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| Other planets are dumb | Sep 30, 2010 9:36 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Hey, even more action today, how about that.
Speaking of action (oh man was that slick or what?), Congress today passed a bill providing funding to NASA through 2013. According to the article, they're supposed to spend that on stuff like an extra-final Space Shuttle flight, supporting the ISS, helping commercial spaceflight development (since that's how they're supposed to get to the ISS after the final Space Shuttle flight, although since none of that exists yet they'll be using the ol' Russian Soyuz capsules), and developing a deep space rocket, in line with the Obama administration's road map of getting astronauts on an asteroid (the Moon has been dropped--too 1960's, I guess) by 2025, and to Mars by the 2030's.
Hm, I thought Mars was George W.'s idea, and we weren't going to do that anymore. I suppose the thought of Japan or Russia or China or Brazil or whoever beating us there was just too much to bear after all. And I wonder what astronauts will do on an asteroid that robots couldn't do? If it isn't drilling inside and making a long-term base--which I just bet it *isn't*--then I'm not sure what the point will be. But we'll be able to say HEY WE DID IT FIRST JUST LIKE THE MOON REMEMBER--unless of course we don't.
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Another thing was that some bunch of scientists or whatnot released their exciting data about finding yet another planet around some other star somewhere that might have life on it. I'm not even going to link it because it's ridiculous. Oh okay fine. Now the excuse for getting excited about this particular chunk of rock is that it's in the dinky dwarf star's tiny habitable zone (since when did those start getting called "Goldilocks planets"? what an awful term), which means the temperature range *could* support liquid water. Which various over-enthusiastic psuedo-scientific hacks want to be the first to proclaim means alien life is there, 100% guaranteed.
Well, call me a pessimist. Our planet had things pretty cushy, and even with everything pretty much just perfect--as far as we understand it--it took like a billion years for single-celled stuff, another billion for multi-celled stuff, and another billion for animals of some kind--all of that long, long time being relatively undisturbed by super-deadly stuff, aside from a major asteroid impact or two. Hm and major meteors for a while at the beginning.
Now single-celled stuff, sure. That stuff is tough, and doesn't really take very long to generate, provided you have some hydrocarbons or whatever and maybe some lightning or something. You probably don't even need the planet to have *that* much water for it to happen.
But multi-celled? We're talking two-billion pretty peaceful years on a perfect planet to cook those up. Even if there are however many hundreds of billions of stars some folks like to think there might be in our galaxy with planets in the "habitable zone" as we understand it, how many have things just so? We know that there are so many factors on our planet where, just nudged a bit out of whack, there'd have been no chance for Earth's current types of complex life to develop. And even if you get all that stuff right, there's still the odd gigantic meteor just waiting to come along and wipe the entire surface of the planet out. Earth has probably had a couple nearly big enough to do that in the past three billion years or whatever, and we're kind of due for another one.
And how many of these planets are bathed in deadly radiation, disturbed by the gravitational pull of other nearby planets, roasted or frozen by fits and starts of their or other nearby stars, etc?
At any rate, the point is, we don't know. We don't have instruments yet that can detect just exactly how swell the climate and history of an extrasolar planet may be. Finding planets outside our solar system is the astronomical fad du jour, but it simply isn't a precise science yet, and the annoying thing about it is that until it gets significantly better, we're going to be bombarded by more and more "OMG look at this planet we probably just found that might have aliens" announcements by whoever's discovered what they hope is the latest Neo Earth. The dude who's all excited about this latest one (which is hardly "Earth-like" given that it's tidally locked, average temp well below freezing, hot side at 160 degrees, 3-4 times Earth's mass, orbits a dwarf star, and no clue if it actually has water or even an atmosphere at all) named it after his wife, for gosh sakes.
I'm sure the aliens will be just tickled.
So I'm putting my foot down: no more links to whatever the latest "Earth-like" utopia planet is. There's no point. There wouldn't be much point even if we had instruments that could detect the presence of liquid water and an atmosphere on them, but at least *then* the silly alien theories about it would have *some* basis in what we understand as biochemical fact, and then sure, start getting your space ship ready to try to land there in 20,000 years or something. I'll be the first to break out the party hats.
No, really, there's no point in getting excited about the prospect of life from other planets until we actually make contact with an alien species, or at least their signals, inadvertent or intentional. In which case, we're *probably* doomed. But maybe if we name them after somebody's wife, they'll be charmed.
Until then, don't bother me about it. =p
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| Bowie and Hot Chocolate, A*-style | Sep 29, 2010 8:08 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Reader Robotwin.com (nice marketing there, RW ;) observed on page 10:127's mirror on ComicFury that Selenis was looking distinctly David Bowie-like yesterday, and I think he's probably on to something there, seeing as how I was on a Bowie YouTube blitz back in May. So...hm. Is Bowie a good look for Selenis? Do I have Bowie on the brain? Will our hero survive!?!?!
I'd forgotten to mention that late last week I added an enlarged detail from page 10:105 to the episode 10 gallery:
The galleries can be accessed via the "episode list" link in the site's top menu, by the way (and some day I really should find a way to make that a little more self-explanatory...).
I made that detail because I was finally getting around to putting that page on my deviantART, which is kind of a collection of what seem to me to be the most successful of my comic drawings. I'm still way behind on that and I need to catch up, because it's what my dad and I will use for selecting the pieces to print, matte, and frame for the exhibition of my stuff that's going to be running at the swanky Caffè Fiore in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood from November through December. Yep, you could go have some (really good) coffee or hot chocolate (:)) while checking out nicely framed prints of what I hope will be my best A* and other drawings. So that's super-exciting and I gotta get caught up on my deviantART page so we can get started on that.
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| Phil Foglio AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA | Sep 28, 2010 7:21 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:I went to the Jet City Comic Show this weekend to scatter A* postcards around. That might actually have worked pretty well, as I had an unusually high number of pages read per visitor on the site the next day! And I met some comic/webcomic people I'd wanted to meet, so that was cool. And I'd seen on the show's site that "Studio Foglio" was listed as an exhibitor, but neither Phil Foglio nor his equally comic-making wife Kaja were listed as guests—so I figured the attendees would be their colorist or other representatives or something, what do I know.
I headed over to their booth and behold and lo, Phil himself was there! (I guess you're only a "guest" if they invite you to come show your stuff for free, and for some reason he didn't get invited, even though he's local and really well known.) Somehow I got a conversation going on the topic of science fiction webcomics, and Phil began rattling off the science fiction webcomics he could think of, and I immediately forgot what the first two he mentioned were, because the third was A*! :o
I hadn't introduced myself at all, so I blurted out "O that's mine do you want a free postcard?!?!" or something, and inflicted one on him without waiting to see what he said. The next I could manage was to ask how he'd found it or knew about it or something, and he harumphed (which he can do quite impressively), cocked an eyebrow, and growled "I read it!"
:oooooooooOOOoooo
So I threw another postcard at him and dribbled something about could he please put that in writing. I think he took a little pity on the clearly brain-dead individual in front of him, but still managed to rescue the situation comically by writing this:
:))))) So... Keep in mind I had never met someone out of the blue who turned out to have read my comic, and when I finally do, and that person turns out to be Phil Foglio, co-author and artist of one of the most well-known and respected webcomics going, Girl Genius—the first webcomic I ever read regularly—and a writer and artist whose work I've enjoyed for at least the past two decades, well... Gosh! My head was pretty much up in the clouds at that point. And he was still indulgent enough to keep talking with my friend and I for a good long while about all sorts of science-fiction and comic-related topics! At one point I tried telling him that he was a hero to webcomic people, but he pretended not to believe me. =P Well Phil, Mr. Foglio, sir, you are definitely a hero to me. <3<3<3
As we were leaving he was also sending his bowler-hatted assistant off with the most ornate latte order I've ever seen—and I live in Seattle, so that's saying something! But three or so hand-written lines across the top of a sheet of paper tops any coffee combination I've ever witnessed.
Visiting him was also neat because I got to see—although it didn't really penetrate my starstruck brain at the time—an actual Hugo award: his gleaming new one that he just got this month with his wife for Girl Genius—for the second year in a row. He had it strategically placed directly in front of him on the table, so that even brain-dead jellyfish like me couldn't miss it; I think in a pinch it would also have done pretty well as a self-defense measure, what with being thirteen inches of pointy silver mounted on a heavy base.
This (I had to go look him up when I got home) was his fourth Hugo: the third was last year for Girl Genius, and the first two were for "Best Fan Artist" in the late 70's; I hadn't known it, since most of the comic work of his that I'd seen was fantasy, but apparently he's a tremendous science fiction fan, and got a couple Hugos when he was running a weekly sci-fi club in college, and drawing illustrations for hundreds of fanzines.
So I guess that explains why he reads a ton of sci-fi webcomics, mine included! Man I am not gonna get over this for a while. :D :) :o
(By the way, if you're wondering what Phil Foglio looks like, here's a pretty good picture—him and his wife all dudded up for the Hugo award show a couple years ago (notice the Hugo lapel pin ;). I was dumb enough to have to ask if any of the three people at the booth were actual Foglios—although I suspected the cherubic fellow leaning back dangerously in his chair was the man himself—because I'd never—or had and forgotten—looked up a real picture of him, and so only had his cartoon self-portraits in mind, in which he always draws himself as a big guy with white (okay see I'd only seen black and white self-portraits by him :P... Gah okay see back when I first read the first page of Girl Genius, it was in black and white... Hmm and if I'd bothered to have paid attention to his What's New with Phil and Dixie comic from 1980's Dragon magazines, I'd have known better) hair, suspenders (I asked: they were hidden under his vest!), and a comically tiny bowler hat perched on the top of his head (a youthful assistant nearby was wearing one, but couldn't have been old enough to have done Phil's earlier comics!).)
The convention itself was a blast from the past for me, because it took place in the exact same big room—the Exhibition Hall at the Seattle Center—where I had gone to my last comic convention—15 or 20 years before! And I had never paid any attention to the guests and activities at conventions as a kid, so I can't really compare how those...compared, but I do suspect the emphasis is more on guests and such these days than comic shop people selling their stuff. But if that's the case, this small, first year show—run by the same people who do the massive Emerald City Comic Con—was nice, because it wasn't very crowded or noisy, didn't have *too* many cosplayers, and still had a bunch of local comic shops there with tons of back issues available at bargain prices. It's been ages since I collected any comics, but a certain one strategically taped to the front of a collection box caught my eye because, while I was never into Conan comics, I *have* enjoyed Robert E. Howard's Conan books, and this particular cover didn't look like it was drawn by the Marvel series' usual artist, John Buscema, of whose work I was not particularly a fan. And it was just $2.
Turns out it's the only comic from the series to have been entirely written and inked by Neal Adams, an artist whose work I do rather enjoy. Roy Thomas' writing is way too over the top, he throws in a character by the loathed hack writers L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter ("Juma the Black" who is—get this—a black man! And thus very strong, and, like pretty much any non-white character in badly written fantasy, well-versed in mysticism and native lore. Great characterization there, guys ;P), the coloring by Glynis Wein is remarkably sloppy (my favorite bloopers: Conan stabbing through a guy with an uncolored sword, Conan's left arm having a gold stripe on it in one panel in the same spot where he wears a gold band on his right arm, and, on the cover, the colorist probably just reading the title and thus coloring only the baddy's skull gold, even though his whole body is supposed to be gold), the story is sort of carried off by a giant slug, and the art isn't Adams' best work by any means (you'll notice there on the cover for instance that the torso of the princess behind Conan is—if you count the part of it that must be blocked by Conan's calf—far too long; I think I noticed that only because I have that kind of problem all the time in my Princess and the Giant comic), but I think I can still count it as money well spent for the amusement I got out of it.
Oh, and it was published the same year I was born! And it's got the same silly old ads I always used to see when buying back issues: Grit, Charles Atlas ("Don't Be Half A Man" and "The Insult that Made a Man Out of 'Mac'" right on the inside front cover), "I'll Make You a Master of Karate," and "Too Skinny?" among them.
And I got to meet and talk to the comic guys I'd set out to see, Jonathon Dalton and Chris Samnee, who were both super nice. So, first comic show I've been to in years and years, and it was a small one, and it was pretty darn great as far as I'm concerned.
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I added links on the "about" pages of my comics to their just-made-today listings on Webcomic Tweets, which provides handy ways to find and track Twitter feeds by webcomic artists. Here's A*'s entry, for instance. And by the way you will notice—should you peruse said about page, that A*'s very own Twitter feed is right here, just waiting to bring the latest A* updates right to your Twitter uh page or reading list or outlet or whatever they're called.
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| A* postcards @ Jet City Comic Show uh today! | Sep 25, 2010 3:29 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I was really thinkin' I'd get two pages done for once in a blue Friday since the next page (omg spoiler) will share the same background and complete this darn weekend-long dangling sentence, but then I spent too much time detailing this pose. I even wasted time taking screenshots of me at work on it in Photoshop and then adding highlights and things in GIMP. (By the way you will notice I am listening to the new-to-me Goldfrapp album there. It is short but neat.)
Also I gotta get some Z's so I can be bushy-eyed and bright-tailed (actually wait I don't think there will be cosplayers there) for hitting the Jet City Comic Show here in Seattle tomorrow and trying to give away free A* postcards, among other activities. You can see a picture of what they'll have on them in the previous news post!
Hey I seem to have had a record high (or near record high?--there's that trick memory of mine) number of visitors today. Keen beans. Must be the postcards. Although wait, I only got 200 printed up, so you'll all have to share...uh...one per every 58 people. That's about a third of a square inch per person, almost postage-stamp size! Of paper. Hm... That could be messy.
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Remember how at the beginning of this week I was going on about the extremely boring advantages of bilinear vs bicubic interpolation for webcomic graphics, and then how resizing an image in most image editing programs, such as Photoshop, results in edges being darker (lower gamma) than they should be?
I know, I know, you were trying to forget. Well, you might even remember that the author of the article that came from, Eric Brasseur, came up with a workaround for scaling images with correct gamma, and I pointed out (well after he came up with it, mind) a few errors in the proposed process, including a loss of color 1,1,1 when working with 256-color grayscale images, and an incorrect command line parameter being used. I mailed those points to Eric and he updated his article accordingly! I even got a little credit at the bottom along with a lot of other people. Thanks, Eric! Man now I am really famous on the internets.
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| Free A* postcards @ Jet City Comic Show, Sat! | Sep 24, 2010 6:43 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:I'll be at Jet City Comic Show--at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall!--this Saturday, probably in the late afternoonish, trying to unload free A* postcards on people, so come take one off my hands! I'm not an exhibitor or anything, so I'll just be wandering around looking silly and hopefully saying hi to a few comic people whose stuff I like, like Jonathon Dalton and Chris Samnee.
I have never tried this before so hopefully it will work. >_>
The cards will look something like this, except on papery bits:
Pretty good for free, right? Yessss.
Oh yeah, and if you're going to be there and want to know what I look like so you can hunt me down and take my cards, I look kind of like the guy on this site's "about" page, only lower contrast, and in color. You could also Google image search me, I guess... Hey I'm the first hit for my name now! Rad. And I'm not any of the dudes with the buzz cuts that seem to be so popular among my fellow Ben Chamberlains. Eesh.
And anyway hopefully they'll have a "freebie" table like I hear is often the case at these things, where I can just dump a stack of cards and then go goof off and hopefully find them all gone when I finally remember to check back.
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Vero's "wasn't" in page 124 there was bugging me; it didn't sound exactly right, and part of me kept wanting it to be "weren't," but the other part of me thought that sounded silly. So I finally looked it up right before uploading the page! Turns out that because it's an "if" conditional type of thing, technically he should be using the "subjunctive" tense, which would be "weren't." But the subjunctive is kind of high-nosed and sissy, so he didn't. I guess. Guh.
I find this a bit funny because when you're in school learning another language, like say French, the teachers love dumping all these crazy-sounding verb tenses on you; mine didn't really get encouraged enough to work themselves up to trying the French subjunctive tense on us in a big way--sigh--but if they had, I'm sure my first reaction would have been something like "'Subjunctive?!' What the heck kind of made up foreign junk is this??" Well so it turns out we have one in my own native language, and I even kind of know it, except not by name. And not by rule. Huh!
Oh well, at least now I know why that line was bugging me. =p
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| Lots and lots of links | Sep 23, 2010 6:44 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Lots of links happened today!
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I came across a super-cool Frazetta space drawing from 1954 and posted it on the forum; the ship even has A*-like shading on it! (Mmmaybe a bit better =p)
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I got a nice bunch of hits from a post on "The Official Elite Forums; "Elite" was a computer space trading game that came out 25+ years ago--I actually played it on C64 (and its sequel, "Frontier" on Amiga) but it was really my brother who played it all the way to "Elite" rank, which took forever, and in fact he and another friend of mine, who was just revisiting it this past week, were talking about it in my presence this weekend! And now a link to A* pops up on the Elite forum! :o Anyway the post is by "DraQ," calling A* a "Minimalistic, Frontier-like SF webcomic." Yay! Thanks for the link, DraQ!
(I always wanted Elite to get a sequel or add-on or something that would let you spend the piles of money you can't really do much with past a certain point on building up your own trading empire that would then do the dirty work across multiple worlds for you: hiring traders and bodyguards, buying space stations and planets, investing in industry to mine valuable resources for lucrative trade, etc; and maybe you could buy like a super space battlecruiser and fly around in that with all your bodyguards and go conquer rival planets and... Well that never happened. But Elite's author, David Braben, is still in the game biz, so hey, maybe he'll become an A* fan and listen to my silly game ideas now. :D >_>
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After reading how Frazetta (darn him) kicked off his own anatomy study by sitting down with an anatomy book someone gave him and copying it all out in one night, I thought hm it wouldn't hurt if I had some sort of anatomy reference diagrams--aside from all the actual photos of people I'm always pulling off Google image search to remind me what people look like, I mean--so about ten seconds of searching later and I found a couple potentially handy things.
First of all, the Henry Gray's (hm he died of smallpox at age 34, gosh!) famous "Gray's Anatomy" medical reference book of hundreds and hundreds of illustrations of dissected human body parts is online--the 1918 edition, anyway. You can even see where veins and arteries and lymph nodes go. :P
Gray's kind of breaks things down into really small chunks, though, so the second thing I found might be handier for quick reference, and that's these muscular reference "photos" (they look more like drawings or 3D renders to me but hey). Although they really ought to have a side view in there.
And now I probably won't look at these much because I'm lazy and it's more fun to look at pictures of actual people. =p
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Sixxth posted a link on the A* forum to the Twitter feed of NASA astronaut Douglas Wheelock, which is where the space-faring Colonel posts really rather gorgeous photos of his space adventures, including his current gig on the International Space Station. Actual space photos by an actual astronaut are happening on Twitter, nifty!
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| I banner you | Sep 22, 2010 7:43 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Ah, that's the ol' pepper.
Hey don't forget (as if I'd let you har har) to check out the latest weekly installment of my Sunday fantasy comic, The Princess and the Giant, which you can reach lickety-split by clicking this preview teaser banner thing:
And while I'm on the topic of banners...as I often am I guess, oh well...here's a new A* one I made this weekend from a recent page:
I should really just cut to the chase and make an entire comic in banner form, I guess.
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| The science of wasting time | Sep 21, 2010 8:40 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Still experimenting with "vinyl" type surface effects for Selenis' space suit. And if you can make the hand gesture Vero's hiding from her, you're a better...hand model than I am.
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I got myself distracted today with some nerdy technical web image stuff, but some of it anyway will pay off for A*; the short of it is that starting with this page and from here on out, edges will be smoother, and images will load about 20% faster. Good deal, yah? It's all about bilinear rather than bicubic interpolation, and if *that* got you excited, then you might be the rare kind of person who will care to read and see all the gory details in the forum thread I wrote about it. Here's the relatively fun part:
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The other technical image nerd stuff that won't be of immediate use was that it was pointed out to me that resizing an image in most software results in edges being darker than they should be. Zut alors. Well I spent quite a bit of time trying various processing options to get around this with the ImageMagick command line image editor, and what I found is yeah you can correct for the gamma loss by switching to 16-bit depth, changing the gamma to a certain value, resizing, then switching back to 8-bit depth and setting the gamma back to the usual 2.2, BUT in doing that you lose color 1,1,1--it goes to pure black 0,0,0. Which is worse than having slightly darkened edges, if you ask me. Well, maybe someone will come up with a way around that, but until they do, I'll just generate dark edges like everyone else.
(By the way, if you're trying to follow the ImageMagick commands on that page, note that the "-scale" parameter in his jpg command should be "-resize" instead.)
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Yet more image nerd stuff: some fool on a webcomic forum started an animated GIF battle, so I thought I'd go through the animated GIFs I used to pop into the news as previews back when I was making A* for animation, and pick out the better ones. You can check out the parade of dancing pixels in this forum thread (high bandwidth).
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| Would art be easier in a 2D universe? | Sep 18, 2010 4:52 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:So much to do yet I only managed one page on Friday yet again, well shucks. On the plus side I think I'm still managing to increase the drawing quality, gradually. I hope. Still so much to learn! And maybe some day I will stop wimping out and drawing guns turned so conveniently sideways to the camera. Who needs that "perspective" stuff, anyway? Silly Renaissance.
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| The truth about combination skin | Sep 17, 2010 7:53 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Ended up trying some new stuff today, drawing-wise. Got in a bit more extensive use of the Ink tool on page 115 than previously, with touches for hair long strands and vinyl-like highlights. On page 116, I tried something I noticed while looking in the mirror yesterday (which is of course how I spend most of my time :P), which is that at least under a brightish light, the lightest part of a skin surface may be right next to the part where it's just starting to turn into shadow--strange but true! So I tried a few highlights (or rather, lighter shadows) right next to a few black areas near the sides of his face. Sorta worked out, I think?
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| A* Episode 10, Pages 112 - 114 | Sep 16, 2010 5:00 AM PDT | url |
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Added 3 new A* pages:Man how long are they gonna talk? I don't think I'm ever going to try having a conversation this long again; I mean, I think it's decently interesting as far as conversations go, but my subtitle scheme isn't really built to handle long conversations efficiently. Less talk, more doing! Hm speaking of which... Okay, looks like we'll get to a wee bit of *background* action on Monday, at least.
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Over the weekend or maybe it was Monday I updated the more comics by me page so that it now shows my comic series in descending order of the most recently updated, and gives the update date, so if you aren't following them by RSS or something, it's still relatively easy to stay up on what's new around here!
Hm well if you happen to check it in the wee hours of the morning between the time I upload a Sketchy comic and the time I finish an A* news update, you'll see Sketchy listed first but dated a day behind A*, which will be below it; that's because I optimistically date my other comics (Sketchy, The Princess and the Giant, etc) manually by their sort of intended release date, but I don't really ever get Sketchy done until past midnight. Yah.
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So among other new things you'll find there's a new Princess and the Giant comic--as there is every week! :D--which you can get to via this handy link banner:
And over the weekend I also made a new little -word- poem, which I don't have a preview banner for so heck I'll just post the whole thing here:
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| One page to tide them | Sep 15, 2010 7:00 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Just one (1...1...1... :P) page today; all that weekend sketching has got my schedule a little out of whack, gotta get it back on track! With rhyme.
The thumbnail I had for this page was pretty much like you see in the final version, with a backlit face and the gun held up in front of it. It took me a while to settle on a means of getting the backlighting across and still making the face appealing, what with the gun in front of it and all, and while I was struggling with that, I drew a preliminary version that in the end I didn't feel was suitable for the context, but that I liked as a drawing, so it's now in the gallery, and you can get to the pretty big version by clicking this tiny version:
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| Bring out the GIMP...Ink | Sep 14, 2010 9:33 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Starting with today's pages, I'm doing an additional round of touch-ups to the Photoshop Lasso tool-drawn images with GIMP's "Ink" tool. GIMP is a freeware, open source image manipulation program, very Photoshop like but not really approaching PS's level of polish, as you might expect, what with it being free and all, but I really like its unique--as far as I've seen--"Ink" tool.
I came across it this weekend while for some reason--inexplicable things tend to happen when I have to take some caffeine to overcome having shorted myself on sleep :p--investigating various drawing tools. I've even put a section of the festivities together into A* gallery format for you; here's Selenis doodled in four different programs:
(That's in the A* episode 10 gallery, here, and here's a bonus one of the preliminary round.)
Going clockwise from the upper left corner there, that's everyone's favorite galactic core bounty hunter sketched with Photoshop CS2's Paintbrush tool, GIMP's Ink tool, Alchemy's Shapes/Outline mode, and Photoshop 4's Lasso tool.
CS2 was the best painting program I had, and as you can see--hm well you can see it better in this close-up--its Paintbrush tool is a little fuzzy, and doesn't have the most dynamic line width control imaginable. So that's why I went looking for something better, and made a pleasant discovery with GIMP.
The clever thing about GIMP's Ink tool is that it can scale line width by movement speed as well as by stylus pressure, so when you go to draw a row of short quick shading lines, for instance, they'll come out nice and skinny just like you want, and then if you slow down, the line will sort of pool out into a fatter thing. This takes a little getting used to when you go in to do some detail work, but overall it's quite intuitive for my dashing style, and way more fun than the standard Paintbrush approach.
I've mentioned Alchemy before, but it's worth mentioning again as it is now in open beta, and you can download it for free, without having to register with their forum or anything. Its Outline Lasso-style drawing mode actually came from a suggestion I sent their programmer :), and is very fun to mess with, because you just move the pointer in any old shape you want, and it fills it in for you as soon as you release the drawing button, so you can build up crazy drawings--such as the Selenis doodle in the lower-right of the above image--very very quickly.
A couple things stop me from using it for production work, though. For one thing, the smoothing it uses alters lines considerably, and prevents drawing small details; I couldn't get the face any more detailed than what you see there, for instance, and that's scaled down by 50%. You can't scale your view in Alchemy, so there's no way to go in for higher detail unless you disable the smoothing option, but then you really start getting a lot of unsightly jagged polygonal lines. The second reason I won't be using Alchemy for actual A* pages is that it has an intentionally limited tool set: no Undo, for instance, and you can't set a canvas size, use layers, etc. But it's fun to doodle with now and then.
Photoshop 4's Lasso tool (lower-left doodle above) is what I've been using for A* all along; it's a weird way to draw, but you can get shapes with it that you simply can't get with any other type of drawing tool--that funky wash from her wrist jet, for instance. So I'm not going to give up drawing with it any time soon, but I do get frustrated sometimes when trying to draw certain things with it: small dots such as stars, for instance, or long slender lines; it's much easier to do stuff like that with a more traditional brushy drawing tool, so that was part of the reason why I went hunting for one.
So now I basically draw the page in Photoshop 4 as usual, then load it into GIMP and throw some ink around on it. I'm going light on that for now; who knows what I'll get up to once I get used to it. Here's the pre-Ink version of today's page 109 (top) compared with the Ink-ed final version (bottom):
You can see that among other things I used the Ink tool to dot the buttons on the control panel, redo Vero's spittle (ew), add highlights to characters' space suits, the pistol, and Selenis' wrist jet, add a long wall line in the background, make Selenis' waving hair a bit bushier, and to touch up parts of her outline. So tiny stuff, but useful, I hope.
For more pure Ink tool doodles, you can check out my other daily comic, Sketchy; starting with Sketchy's page 187, I'm drawing that comic entirely with the Ink tool.
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| Strings and things | Sep 11, 2010 3:18 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Another fabulous Friday! And what's this, more name dropping? Eeee move along, move along.
A preliminary version--at the point where I was redrawing Vero's head--had things looking a little bleak for our irradiated hero:
Oops, that ain't right! Also notice I had the shading backwards on his helmet. :P
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Hm what else can I distract you with? Well there's a wacky thread in the A* forum where we ramble about our own theories of the universe, and in it I embedded a nifty video from the University of Nottingham answering questions about a lot of nutty physics and astronomy topics, including, at the beginning, a nice quick layman's description of "string theory." Also I'm in the credits at the end (under my YouTube username, smbhax) for having sent them in some questions of my own, but I dunno if they're gonna use them or not!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ZPpC_lyYw
These "Sixty Symbols" videos are made by BBC man Brady Haran, and he makes a bunch of other series of videos with Nottingham scholars and scientists, including a series with a video for each element in the Periodic Table and a series with a video for every book in the bible--their historical background and so forth. Hours of good YouTubing to be had!
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| Quantum stuff and lasers | Sep 10, 2010 6:13 AM PDT | url |
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Added 3 new A* pages:Man, three pages! I was on a roll today, woo.
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There was an interesting Time article yesterday about China having made a breakthrough in cryptology, specifically--according to them--being able to send supposedly unbreakable secret messages over heretofore unmatched distances using a technique called quantum teleportation.
Unfortunately, that's a significant misnomer. You might think at first it's some sort of super-long-range quantum tunneling, but nope, nothing like that at all. It's pretty neat in its own right, though. So basically, if an electromagnetic reaction ends up emitting, for instance, two photons from a single particle, the properties of those photons--energy level and spin, at least, I think--are interdependent, or "entangled." If you have a bunch of those in sequence, you can send one half of the pairs along a laser beam or whatever to your buddies far away. Now, the wacky part is that when the people at one location measure one photon from one of these pairs, that "fixes" its properties--which before that had a range of values due to quantum uncertainty--AND its corresponding photon far away--up to ten miles away, if China's claim is for real--will get fixed, too: it *has* to match the other, in order for conservation of energy to be preserved.
At least, I think that's how it goes, if my skimming of the Wikipedia article wasn't too far off. Pretty amazing to think about. There's a lot more to it after that, because somehow they will still be somewhat different, but if the people at the first site then tell the people at the second site how exactly they altered their photon from the pair, or something, then the people at the second site can perform an operation on *their* photon that will allow them to deduce the value of the first photon. Since nobody else has one of these photons, nobody else can figure out what the value is. So this could be used to send quantum-coded messages to submarines or whatever via laser beams. Or something like that.
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| Super productive time now | Sep 09, 2010 3:32 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Man lookit me, I thought I was only gonna fit in a single page today and I did two! Woo, doubled my productivity!
Speaking of which, I still have other stuff I haven't shown you from my super-productive weekend. I do this little poem-comic thing called -word-, and I uploaded three new pages to it over the weekend, starting with this one (click this to hop over there and then you can go forward to the rest):
I was pretty happy I found that font for this one. :)
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| Other stuff I did this weekend | Sep 08, 2010 5:01 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Finally caught up on my icon making over the weekend--I know you couldn't wait! =P
  
  
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| Two pages in one is silly! | Sep 07, 2010 7:32 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Hm you know I guess Wednesday's probably gonna be another super-late single-pager as well. Dar! My two best update days have had their legs taken out this week. Ah well, we march on slightly slower than normal, but ever onward nonetheless. :P
This page looks a little "designy"; before the final version of page 100 you see here--well not HERE, but through the link above--I drew a different one based on my original storyboard, and spent a lot of time on it but got less and less satisfied. See if you can see why:
For one thing: boooooooring! And too much like page 97, except with a much less interesting camera angle. Bad storyboard, bad! So that's how I wasted time today, woo!
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Here's the new page of my weekend comic, The Princess and the Giant! Well not HERE here: you click this banner thing below to get there!
Why didn't you click it?? =p G'wan!
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| Dropping too big of a bomb | Sep 04, 2010 3:55 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:This is probably the farthest-out stuff I'm going to throw at you in this episode--or even for a while after that--as far as names and things you haven't heard of yet go, so don't-- Hrm well I was going to say "don't worry," but nah, you should be worried. VERRRRRRY worried! :D
Following up on the humiliation of producing just a single page today, it's looking like my crazy Monday party group is getting up to steam again, so Monday might be a very late one-page affair as well. Yes what a wild lifestyle I have, phew.
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I could have sworn I posted this before but I can't find it in searching my own forum or news, so I guess I just *thought* about posting it before, but then got too busy with just the strip itself to post it. Hopefully? Anyway
photo by Minatom (source)
^ Nearly fifty years ago, the northern part of our planet had a day with a second sunrise: the Tsar Bomba, detonating four kilometers over a Russian island in the Arctic Ocean in a fireball some estimates place at nearly eight kilometers in diameter. With a yield of 50 megatons, this October 30th, 1961 test by the USSR was over three times as powerful as the next most powerful detonation in human history--the US's Castle Bravo test, which I've talked about before--and for its brief flare matched 1.4% of the power output of the Sun.
Bombs that powerful proved too dangerous and impractical for actual war use--the plane that dropped it could barely get out of the way of the blast, for instance, and anyway most of the energy would deflect out into space--so, probably fortunately, they aren't around anymore. The Tsar Bomba was actually reduced in power from its original design, which might have yielded 100 Mt, but was considered too likely to produce fallout that would have drifted over populated areas of the USSR. So it was toned down, and--unusually for a nuclear test--most of the blast power came from nuclear fusion, rather than fission, making it a remarkably "clean" nuclear bomb, meaning it produced relatively little radioactive fallout.
So uh yeah really I just find this idea of a man-made star within our own atmosphere fascinating. Bombs and war bad.
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| Photoshop to the rescue! | Sep 03, 2010 7:09 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Stupid tricks you can do in Photoshop!
- Stick a semi-transparent white layer behind all your shading so the head looks kind of like a sloppy skeleton!
- Invert that sucker! OMG it's totally different now!!! Your character is on a campout, playing with a flashlight in their tent! Man!
Right, this unworthy entry will join all the others in the episode 10 gallery. Galleries are accessible through the "episode list" link in the site's top menu. I suppose technically I should just put a "gallery" link in the menu, but this way uh the art sneaks up on you?
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| Universal attack! | Sep 02, 2010 6:39 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Dang I'm way behind on my usual storms of icon-making. Hmph! As a tide-me-over I took page 91 and split it into two portraits, which are in the episode 10 gallery if you need to find them in the future:
Oh man and I hadn't even thought at first I was gonna get two pages done today because I was up all night reading La Muse; the first page says the online version is just a "preview," but in fact it's all 220 pages of the story, which took some time to get through! Very interesting going, for me primarily because the art by Hugo Petrus is often amazing, looking simultaneously almost photo-referency but also really stylized and with often cartoony exaggerated expressions--but then what's uh extra interesting is that it seems to go through some streamlining processes later on, so for instance some panels just get a little loopy, particularly in the faces, but you also see sorta clever shortcuts being taken, like small background characters no longer having faces drawn on them, but just being sort of blurred. That doesn't sound great but really, some of the art is super, especially near the beginning. Petrus' strong smile lines probably influenced Selenis' face on today's page 96.
The writing is interesting in the same "hm this didn't all work out equally well but some is awesome and the rest is a fascinating attempt" way: the base premise, basically an ultimately powerful, frivolous, well-meaning superwoman out to cure humanity, is patently ridiculous, but that's kind of the point, and it's played for increasing laughs as you wonder how far they can take it, but then tries to get some serious stuff going on, and...well that doesn't work as well, because La Muse (aforesaid superwoman) never takes anything seriously, so you don't believe her when she's finally supposed to be doing that. And then it runs into the old cosmic super-book problem, where they're dealing with poorly defined cosmic powers, and then they have to keep one-upping them, and eventually you get to ridiculous stuff like (actual La Muse quote) "They threw a **** universe at me!" Now if that was still playing for laughs, it would be prime stuff, but it's actually supposed to be kind of serious by that point.
Aaand there's my overly critical review of a vastly superior comic. Yay webcomics! But really go check it out, it's fun.
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Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that with page 95 today I started adding the subtitles at high-resolution, instead of shrinking the art down, then adding the captions at screen resolution; I had thought that the subtitles would come out sharper if I wasn't doing them big and then shrinking them down before they go up on the web, but in fact they come out way nicer if I do them at high res and then shrink 'em down--the kerning or whatnot is much more precise and stuff, and the letter edges are smoother without being blurry. The little "smbhax.com" in the corner isn't quite as sharp as it was before, but that's just sort of an easygoing watermark, so no biggie. Also this means if I ever have to print them out (in pages after 10:95, I mean), I won't have to reconstruct the darn subtitles and captions! Phew.
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| Ninja Princess will save us | Sep 01, 2010 7:49 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Hey my silent fantasy comic "The Princess and the Giant" updated this weekend...as it does every weekend, so that really isn't news, but I like to pretend it is. Anyway it's an excuse to show you this snazzy banner/preview that links to the new Princess page:
And if you're really feeling frisky you could hop over to the forum post about that page wherein you will find preliminary versions of the page, featuring, among others, Ninja Princess. Yep. >_>
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