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| First-ever A* T-shirt designs! | Nov 30, 2010 4:17 PM PST | url |
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Earlier this year I mentioned that by year's end I wanted to get an actual online store going with A* merchandise for people who might want some, and so--egged on by a few people who really do seem to want some :o--I present you with the beginnings of such a store--the T-shirt side, anyway:
A* T-shirts at smbhax.spreadshirt.com!
I haven't incorporated that link into the site's main menu yet because I'd like to get feedback from you lovely readers on what you think of the current set-up and T-shirt designs available. You can see them all via the link above, but for the sake of posterity and a slightly larger view, I'll post them here:
They're on "heavyweight" T-shirts, in both men's (pictured above) and women's sizes, and--except for that lower right one--you can pick from multiple T-shirt colors. I haven't actually gotten my mitts on one of these shirts--another reason why the store is remaining unlinked for the time being!--but in a discussion among other webcomic authors about such online T-shirt stores, spreadshirt.com came up as one of the better ones available, so hopefully the shirts will be good quality. I guess I'll have to order myself one for Christmas and find out!
Anyway, back to the here and now, I'd love to hear what you think of these T-shirt designs: do you love 'em? Hate 'em? Feel nothing but total ambivalence toward them? Have other A* images in mind that you'd like to have available in T-shirt form? Let me know!
(Like, click that "discuss" link right above--or below, in the RSS feed--this article and tell me what you think on the A* forum!)
(Oh yeah, and you can make some kind of funny stuff with their online T-shirt design utility. Like, in one of my giddier moments, I made these...but I delisted them when a modicum of sanity returned. I suppose you could still make your own though, since I've made the designs themselves available to spreadshirt.com's build-your-own T-shirt utility thingy. The horror! :p)
(And thanks to the author of the fine webcomic Rusty and Co. for coming up with the idea of that spiffy oval border in the third shirt design!)
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| Two cartoony guys in dark room = quick draw! | Nov 30, 2010 3:51 PM PST | url |
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Added 4 new A* pages:Man, these are so late I'm pretty much well into the next day. Ah well, they still count for Monday as far as I'm concerned--I'm still gonna get in five days of updates this week, consarn it!
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| Man drawing cartoony characters is way faster | Nov 27, 2010 7:51 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* pages:Gee three pages on a Friday, maybe I am gonna shoot through this Mar/Proctor part pretty quick! :o Well there will be a little more scenery and action in a bit, I suppose that'll knock me off this blazing pace slightly.
Today I saw someone's signature line on a forum somewhere that said "The first law of thermodynamics is that you do not talk about thermodynamics." I found this delightfully witty.
I haven't yet reminded you this week to check out my weekend fairy tale comic, The Princess and the Giant, which I update assiduously every Sunday. I don't have a new banner for the latest page, which involves a rat, a piece of bread, and an elephant, two of which are flying over the third--but anyway here's a banner for the comic in general that will take you to it when clicked:
So that's what I'll be doing this weekend. What about you? Oh wait, that was a little too personal, wasn't it? I meant to maintain my aloof dignity. Um so eh whatever you're doing this weekend--not that I'm asking or prying! >_>--that would be rather gauche--I hope it goes well, and I'll meet you back here with more A* on Monday.
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| Ugly stars tutorial | Nov 26, 2010 7:10 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Boy, the eggnog or turkey or something nearly *did* finish me off, but uh well I'm still here. Whew. And anyway I just had to get this Proctor beefcake up for you all to enjoy.
Hm I was gonna knock off fast but I am feeling better now so I'll just go ahead with the little tutorial on how to draw the ugly stars I made a few pages ago. Ready? Here goes...
1) In your layer-supporting drawing program of choice (I'm using GIMP and its "Ink" brush tool), make a blank layer over a black background, set the new layer to "Screen" blending mode, and draw a white squiggle in it.
2) Rotate the canvas 90 degrees.
3) Squiggle on that same layer, but in black this time (remember, this layer needs to be on "Screen," otherwise the black squiggles will block stars or other things on layers beneath this one, which we don't want).
4) Rotate by another 90 degrees!
5) Squiggle in black again; you're now working at 180 degrees from your initial white squiggle, so you may want to vary your drawing angle just a bit to avoid overlapping your original lines too closely. Now we're starting to get some nice scattered stars. Don't go too heavy here or you'll end up with too few stars to make this worthwhile.
6) Rotate another 90 degrees.
7) You should have your stars pretty isolated by now; you'll go over it in black here again, but just picking areas where the stars look like they're all chopped out of a line: knock a few more out until they start to look properly scattered.
8) Rotate another 90 degrees.
9) Now we're back to our original "upright" position. Check for anything that still looks like a row of stars, and knock a few stars out of it.
You're done! With one layer. It's okay if you can still see a faint diagonal grid pattern in the stars here, because you're going to repeat the whole process eh four times or so to build up a bunch of overlapping star layers: I usually do two or three layers with the squiggle over the same spots where I want sort of bands of thicker stars; I've also been doing one layer that pretty much covers the whole background, to give a nice overall coverage.
When the stars are built up enough, I'll go in with black on a new layer over them to carve out clouds of gas blocking some of them and so forth...well I'm not going to try to tutorialize all of that now! Oh and I'll also draw in a few stars by hand where I want a few nice larger ones or clusters or whatnot, and I also vary the opacity of the background star layers, from 80-100%, which adds a sense of depth to the star field.
The result of all that work is a pretty dense cluster of stars that doesn't have the "someone placed a bunch of dots here" look that's sometimes hard to avoid when you just draw all the stars one by one. On the other hand, these scribble stars can be a little ugly, but if you kind of squint at 'em, I think they look a bit more photo-realistic, actually, than a lot of dotted stars. *My* dotted stars, anyway. Bah! Well I'm not all that great at drawing stars, but I'll probably be using this method until I can find a better one. :P
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| I've got my Hawking radiation to keep me warm | Nov 25, 2010 7:11 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Hey, where's the volume knob on this thing? Juuust kidding. I do like my dumb shows.
Tomorrow--or well, today I guess if you're up already :P--is Turkey Day in the US of A, but if I can shake myself out of whatever turkey and nog-induced coma I get myself into, I should be able to get at least one page up (which would be the last silent one in this little sequence, conveniently). And once Thanksgiving is done with, it's officially the holiday season and I can listen to Christmas music (it actually IS snowing again right now here in Seattle, which is pretty creepy...and hopefully it'll melt before I have to get my famous mashed potatoes over to mom & dad's place tomorrow...) without people thinking I'm too weird, yay!
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Yesterday was another reminder for me to stick to the "if in doubt, add more black" rule I came up with for myself earlier in this episode; that rascally satellite just wasn't right until I gave it the super-dark shadow treatment (and then the limb of the planet, too):
Darker = better again, how about that.
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Hm looking up Hawking radiation--a type of quantum radiation black holes in theory give off, giving them a very slight surface temperature--when I wrote the title of this news post landed me on a scientific paper from just a few months ago claiming to have verified the existence of Hawking radiation in a laboratory by shining "ultrashort laser pulse filaments" through a piece of fused silica glass that with the interesting property of having its refraction index changed when excited by the laser light: so in other words, the laser, traveling through the glass, causes the glass to become less and less transparent, causing the light to move slower and slower and eventually stop: a "so-called white hole event horizon." And then they measured some radiation coming out that they ruled out as having come from traditional means, and thus said it must be Hawking radiation.
That does sound maybe a little iffy, but it's interesting. Here's the scientific paper, and here's an article summarizing it in layman's terms.
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| Oh my stars | Nov 24, 2010 7:48 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Enhance, enhance... Hey, tomorrow I get to draw people again. :)
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Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life is a sorta philosophical webcomic featuring robots joyriding around the solar system, and I like it. Had paused for a while but seems to be updating again, which is good news. If you want to see low-color artwork done right--not like my thrashings about--give it a look--and remember to click and drag to navigate the episodes.
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I noticed people visiting A* from a new location in the past week or so, and it looks like I have to thank gamersfirst.com forum user SirPaper for making his signature an A* banner and link! Just a simple thing like that actually got a lot of new people over to check out the comic, so thanks SirPaper :), and hello to those of you who clicked the good Sir's banner.
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| How to draw tons of ugly stars | Nov 23, 2010 6:17 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* pages:I came up with a new method of drawing background stars! It involves scribbling rather than eh stippling, so it's a lot easier on the hand/tablet/sanity/etc, and let me up the star density quite a bit. :D I like the galactic core looking just packed to the gills with stars; and it certainly is--relative to Earth's spot way out in the galactic suburbs, anyway.
If I was really smart I guess I'd use some kinda fancy Photoshop brush to sprinkle perfect, randomly scaled stars all over with big careless swipes of my hand and be done in like 30 seconds... Hm that sounds nice... But NO! My dedication to caveman drawing techniques remains unshake--uh...firm!
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| Why I suck at perspective | Nov 20, 2010 8:57 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:If you've been reading for even just a little while, you know that I like to draw pretty funky perspective stuff; you could probably also guess that I don't draw the vanishing points and plot it all out pretty and geometrically with straight lines on a grid so it recedes from the eye in perfect optical correctness and so forth.
Nope, I eyeball and freehand it: way more fun and--the thought occurred to me after a conversation with a friend of mine this evening--in a way, I think it may actually be more accurate--not optically or geometrically, but experientially, which I think is actually a word.
What am I blabbering about, you ask? How could I, heathen that I am, suggest that all those Renaissance Italian dudes had it wrong? Well I'm not, exactly. But let's take a more recent example, namely Frank Frazetta, whose work I mostly like and have talked about. Here are some examples of foreshortening by Frazetta:
 
(Full versions here and here.)
Now, I think Frazetta eyeballed his foreshortenings too, but I'm pretty sure his are much more geometrically accurate than mine. But correct as they may be on a technical level, how much depth do you feel from the arms of these figures? Do they really feel like they're coming out of the viewing plane toward your eye? Well, a *little*, but there's also this nagging feeling of "why are her arms so short"?
And I think the answer to why this doesn't exactly work is that it isn't in 3D; we aren't seeing it stereoscopically, where our depth perception would confirm that yes indeed they are coming at us; the fact is, foreshortening, unless the object is right in your face, is in reality usually pretty unimpressive--the scaling between her fore and aft hands there, for instance, is minor--and we need some depth perception to make it work.
Not to mention that to make a zippy drawing that the viewer is really going to feel, you often need to stretch reality just a bit--not so much that the viewer notices it consciously, perhaps, but enough to make the impression you want on a jaded audience.
So that, at least, is my excuse for being sloppy with perspective and foreshortening. For instance, the recent page 11:32 was pretty much drowning in it:
Comparing the lengths of her shin and arm there will yield some pretty frightening results, and if you try setting this up on a perspective grid I'm sure you'll find just how horrific the so-called perspective there is, BUT I'm pretty sure that you're at least, upon first glance, in no doubt that the figure there is kinda pointing your way feet-first.
Playing fast and loose like that with proper drawing techniques is at least some of the reason why I flub things up in monstrous ways on occasion; if you were unfortunate enough to see that page for the first few hours after I uploaded it, for instance, you'd have been confronted by a woman whose arm was probably five feet long. Here's an amusing animation of it! (It took me two tries to "correct" it; the shortest one is the final one :P):
So that's fun. In fairness to Frazetta--who I do think was a fantastic artist, and whose work has been a great inspiration to me--he usually avoided tangling with significant foreshortening, preferring to arrange his figures neatly along one or more planes perpendicular to the viewer, in classic illustration/cartoon fashion, which enables you to get the strongest, most instantly recognizable silhouettes--just going to show that, contrary to what Marvel Comics may have drilled into my brain as a kid, you CAN get really dramatic images without putting your viewer's eye out with dramatically exaggerated foreshortening. But it's too late for me; I'm usually just not happy drawing without *some* kind of ridiculous attempt at foreshortening--or at least perspective in the broader sense--in there somewhere.
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| Trapped antimatter atoms! What a tease. | Nov 19, 2010 9:12 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Science made the news again today! The ALPHA project at CERN--best known for being home to the world's largest particle accelerator--trapped antihydrogen: 38 atoms consisting of a positron orbiting an antiproton were kept intact for about a sixth of a second. Previously, positrons and antiprotons had been created in accelerators, and sometimes combined into antihydrogen, but nobody had been able to keep them around long enough to get a good look at them before they did this:
image by CERN (source)
Those are antihydrogen atoms hitting the side of ALPHA's antimatter trap, which is a Penning trap: it uses strong magnetic fields to keep the positrons and antiprotons inside, away from any regular matter they might hit and annihilate against. Once those particles combine into antihydrogen, though, they become magnetically neutral, and, in previous experiments--according to this helpful article about ALPHA's trap--those antihydrogen atoms would then be loose and annihilate against the side of the trap within microseconds, which wasn't long enough to get a good look at them.
The current goal of CERN's ALPHA ("Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus") experiment is to be able to observe antihydrogen long enough to measure its spectrum, and compare it with hydrogen: they're expected to be the same, but if they aren't, that could lead to an explanation for why we're in a matter rather than antimatter universe!)
That's great, but how do you get these antimatter atoms to stay still for you? ALPHA's solution has been to incorporate a second, very subtle magnetic field, called a "Ioffe–Pritchard field," or a "minimum-B trap," into their Penning trap. What that does gets into quantum mechanical stuff like "magnetic moment" (here, for instance) that I don't really understand, but it *seems* to be something like this: all atoms, neutral or not, have a quantum property, "magnetic moment," of a certain discrete value, and if you can create some slow-moving (ie very cool) atoms inside a very sensitive magnetic field tuned in just a certain way, the intrinsic magnetic moment of the atoms will keep the atoms inside the field--well, still not for very long, but apparently the ALPHA scientists think that the time scales they can keep the antihydrogen atoms in the trap--currently about 1/6th of a second--will be sufficient to start getting some measurements of the antimatter's properties.
CERN has been producing antimatter in accelerators and catching it via their Antiproton decelerator since 2000 (they've been producing it for much longer than that, I think). ALPHA apparently uses evaporative cooling to get their antimatter cool (ie slow) enough to hold in their Ioffe-Pritchard field: you let the hottest atoms escape, and that cools the ones remaining, while of course significantly cutting down your sample size.
At some point they tried using lasers for cooling, and may still for all I know. In laser cooling, you zap atoms from all sides with lasers tuned to a frequency that matches a specific energy level / velocity in the target atoms, so photons in the beam hit those atoms as they're trying to move outward, very gradually slowing them down (if you continue to retune the lasers to lower and lower frequencies) to really low speeds/temperatures. Here's a nifty Sixty Symbols video on it (direct link for RSS readers).
Particles from the decelerator are--maybe initially?--cooled by passing them through foil. According to one of those articles, they also use liquid helium cooling at some stage in the process--this might be some of it boiling off here:
image by CERN (source)
And here's an overview of the ALPHA lab:
image by CERN (source)
Also, check out the ALPHA experiment home page for a rather slow but helpful video showing how it works.
So why is this interesting for A*? Because the speed at which you can move a space ship is limited by the velocity of its exhaust, and the fastest exhaust you can get from say a nuclear engine, while much faster--in theory--than what we've gotten with chemical engines, is still *only* about 10% of the speed of light, because most of the product of nuclear reactions is not released as energy, let alone usable exhaust. Antimatter, on the other hand, annihilates with matter with 100% conversion to energy, and although you lose about 50% of that as eh neutrinos or well something that just shoots right through normal matter and thus can't be used for propulsion, you're still annihilating an equal amount of matter, too, so added together you can get quite a bang for your buck, and exhaust speeds up to something like 30% of the speed of light. (Here's a handy list of various exhaust speeds.)
So antimatter drives could mean 300% faster ships than you could get through nuclear means! Not to mention a lot of power on hand. But so far, anyway, it doesn't really look feasible. For one thing, producing antimatter is--currently, at least--very inefficient and slow. Some quotes from the Wikipedia entry on antimatter:
- "According to CERN, only one part in ten billion (10−10) of the energy invested in the production of antimatter particles can be subsequently retrieved."
- "in 2004, the annual production of antiprotons at CERN was several picograms at a cost of $20 million. This means to produce 1 gram of antimatter, CERN would need to spend 100 quadrillion dollars and run the antimatter factory for 100 billion years."
- "The current antimatter production rate is between 1 and 10 nanograms per year, and this is expected to increase to between 3 and 30 nanograms per year by 2015 or 2020 with new superconducting linear accelerator facilities at CERN and Fermilab."
- "If we could assemble all of the antimatter we've ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes." (CERN scientist quoted in 2004.)
So getting any really rocket-usable amount together seems altogether out of the picture for the foreseeable future. Even if you could, though, there's the problem of containing it: according to this article I cited earlier, under current trap technology you'd need a trap 100 meters on each side to hold just a milligram of antimatter (which could yield energy equal to about 50 tons of TNT, which is for instance about 0.0008 the destructive power of a modern thermonuclear missile--ie, really not much).
Incidentally, fusion power also has similar containment problems.
Well dang.
So maybe we won't be using it for space ships, but studying it might teach us some elemental things about the nature of the universe, which would still be cool, I guess. :P
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| Black hole headlines! | Nov 18, 2010 6:26 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Yes, if you were wondering in what garb galactic assassins lounge around their lunar bases, now you know that flip-flops and cargo shorts are definitely included.
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I came across a couple new black-hole science links in the past few days!
NASA announced that they think they may have discovered the youngest nearby black hole; from 1995-2007, multiple X-ray telescopes studied supernova remnant SN 1979C--light from whose supernova explosion reached Earth in 1979--and it seems to have been emitting X-rays steadily for that whole time. One thing thought to result from supernovae, and to emit X-rays, would be a black hole sucking in remaining loose matter.
composite image by NASA (source); X-ray data is in gold
They're particularly encouraged to think that they've detected a stellar black hole in this case because no gamma ray burst was detected with this supernova, but it did contain hydrogen, which means it was a type II supernova, thought to be the type of supernova that produces most black holes. (In contrast, most supernovae detected have been--I think--type 1a supernovae, which are explosions of relatively small white dwarf stars, and unlikely to have sufficient mass to produce a black hole (a star of 20 stellar masses is thought to be required to produce a black hole; type 1as go boom when they hit the Chandrasekhar limit of only 1.38 solar masses).) It's also somewhat exciting because SN 1979C is "only" 50 million light years away (In galaxy Messier 100), whereas the type 1a supernovae detected by their emitted gamma ray bursts are often billions of light years away.
Still, calling it the "youngest nearby black hole" is a neat bit of hyperbole, because--aside from the fact that there are almost certainly many stellar black holes in our own galaxy, on the order of just tens of thousands of light years away from Earth--they can't really be sure this X-ray-emitting-thing is a black hole; even if it is a remnant of the supernova explosion detected in 1979, it could be a pulsar rather than a black hole. Also, because it's 50 million light years away, that makes it at least 50,000,030 years old.
So really this article illustrates just how darn hard it is to find black holes!
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Aside, that is, from the supermassive ones now thought to exist at the center of pretty much every galaxy. And the first half of this new Sixty Symbols video has an interesting discussion about what happens when those black holes collide: (Link to it on YouTube for those reading via RSS.)
So black holes continue to make the news more and more often. Eventually they might be the *only* news in the universe... :o
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| Thar she blows | Nov 17, 2010 6:47 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Let's hear it for powerful hair dryers and low gravity!
Here's the original storyboard for page 29:
If that looks familiar to you (aside from its reinterpretation in the final version of page 29), that might be because it formed the upper part of the illustration I used for the postcards given out for free at my art show; there's a version of that image in the episode 11 gallery.
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Over the weekend conditions were perfect (ie I was super tired, had some time on my hands, and was still wired on the mocha I had consumed sixteen hours earlier) for a poem to pop into my head! So that became the latest of my "word" font poem things, which you can short-cut to by clicking this banner:
Don't worry, it isn't really autobiographical; I never buy milk!
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| Art party success! | Nov 16, 2010 8:01 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Almost done recapping the first ten episodes (you noticed the report relayed by Mother on page 11:27 here described the end of episode 8, right? :)), I swear! We might get on to recapping some *new* stuff this week, even; I mean stuff that happened between the end of episode ten, and now--which, if you've been reading carefully today, was a not-insignificant lapse of time. This won't be the only time-jump in this episode, either, so stay sharp. :D
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The reception for my Seattle art show took place Saturday night, and I can definitely say that I had a fine time--hopefully all the other people who showed up did, too! Here's the one photo I snapped
capturing the rear of the shop, and you can see the mob of people clustered around the rear half of my prints (check the link just above to see what that display wall looks like), in front of which were strategically placed the party's supply of cheese, crackers, pumpkin chocolate-chip cookies, and wine; I don't know who brought the cookies and wine, but whoever you are, you are awesome. A couple other artists had displays back there just for the night of the reception--the blinding light on the right has something to do with that, I think--and there was even a fellow playing a West (?) African harp enthusiastically.
Lots of friends, family, and neighbors showed up--even a bunch I had no idea were coming--and I met some new people too, including several artists, one of which was fellow webcomicker W. P. Morse of Rhapsodies. <-- Yes, that's a webcomic!
Thanks for coming and making it a real party, people! =D And thanks of course to Caffè Fiore for hosting it.
The display will remain up through the end of the year, so there's plenty of time to check out the several dozen prints of my work hanging up there with a party of your own!
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| Art show reception tomorr-- Tonight! | Nov 13, 2010 8:21 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Heyyy it must be Friday, because that's the day where I usually manage just one, very late page. In fact I should probably be getting some sleep because the reception for my art show is going down this evening--today now being technically Saturday. So if you're in the Seattle area and have nothing better to do between 7-9 pm tonight, or maybe just want some free crackers and cheese and mingling, why, stop on by!
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| Abstract and secret art exclusives! | Nov 12, 2010 7:03 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Told ya we'd get out! Well, one foot so far, anyway. It *was* in the most boring way possible I guess... Hm. But that's what makes it *hard*! Yeah--yeah, that's the ticket! >_>
You'll have to excuse me for going a bit extra abstracty on you with page 23 there, but I do love me some abstraction now and then--good for the circulation, probably. Er. Anyway here's the ol' storyboard for that page:
I was pretty happy with that when I scribbled it out, because after a bunch of standing around it was like woo like at this crazy thing, it's got direction--heck, even inversion! Bam! And so I was a little nervous about executing the final version of it, but hopefully some of that came through.
In fact, I'm thinking about taking a few large prints of that page to have for sale as unmatted and unframed bargains at my art show's reception this Saturday--along with a couple other things I've done too recently to have gotten on the walls. Woo! Reception exclusives!
I think this one will be kind of neat as a print, particularly because the open white parts at the edges--the head, the doorway, the little diminished point of the ankles--will "bleed" into the margins, like this (only, on a big piece of glossy cardstock, mind you):
Yep! Classy! ^_~
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| When in doubt, make it all black | Nov 11, 2010 5:33 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Tomorrow we get out of this holding cell--one way or the other!
And of course it's just *now* that I figure out what was bugging me about the face-on drawings I was doing in here. See if you can spot it in this comparison of page 11:22's initial shading, then the revision:
See it? Basically, I was shading too much in gray rather than in black. This ain't Supermassive Gray Hole A*! *cough* So what I had been covering with shadows needed to be all black, and then I line some thin shaded borders around that, and voila, higher contrast, more drama, yay. Glad I figured that out, because the excessive number of shading layers I kept laying on the previous two pages to try to compensate for the lack of black shading was *really* time consuming, not to mention boring to draw.
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| Cookies for clones | Nov 10, 2010 6:05 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Oh there I go cutting her off in the middle of a sentence again. What will the end of it be? "...and bake us all cookies" would be nice, I think.
Hey instead of reading this, you could be checking out the latest page of my weekend fairy tale comic, "The Princess and the Giant." Yep, right through this handy clickable link image:
^ That isn't actually part of this week's image; it's just an oldie but goodie. The Princess was too tiny in this week's image to turn her into a banner, but there's a lot of other stuff going on around her, so give it a look!
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| An unrelated black rose | Nov 09, 2010 4:43 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:I hope we're all clear on Selenis now!
I did an unrelated drawing over the weekend, just for the heck of it I guess. It's very slightly maybe NSFW, so I'll tuck it behind this little clickable icon version which even the most paranoid boss couldn't possibly object to (could they? :o):
(maybe slightly NSFW!)
It was just sort of an image that popped into my head, but this ended up coming out somewhat differently, so maybe I'll have to try another one at some point. I also wanted to try loosening up a bit; I think sometimes on A* I get a little too particular and cramped up--too conservative, if you will--and the resulting image isn't quite as lively as it could have been; Friday's page 11:16 particularly struck me that way, for instance. And it was fun to work looser without layers and (much) undo. So I gotta try to keep that in mind when working on my actual comic stuff.
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| The week is over, long live the next week | Nov 06, 2010 8:09 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Perriman's Perfected Cloning Techniques, now in handy bottled form! Miracle life-extending formula improves vigor and restores taste buds! Is Perriman's right...for you?
Here are the storyboards for page 16:
I like how the lines in the first one came out, but in the end I think the straight vertical orientation was a little too similar to the neighboring pages in this sequence.
Next week should see me able to generate more pages than this week, since I won't have to be framing any more A* prints to hang on gallery walls...I don't think. :P
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| The show is on! A* on display in Seattle | Nov 05, 2010 6:20 AM PDT | url |
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Most of my prints are now hanging on several walls at Caffè Fiore:
You'll notice a couple gaps there: they ran out of hooks! :o For this massive display. But they're going to get some more and hopefully have five more prints up tomorrow, two of which are pretty big ones. I got to put most of the ones you see here up myself while balancing precariously on stools (only because I'm sort of careless with my balance, not due to any ricketyness with their rock-solid stools), and we did the whole comical "no a little to the left...no, now it has to go back to the right..." thing repeatedly.
Huge thanks to my mom and dad for participating in that fun, and doing most of the work getting these matted and framed--that's a *ton* of work, as I have learned from the tiny part of it I did. And sticking those little title/price tags to the walls was an adventure in itself: the Scotch double-sided tape we tried wasn't strong enough, so we went with this crazy super-sticky brand that threatened to trap one or more of us on multiple occasions. It'll probably take some of their paint off when I try to remove it two months from now when the show ends. >_> (This is actually Fiore's last two-month show; they go to one month per artist after this, so I got extra lucky!)
And we still have a bunch of stuff they didn't have room for, but we'll bring those to the official opening on the 13th, at least.
Oh, you can see the funky lighting they have in Fiore--not track lighting on the art, but those tall glowing tubes hanging down from the ceiling in the middle of the shop; they seem like some sort of antique light bulbs somehow, and bathe the whole place in a nice gentle warm glow...which my cheap cell phone camera didn't capture all that well. =p
There's a kid's play area right below that Princess print with the elephant (lower left, photos 1 & 2--that's the back of the shop, while 3 & 4 are in the front); mom thought the kids might like that one.
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| Wet hair can be such a pain | Nov 05, 2010 5:57 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Now if you read episode 10 (EDIT: oop, actually more like episodes 8-9!), you know that isn't quite what went down, but hey, what she doesn't know won't hurt her--or will it? :o
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| Food coma had nothing to do with...oh | Nov 04, 2010 5:30 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Did more framing today, gotta go actually put the things up tomorrow, and then the show of prints will be on. On like...a show!
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| Scientists make knives out of glass you know | Nov 03, 2010 2:54 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Framed some of the pieces for the show today; working with freshly cut glass isn't quite as fun as it sounds! I've got to go do more of that tomorrow, so we're probably looking at just a single page per day for the rest of this week. Hm... The next page is pretty simple visually; maybe I'll be able to squeeze out two tomorrow, if I'm lucky!
Now that we finally have this semi-new character fully introduced, I've been able to put her name and the new episode on the episode list page.
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| A quick guide to galactic pronunciation | Nov 02, 2010 3:09 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:But would you pronounce that "zee," or "zay-uh," or what?
I'll probably only manage one page tomorrow, since it looks like I'll be spending a chunk of the day getting the rest of the framing supplies and so forth for the show--24 framed prints gotta be ready to go up on several walls Thursday!
Oh hah just remembered I was watching a Spanish football game earlier, and the--presumably British--announcer pronounced "z" as "th" (and "th" as "f")--so I guess he'd pronounce her last name totally differently than I'd imagined anyone would! Wonder where that accent comes from.
Oh yeah 2: Hee, pages 11.10 and 11.11 on 11/01/10!
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