have one layer for flat colors, and another at about 30 percent transparency to add the highlights and shadows by coloring over the flat areas in black, white, or yellow."

"After that’s done, I take a blank page, with the standard backdrop pattern, cut out the characters from the other file, and drop them onto the page. This step is a lot like making a collage. I often don’t know what the finished page is going to look like until this step. I sometimes cut out drawings that seem unnecessary at this point, or draw new poses because the page looks empty."

"I start drawing backgrounds on a new layer in between the characters and the page pattern. I do this by filling in selected shapes with solid color. After that I’ll add details, usually with the line or shape tools, to keep a geometric shape for the images. Within the book (where Aki is keeping the book as a scrapbook), these backgrounds are supposed to be made with cut paper."

"I type the character’s dialogue on top of this, and then use the "rounded-edge rectangle tool" to make word bubbles. I set a drop shadow on that layer so that the bubbles look like paper that Aki has glued to the page. Voila! A finished page!"