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  A year of art, ink, love, and vacuum tubesDec 31, 2011 9:44 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:The Henry Art Gallery here in Seattle, which I've actually been to before--it is a pretty nifty gallery/museum place--is going to be having an exhibition of webcomics in 2012, and so that you can help them figure out which webcomics to include, they've put up a poll where you can vote for your favorite webcomics to be included. It would really be a cool place for any webcomic person to have their stuff shown, so pop over there and help make it happen for some deserving folks!
 
Edit 3/3: Oops, actually I'm not sure I've been to the Henry, which is on the University of Washington campus; I was confusing it with a past visit to the Frye Art Museum over on Seattle's Capitol Hill, which is quite nice.
 
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I was sort of surprised to see that vacuum tubes were the US's 4th largest export in 2011. I mean, vacuum tubes? Is that a lot of guitar amps and WWII-era supercomputers, or what? Well, Wikipedia's vacuum tubes article doesn't really make it clear, but it does explain that new types of vacuum technology, such as vacuum fluorescent displays and vacuum nanoelectronics, are used in all sort of fancy new gadgets these days, from car stereo displays to cell phones and Bluetooth transmitters. So maybe that's part of where the $37.1 billion vacuum tube export market comes from!
 
... Probably still is a lot of guitar amps though, those things can be pretty spendy.
 
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My continuing quest to teach myself ink wash for A* turned up yet another (I mean in addition to some of the people I found in the Masters of Ink interview series that I came across last week) pretty darn amazing contemporary artist who works in ink wash: Stuart Sayger is one of those pro comic book types and really slings ink around with gusto, as you can see for instance in his Red Sonja. Here is an commentary by him from a few years back about his materials and methods:
 
No lie.. I use just about anything and everything to draw with.. but there are a few tools that I use more often that most..
#1 thing that I can't live with out is just a plain ol bottle of ink... I draw alot with sumi ink... It dries with a bit of a different surface than india inks... Sumi has more of a hard shell finish... i think that it allows white inks to stand on top more , thus the white will stay brighter... I like to apply ink with all sorts of tools.. yes, I use brushs just like everyone else, but i love to use my fingers to draw with.. I'll put my finger right in the ink sometimes.. I can make a line with my fingernail and then roll my finger to the side and controll the line's thickness .. ( no kidding !) I'll also use all kinds of different cheap pens.. I draw for reproduction, so if i am drawing with many different types of black ink and they don't really match, I never mind..
the #2 thing i need is a jar of PROwhite correction fluid/ paste/goop... I love that stuff... you can apply it just like ink except that it is thicker ( you can thin it with distilled water)... yes i'll use my fingers when drawing iwth it as well...
Alot of the old school artists don't like to use correction paint and will just about never layer ink and correction paint.. I do it on almost every piece that I make... the lesson there is do what works well and looks good to you... ( though im sure that Joe Kubert would have stuck me with a ruler if he saw how I worked!)

I think it's interesting how Sayger really does use that thick white ink over the black with a distinctive verve. And I happen to use that Japanese "sumi" ink he's talking about, which is neat to know because most of the other pros I've read about lately just use one of the two main local-ish brands, Speedball or Higgins--I haven't tried Higgins but I have tried Speedball, and it was kind of brownish actually and not nearly as black as the Japanese stuff that comes in those green bottles.
 
He's right about using your fingers, too; in fact, I have a way easier time working with that thick white ink if I can mush it around with my finger--I did a bunch of that in yesterday's page, for instance. And I like how another ink artist I've mentioned before, Sean Murphy, uses his fingerprints in black ink for texture and shading; if you zoom in on the torso of his Batman, for instance, you'll see the grays there are actually fingerprints.
 
Of course, there was a certain Frazetta fellow who also wasn't bad at ink wash; his tend to be very subtle, often just shading off from black ink so you almost don't even notice it consciously, but it really gives the lines a sense of depth and mystery.
 
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I took a bite of an apple today and it came out like this:
 
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A good sign, I think! <3 and Happy New Year, everyone--see you with lots more A* and bloggetry (which I can't seem to stop doing, even when I try =p) in 2012!
 
 
 
 
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  YouTube: crazy; van Gogh: just color blind?Dec 30, 2011 7:59 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:After doing the pencils for today's page I stumbled into a couple more impromptu face research sessions on YouTube:
 
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and
 
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Who are these people with the interesting faces and stylists? Well it doesn't really matter for A* I suppose but the answers lie here and here.
 
And speaking of the pencils, these are they:
 
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An interesting Tweet came across my Twitter tonight—supposedly if you run Vincent van Gogh's paintings through a Photomashoppy thing that claims to simulate how they look to someone with color blindness, the colors actually look somewhat normal, rather than all crazytown like we're used to from the tragic post-Impressionist. So was he really a crazy genius, or just color blind? I have to think that he wouldn't have ended up nearly as rock-star popular as he is if his colors hadn't been so far out, so in any case, aside from the suicide thing and the ear, it kind of worked out.
 
 
 
 
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  The coolest pulsar image I've ever seenDec 29, 2011 9:41 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Just before Christmas, NASA rather nonchalantly posted what is far and away the coolest image of a pulsar that I've ever seen. A pulsar is a spinning neutron star--what's left behind by the supernova explosion of a star that wasn't massive enough to collapse into a black hole. It's also this:
 
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image by NASA/CXC/Univ. of Potsdam/L. Oskinova et al. (source)
 
Here's the juicy middle section of NASA's article on the photo:
 
In this composite image, X-rays from Chandra and XMM-Newton have been colored blue and optical data from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile are colored red and green. The pulsar, known as SXP 1062, is the bright white source located on the right-hand side of the image in the middle of the diffuse blue emission inside a red shell. The diffuse X-rays and optical shell are both evidence of a supernova remnant surrounding the pulsar. The optical data also displays spectacular formations of gas and dust in a star-forming region on the left side of the image.
 
SXP 1062 interests astronomers because the Chandra and XMM-Newton data show that it is rotating unusually slowly -- about once every 18 minutes. (In contrast, some pulsars are found to revolve multiple times per second, including most newly born pulsars.) This relatively leisurely pace of SXP 1062 makes it one of the slowest rotating X-ray pulsars in the SMC.
 
Scientists have estimated that the supernova remnant around SXP 1062 is between 10,000 and 40,000 years old, as it appears in the image. This means that the pulsar is very young [...]
 
 
 
 
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  Show of my art opening Jan 6th in Seattle!Dec 28, 2011 11:45 AM PST | url
 
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I know it's awfully late notice, but nonetheless a show of my art opens the Friday after this one--that'd be Friday the 6th of January, 2012--at Frame Up Studios in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood (3515 Fremont Ave. N, specifically), with a little party from 6:00 to 9:00 pm that is open to all; I have to be there for it so I hope you'll come visit me!
 
The studio is kindly providing some refreshments; that date is also the Fremont First Friday art walk, so other galleries in the neighborhood will be having shindigs of their own at the same time--although if you just need to buy something ultimately delicious to eat, may I suggest the simply yet accurately named "pie" right next door.
 
My stuff will be on display at Frame Up through the end of January, and includes a selection of my very latest traditional ink wash paintings, along with sharp, framed prints of the drawings I make in odd ways on computers; art from these pieces appears in my Supermassive Black Hole A* and Princess and the Giant comic series.
 
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Added 1 new A* page:One thing that definitely won't be at the show are the pencils for today's A* page, since I paint over / erase them in the inking and washing stage. But they kinda looked nice in their graphitey way, so I took a photo before obliterating them:
 
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  Lovejoy vids, GRAIL orbits, J. Jones, HexagonDec 27, 2011 7:02 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Comet Lovejoy just keeps getting more famous! Now it's on YouTube—this is the full sequence from the one photo I had of it last week, shot from the ISS; comet footage ends at about 30 seconds in:
 
[Edit 5/26/18 - video no longer on YouTube]
 
and Vimeo—as seen from the Very Large Telescope array in the mountains of Chile:
 
http://vimeo.com/34073825
 
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Back in August I wrote a little about the impending launch of the GRAIL spacecraft: twin probes that will orbit the Moon, one a little behind the other, and measure the variation in their positions caused by the Moon's gravity, thus generating a detailed map of the Moon's gravitational field. Well, the twins are nearly ready to swing into action: according to this article, over the New Year weekend they'll be making their lunar orbit insertion, 24 hours apart; their course to the Moon over the preceding months has been so accurate that no course correction was necessary, which is fairly impressive.
 
If the orbital insertion goes okay, they'll spend the next two months swinging gradually downward toward the lunar surface, "until they are about 35 miles above the surface with an average separation of 124 miles," at which point they can begin mapping. They'll also get new names: currently known simply as GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B, names chosen from a contest of schoolchildren will be revealed once they're orbiting successfully.
 
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Over the X-Mas weekend I found out about a new (to me) and amazing ink artist, Jeff Jones, who came to comic prominence in the '70's, forming an independent group, "The Studio," with friends and fellow comic artists Barry Windsor-Smith, Mike Kaluta, and Bernie Wrightson (all of whom I *had* heard of). Jones, sadly no longer with us, had a knack for short, strikingly offbeat stories illustrated in a signature high contrast but freely organic inked style, like Sleep, a far-out five page sci-fi story you can see there in all its scanned glory. Jones also did cool stuff in the way of paintings, colored ink illustrations, and ink wash.
 
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This AP story tells the only-just-declassified story of the highly trained men and women gathered in the shuttered buildings of the Perkin-Elmer Corp. of Danbury, Connecticut, where from 1966 to at least 1987 up to 1,000 of them at once worked away at the government's top secret Project Hexagon,
considered the most successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth's atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks.
 
The scale, ambition and sheer ingenuity of Hexagon KH-9 was breathtaking. The fact that 19 out of 20 launches were successful (the final mission blew up because the booster rockets failed) is astonishing.

Even though the program ended decades ago, the secret was faithfully kept until the government officially declassified Hexagon this past September—project members weren't even allowed to speak of Hexagon to their spouses or children, who all this time thought they had merely worked often long hours making some sort of generic "widgets." Those "widgets" were in fact 60-foot-long satellites weighing "30,000 pounds and supplying film at speeds of 200 inches per second"; they could capture images of a resolution capable of showing features as small as a private swimming pool, or a Soviet battalion in training exercises.
 
 
 
 
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  A cosmic twistDec 24, 2011 10:57 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Image
image by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) (source)
 
^ Echoing the weightless curls of our anti-heroine's hair, the deranged arms of galaxy UGC 1810, seen twisting across this new composite Hubble image sampling the ultraviolet, blue, and red wavelengths, are thought to have been distorted from the usual spiral shape by a collision with the galaxy below it, UGC 1813. The galactic pair, collectively known as Arp 273, also display the type of brilliant starburst activity theorized to follow in the wake of such cosmic disruptions.
 
Have a lovely Christmas or whatever you like to call it! If you're looking for something more to look at after unstuffing your stocking, give the Masters of Ink interview series at optimumwound.com a perusal; those interested in the creation of comic art will be treated to some very talented and experienced professionals giving the gritty details of their tools and methods--particularly interesting to me as I was thinking maybe I should try one of those dip pen things, get some really hard lines--and everyone will, I think, enjoy at least some of the incredible art accompanying the technical details.
 
 
 
 
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  Space ball flybys (Lovejoy) and landingsDec 23, 2011 7:27 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Just a couple days ago I was showing videos of Comet Lovejoy, the first sungrazing comet observed to survive its brush with the Sun. Since then it's been winging its way back out toward cooler parts of the solar system, and the commander of the International Space Station caught a great shot of it passing over the Earth's horizon:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
Man!
 
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More down to Earth but much more mysteriously, "authorities found in an Internet search" that several "space balls" "have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years." The latest, just announced, landed in Namibia last month:
 
With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of "two halves welded together".
 
It was made of a "metal alloy known to man" and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik.
 
It was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 meters wide.

Here's a shot of the mysterious space creature:
 
Image
image by National Forensic Science Institute (source)
 
Test objects or targets left in orbit by an old space program? Nobody knows--or nobody's talking--yet!
 
 
 
 
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  The ins and outs of space ship hatchesDec 22, 2011 6:13 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I wanted to draw an old-school screw-opening hatch for this ship; for the most part I've used various types of sliding doors containment areas in A* to this point, which are easier to draw, but kind boring visually--also harder to show someone in the process of opening them. I suppose this is a secondary or inner hatch here. For some reason I'd been picturing it as an outward-opening hatch, but then I thought maybe I should check to see which way hatches usually go on space ships.
 
Apparently for space ships, hatch usually open out (and in for submarines). This seems unintuitive--which is why I looked it up--because if they opened the other way (in for a space ship, out for a submarine), pressure would help seal them shut--that kind of hatch is called a plug door. I'm not sure what set the precedent for submarines, but for space ships it was pretty definitely the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts in a launch pad systems test in 1967; their pure oxygen cabin atmosphere ignited, and even if they had been able to reach the escape hatch, they wouldn't have been able to get out, because the inward-swinging hatch couldn't have been opened until the cabin pressure had been vented to match the outside pressure; after that, the US space program switched definitively to outward-opening hatches (ironically, one of the reasons the Apollo 1 had an inward-opening hatch was because one of the astronauts killed, Gus Grissom, had come close to drowning when explosive bolts on his Liberty Bell 7 ship in the Mercury-Redstone 4 mission (the US's second manned space flight, in 1961) had blown the craft's outward-opening hatch off unexpectedly after the ship landed in the sea).
 
Here are some photos of the inner (inward-opening) and outer hatch of the "Block 1" design used in Apollo 1:
 
Image Image
images by NASA (source)
 
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Man I'm getting a backlog of news tabs again, gotta run through some of these. Let's see... A while back I posted about a NASA sting operation where they caught someone trying to sell a Moon rock--brought back by the Apollo missions, they're classified as "national treasures" and are not legal to sell, although President Nixon gave them as gifts to all 50 states, and 136 countries. Well, this article talks about a recent report released by NASA's inspector general, admitting that out of 26,000 space material samples given out on loan, "more than 500 pieces of moon rocks, meteorites, comet chunks and other space material were stolen or have been missing since 1970"; apparently they just didn't really keep track of them very well--samples would be given out on loan to researchers or institutions, who would keep them for decades, even allowing employees to take them home upon retirement. Oh well, lots more where those came from, I suppose.
 
And then over the past few days there's been a flurry of articles about the Earth having a "second Moon," which is a pretty impressive overreaction to a recent paper claiming that studies of the Earth/Moon system's gravitational field show that at any given time, there is probably an asteroid on the order of 1-meter across orbiting the Earth--not quite "Moon"-sized. These rocks supposedly take three or so spins around the planet over the span of about ten months before their momentum carries them back out into space. One such rock was spotted by a sky survey in 2006 (due to its bright color it was at first mistaken for an old titanium white Saturn rocket stage, a number of which are in solar orbit close to the Earth), and stayed in Earth orbit until 2007. Asteroids that small--and usually not so bright--are pretty hard to spot, even in orbit around the Earth, but according to this theory there's probably one out there now, buzzing around the planet.
 
 
 
 
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  A snowball's chance in the Sun: Comet LovejoyDec 21, 2011 8:15 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:If you've been reading my posts in recent months, you know that comets fall into the Sun all the time--scientists have observed some 2000 comets taking their final fatal plunge sunward. Well, they've finally seen one take that plunge--and survive:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
^ That's Comet Lovejoy escaping from the Sun on December 15th. It was only just discovered--by an amateur Australian astronomer--on December 2nd, diving toward the Sun. Tracked by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, it was seen plunging toward what was sure to be its fiery death, only, a little while later, it was spotted racing away on the other side.
 
According to NASA's article, the class of comets to which Lovejoy is thought to have belonged--Kreutz Sungrazers, possibly the remains a single massive comet seen in 1106 AD--are usually about 10 meters across; Lovejoy looked about ten times that size when it was spotted, but now scientists are thinking that since it survived its solar flyby, it might have been significantly bigger--500 meters or so across. It'll have lost a lot of that mass in its close brush with the Sun, but boy, what a trooper.
 
 
 
 
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  Another webcomic with A*: "The Big Crunch"Dec 20, 2011 6:52 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I ran across another webcomic set around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*! It just started in September, and it's called (warning: there is some four-letter language) The Big Crunch. It's a comedy with all kinds of crazy aliens packed onto a doomed planet somehow circling the black hole; kind of makes me think of a combination of Scenes From A Multiverse and Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life, which are two pretty decent sci-fi comics in their own right. But they don't have the supermassive black hole A* in them, whereas The Big Crunch does, so maybe check that one out first.
 
And in fact--not that I'm biased or anything well okay maybe--the author of that comic sent me a link to this YouTube video showing a succession of space images zooming in from a full view of the Milky Way (as seen from Earth) to focus on the area right around A*:
 
video on Youtube
 
I've seen other videos like that before but I couldn't find that I'd ever embedded one here, so there you go!
 
Oh yeah, since I've already mentioned a few other sci-fi webcomics, I'll also mention that I came across another one that was new to me: Space Base 8, a comedy featuring a crash test monkey, a space station, and wacky hi-jinks, illustrated in a loose and lively cartoon style.
 
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And finally, over the weekend I noticed that A* was reviewed by Russians! Or the authors of some kind of blog in Russian, at least, as part of a sci-fi webcomic round-up. There are some other interesting comics in there I hadn't heard about before, although some of the most interesting ones are in kinda icky confusing or sound-playing Flash sites. :P Anyway I'm always excited when someone takes the time to review A*, so huzzah!
 
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EDIT: Oops, and finally finally this time, regarding that music video picture puzzler in the previous post, here is *spoiler* the answer.
 
 
 
 
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  More puzzles up my sleevesDec 17, 2011 10:06 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This one was tough to scan! Even the 140 lb watercolor paper I'm using now rumpled up a little across the mostly wash-free middle (the character's body) with the top and bottom being all wet and washy, which ended up as a few faint, fuzzy dark bands across the scan (those areas being slightly elevated off the glass). I added extra weight on top of the scanner, which helped a little, but in the end I had to do some touching up with a spot Levels layer in Photoshop to get rid of the dark bands. Oh well at least I know how to do it now—it actually works pretty darn well.
 
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Two riddles to puzzle you over the weekend!
 
First, yet another trip to YouTube ends in an unexpected face research session for A*. Can you identify the performer and maybe even the music video these three screenshots come from?
 
Image Image Image
 
I didn't follow or really know anything about this artist back in the day, but darned if she didn't have some A*-appropriate makeup going on here, and the lighting is just the kind to bring out facial features. Also she's really good at making entertaining expressions while singing. :D Speaking of which, as I was screenshotting this I realized one reason why I find looking at faces in music videos particularly helpful: 'cause most of the time when you're drawing a detailed mouth in a comic like A*, it's when the mouth is saying something, and in music videos you generally get a really good look at mouths operating at full steam!
 
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Second riddle! In two parts, actually.
 
When I thought I was all done painting today's page and was about to stick it in the scanner, I noticed I'd unwittingly modified a bit of Selenis' costume from the way it looked on previous pages—can you spot the difference?
 
And the second part of this second riddle! Can you find the *other* time I accidentally modified this same item of her costume—okay, it's her dress—in a different way?
 
Big-ish hint: this happened back in episode 13, and before it switched to hand-painted art. The answer is *not* that the little scarf thing around the back of her dress was missing after she left Andiran's hotel room—I did that on purpose (figure she tore it off because she was tired of it—and I was tired of drawing it :p).
 
I was initially annoyed with myself for this latest little visual continuity error, and I don't think it's a coincidence that these have started cropping up pretty much right after I ran out of thumbnails for each page, drawn in advance—I had them in all episodes prior to 13, and for 13 up through the last scene on the space station, but then I just found I didn't have the time to do an extra sketch (or often more) for each page. So I don't do them anymore!
 
It's sometimes scary sailing ahead without the thumbnails, and it definitely requires putting in a little more thought each day than I used to have to do—and if I was like a real pro I'd have them, ya know—but I also kind of like *not* having a guide to follow for each new page's final drawing. I've never been big on strict visual continuity, as you've probably noticed; in practice, faces and styles and so on change day by day based on how I feel about each page as I work on it—this happens pretty much entirely unconsciously and was another thing that irked me when I realized I was doing it, but, like these little unplanned visual prop changes that are coming in in the absence of thumbnails, I'm kinda learning to embrace it; I think in the end these free me up to evolve the comic visually to better final effect, and to focus more on making each page as good as it can be in its own right.
 
This latest inadvertent and unconscious costume change, for instance, neatly solves a part of her dress design that I now realize had been irritating me more and more since she left the hotel. The dress is going to stick around for a bit more in this episode, and if I was being a continuity stickler, I'd have to suffer through that irritating design all the way through—but I'm not, and my subconscious neatly came up with and implemented what is actually, for me, a nice bit of costume redesign. Does it make sense? Not really—although hey you could say she passed the two hours before her flight in altering her costume >_>—but it *does* make for a better image, and chances are you wouldn't have noticed the change anyway if I hadn't pointed it out (have you found it yet? :D).
 
So this is all well and good until I flub something major that actually introduces a hole in the plot. >_> ;) =o
 
 
 
 
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  White washing is hard and I should stop itDec 16, 2011 9:04 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Note to self (again): don't try white ink wash! It is hard to manage! Hum well it was interesting, anyway!
 
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Okay if you were stumped by the "name that music video" screenshot from yesterday, the answer is *SPOILER SPOILER* here. Yep!
 
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I made some banners for A* on Ink Outbreak, which apparently some people use to read comics? It's this top bar thingy that will take you to other "related" comics--sorta like StumbleUpon but specifically for webcomics, maybe, I dunno. Anyway they have their own custom banner sizes, maybe because they don't want people to just throw in their standard marketing banners or whatnot. A* was already on Ink Outbreak (I mean, it was appearing in their listing as a comic that updated), so I figured I might as well make some banners for 'em that are a little more representative of the comic than a big black rectangle...although actually that does kind of work for A*, probably better than most any other webcomic. Oh well here are the banners, whee:
 
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The art is from just a few pages back, episode 15, page 7.
 
 
 
 
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  Putting the grays before the blackDec 15, 2011 7:58 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Phew this one was tricky, I kind of ended up doing it backwards—grays before black. Hm!
 
Found myself falling into more "research" of interesting faces in YouTube videos again today. Bonus points to you if you can name the performer or even the song this one comes from:
 
Image
 
Hint: the name of the song has the same kinda root meaning as Selenis' name, only in a Romance language. =p
 
 
 
 
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  I am trying to write short blog posts becauseDec 14, 2011 4:16 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This ended up being a pretty productive page. I felt like the black ink alone wasn't quite getting it done, so when I started laying ink wash over it I messed around with it more than I usually do, and I found some handy ways to manipulate it for more detailed modeling effects: for the nose, for instance, I was able to create light and dark areas out of what had been a more or less flat area of wash by going back in with more water, or strategically sponging some off with a paper towel. And I had found some weeks ago that although the white ink stuff I have can't really be used in or with washes normally, since it isn't waterproof and doesn't mix well, if I add it on "dry," then wet a finger and smudge it, it actually blends pretty well that way—so I used that technique for some highlights.
 
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I'm going to be trying to keep my blog entries relatively brief for a while here, and that's because I need to make time to get some important (to me =p) things done around the site: gotta get the subscription mode done (haven't even really managed to get started on the cookie-based version, dar), and then enable buying the original A* page paintings. These are gonna be somewhat technically challenging for me so they'll probably take a while, grr.
 
Oh but before all that I still have to finish up the script for this episode. ;)
 
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And you know it doesn't really help when I go and waste an hour or so taking screenshots of internet videos for "research." Shhah!
 
Image Image
 
 
 
 
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  Gemini 11 and slightly artificial gravityDec 13, 2011 2:42 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I saw a mention in a blog-ish article by Gary Church, Water and Bombs, that the Gemini 11 mission tested artificial gravity--so of course I had to go and look that up!
 
In 1966, Gemini 11 launched into Earth orbit and rendezvoused with the unmanned Agena Target Vehicle, simulating the rendezvous of a lunar module with a command module after a successful Moon landing. Then, using the Agena's thruster, the combined craft boosted to a high orbit of 850 miles (1,370 km), which is *still* the record for the highest Earth orbit--the maximum orbital altitude of the Space Shuttle, by comparison, was 600 miles (970 km).
 
Anyway to get to the point, at some point in their practice routine that covered four docking and undocking maneuvers, the astronauts tied a 100-foot (30 m) tether to the Agena
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
and then used the maneuvering thrusters on the two craft to spin them around each other, with their inertia (the so-called "centrifugal force") pulling the tether tight between them and causing the astronauts to feel an effect like gravity pulling them into the outward-facing hull of the Gemini capsule. Artificial gravity in spaaaaaaaace!
 
But with their short tether and relatively slow rotational velocity, they only generated the equivalent of 0.00015 g; under gravity of that magnitude, the average human adult would weigh something like 12 grams--about the weight of a lightweight writing pen at sea level, according to the internet.
 
 
 
 
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  Lost pencils and space stationsDec 10, 2011 9:30 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Now, "Molsov" started out like a lot of the names I come up with, basically as a kind of sound I wanted for the name. But it turns out it could also almost mean stuff! For instance, "Mol" could stand for the Manned Orbital Laboratory, a manned training and reconnaissance space station the U.S. Air Force was looking into in the '60s, until they eventually decided it would cost to much and not be any more useful than much cheaper drones. Also for some reason it was going to look kind like a beer bottle, at least as imagined in this '67 concept drawing (that's a Gemini B re-entry capsule at the near end, separating from the station for a return to Earth):
 
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image by USAF (source)
 
Compare with this earlier concept drawing from 1960, before the Gemini craft were settled on as shuttle vehicles:
 
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image by USAF (source)
 
And check out the dome on this MOL space suit:
 
Image
image by USAF (source)
 
The "sov" part of the "Molsov" name could come from the word "sovereign," which will apply to Molsov in a way which will be hinted at by the end of this little conversation; it could also stand for single occupant vehicle, whose almost-relevance you will see as early as Selenis' next sentence!
 
But mostly I just liked how it sounded. :P
 
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Here's what Selenis looked like in pencil before I splashed ink all over her for today's page:
 
Image
 
I kind of liked this version, even if her eyes are looking two different directions. ;D (Actually that's probably *why* I like it. :P Why settle for an image of a face having just one expression when it can actually have two?)
 
 
 
 
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  I for one welcome our robotic overl--ERRORDec 09, 2011 5:37 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Executies only! No, wait, it...probably doesn't say that. Well okay it definitely doesn't, because as you can see in the photo of the original, there's definitely a "v" in there right at the edge of the paper. Plus the booking agent has hands! Who'd have guessed.
 
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I've talked here before about humans controlling computers/robots with their brain, and also how Selenis' brain implants could do the same. So given that, and knowing as we do that robots will take over the world, it should come as no surprise that researchers (human, but no doubt controlled by robotic overlords) at the Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics, and Microelectronics in France ("informatics" appears to be an actual word, although a rather generously defined one) have created an experiment in which a robot controls a human's arm by means of electrodes:
 
video on Youtube
 
The excuse for doing this, according to the article, is that it could help with for instance muscular therapy after an injury. Fortunately though not all members of the scientific community have been assimilated as yet, as there are said to have been some who gave away their control-free status when they emitted "a nervous gasp" when the video was first shown at a conference. And really how much more proof do you need that the project is controlled by robotic puppetmasters when the project's human so-called "lead" researcher sums it up like so (partially paraphrased in the article): "The approach is safe and with some tweaks the stimulation could be made 'comfortable' for people. 'You get used to it,' he said."
 
I'm sure we will. >_>
 
 
 
 
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  By ISS's early lightDec 08, 2011 3:56 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:NASA posted an article a little while back about neat footage of the Earth taken with the International Space Station's new, Japanese "Super Sensitive High Definition TV" camera ("SS-HDTV"); the footage aired on Japan's NHK television station, and particularly cool clips taken by JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa showed up on YouTube--but since NASA published that article, which links to some of them, they've been switched to "Private" viewing. Wah! Rather a rude thing to do while NASA's trying to link to your video. :P And I'd been meaning to use them for today's blog article. ;_;
 
Well eh... Here's the only surviving sample of NHK-aired SS-HDTV footage I could find, and it's a rather unexciting live segment. Fortunately though some enterprising individuals have pieced together footage from stills (must have been a lot of 'em!) posted on NASA's site--like this rather spectacular compilation:
 
video on Youtube
 
^ I especially like that shot at about 2:00, where dawn light (I guess?) is striking the ISS modules hanging down in the foreground, before the sun has risen over the rim of the planet, so there are still little galaxies of city lights zooming by down below--really beautiful and amazing, gosh!
 
Earlier in the year that same YouTuber put together this compilation of slower panning shots of the planet seen from the ISS, also in very high definition.
 
 
 
 
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  Episode 15, Synthetic Aperture RadarDec 07, 2011 4:27 AM PST | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Yay episode 15! This is Selenis 35, who we left on her way to the spaceport at the end of episode 13.
 
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Seems like I'm always writing about Saturn's crazy ice-shooting moon Enceladus (the last time was back in October, for instance). That's partly because it *is* so crazy (shoots ice particles out into a ring around Saturn, is coated in up to 300 feet of snow, etc), and partly because the Cassini spacecraft is often cruising around there getting some amazing photos.
 
Now Cassini's broken out a new trick on Enceladus: capturing swaths of the moon's topography in extremely high detail with synthetic aperture radar.
 
This Synthetic Aperture Radar ("SAR") stuff is pretty nifty; I can't make heads or tales of the fairly technical Wikipedia page on it there, but it seems to involve getting really detailed image data back by bouncing radio waves off the surface, instead of just taking photos or something. Here's a killer image of the Venusian surface made using SAR data the Magellan spacecraft got in 1991 (the globe shape and color are simulated)--the radar imaging cut right through the incredibly thick cloud layer that completely covers the planet:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
 
 
 
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  The New Supermassivest? (& Ep. 15 tomorrow!)Dec 06, 2011 4:26 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:And that's the end of episode 14! Episode 15 starts tomorrow! We return to where we left Selenis 35 at the end of episode 13. It'll have some action and a space voyage and ooh so many wonderful things!
 
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My dad heard on the radio today that two new really big black holes were found. I hunted around and found this video interviewing two of the researchers; analyzing data from a wide range of instruments, looking mostly at ancient, massive elliptical galaxies, they found two with central supermassive black holes estimated to contain 10 billion solar masses each—the previous record-holder was the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87 (I talked about that some back here), weighing in at 6.6 billion solar masses—so these newly found ones would be considerably bigger:
 
[Old Flash embedded video removed, unable to find working source URL. : Pp]
 
^ Oh yeah and didja notice they talk about Sgr A* a little after 3 minutes in? :)
 
 
 
 
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  The Life and Times of Count von ZeppelinDec 03, 2011 9:17 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I noticed it was in fact was "zeppelin week" on that Old Picture blog I linked yesterday, so if you use the "Newer Post" links at the bottom of the comments sections you'll find some more neat photos, and even videos: here's one showing clips of the Graf arriving in New York City for a ticker-tape parade after completing its record-setting round-the-world flight in 1929 (although according to one of the comments left on YouTube, the footage is from "Farewell," a film by Dutch director Gerard Nijssen, mixing clips of neat things from the '20's and '30's--this part is mostly the Graf, but for instance the commenter points out that the really cool shot of a huge zeppelin flying through a smoke screen just dropped by an airplane is the USS Los Angeles in a 1927 combat drill):
 
video on Youtube
 
The word "zeppelin" comes from the name of Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin, (1838-1917) a German count ("Graf" is German for "Count"; but I should say a Count of the Grand Duchy of Baden, rather, since that's what it was before the revolution of 1918; also, his family was a noble one dating back to the 1400s, their home town being Zepelin).
 
Image
image from Deutsches Bundesarchiv (source)
 
Like many minor nobles, Zeppelin embarked on a military officer's career, at one point being an observer for the Union's Army of the Potomac in the American Civil War; after that stint, during a later expedition with Russians and Native Americans to the source of the Mississippi, he made his first aerial ascent in the tethered balloon of John Steiner, German member of the Union Army Balloon Corps.
 
Appointed adjutant to the King of Württemberg back in Europe, he served in various continental wars (Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71) until a bit of a falling out led to his retirement, with the rank of General, in 1891.
 
He had kindled a fascination with airships since his American expedition, however--he had unsuccessfully tried to convince the King of Württemberg of their efficacy--and once retired he spent his time in researching various airship designs, and in campaigning for government or private funds for their construction. After five years of frustration he found private backers in the Association of German Engineers, leading to the formation of a joint stock company, in which he was the majority investor, in 1898, which promptly began work on the Zeppelin LZ1, the world's first successful rigid airship. The LZ1 flew in three trials on Lake Constance in Germany in 1900
 
Image
image from Library of Congress (source)
 
reaching a height of 410 m (1300 ft) and a speed of somewhere above 28 km/h (18 mph), which beat the French speed record by 50%. The trials may (Wikipedia pages conflict here) have ended in a crash; there were certainly more crashes with more development models in the following years, but speeds improved (58 km/h in 1907), and the public became interested; his second model was financed by donations and a public lottery, and the crash of the LZ4 in 1908 worked public interest up to such a pitch that his next collection campaign gathered 6.5 million German Marks (I don't know how much that is in current USD but it sounds good), the military bought his LZ3 model, and his airships, "Zeppelins," became all the rage.
 
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I noticed the latest page of the webcomic "Hard Graft" is really pretty awesome in its black and white artwork way. I first linked to them way back in 2009 as a way of thanking their author for feedback on a possible ad layout for the A* site (hah you can even see the sorta "horizon" divider I had under the top menu, and a rather wacky old banner ad of my own), and the art has fluctuated somewhat since then I guess, but dang if that isn't some nice work in that newest page, throwing down really sharp, heavy shadow in a deft, graphic way that reminds me of some of the old adventure comic strips.
 
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Oh and I really won't make you sit through two pages of pretty nearly the same thing in A* very often, but this seemed like one time to do it. Anyway it's a super-short episode--the next page, Monday's, will be the final page of the episode! And then right on to episode 15 on Tuesday; and 15 will really be the first that I've written with the conscious admission that I'll probably only be managing one page of it a day (previously I always liked to delude myself into thinking I could maybe get up to two per day, but reality has proven otherwise! :P), so the overall pace per page will be a bit livelier than what we've had before, I think you'll find.
 
 
 
 
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  To spruce up any photo, add giant zeppelinDec 02, 2011 8:55 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A while back I posted about the Graf Zeppelin, the largest airship in the world in 1928, and holder of the round-the-world air record (21 days) from 1929 until it was broken by Wiley Post in an airplane in 1931. Well fate would have it that I came across two articles with a total of three nifty photos of the Graf in the space of a few days a few days ago! So if you like old photos of huge zeppelins (and who doesn't, I'd like to know), check out the blog post below this "Adventures of the 19XX" comic (man the one of the little biplanes buzzing around it like gnats is so cool) and this article from the "Old Picture of the Day" blog, of the Graf over the Tower of David in Old Jerusalem in 1931 (sort of spooky seeing as how the Graf was a German aircraft and operated "for its final two years [1935-1937] by the Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei GmbH (DZR), a company established by Hermann Göring in March 1935 to increase Nazi party influence over Zeppelin operations" (Wikipedia)).
 
That second article link came up on Google+.
 
 
 
 
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  Gumbybots and banishing diabolically bad artDec 01, 2011 9:04 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Warning: this is eerie. Researchers at Harvard have been working on robots made entirely of flexible materials; they can undulate and crawl like worms or starfish thanks to strategic inflation by air pumps:
 
video on Youtube
 
Why? Well, according to a quote in this article, at least one of reasons for this is that the "unique ability for soft robots to deform allows them to go places that traditional rigid-body robots cannot."
 
Yeah, like...crawling up your pant leg. Ew-w-w-wwww *cold shivers* Okay fortunately they can't do that just yet.
 
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After nearly two days of tortured drawings and paintings (and wasting about $3 in fine French watercolor paper on three of said paintings ;_; which shall go unpublished for the public good), I *think* I figured out what the trouble was. See I wasn't satisfied with yesterday's page (this is not unusual with me), to the point where I couldn't sleep (that is a little more unusual) and had to stay up and try a complete re-do. It was not successful (and I was thinking I'd scan it and show it since it was sort of experimental in some ways but now I just want it to be over with >_<).
 
And I thought okay well that was aggravating but I think I learned some stuff, onward, tomorrow's page will be better. But it wasn't. So I redrew it numerous times and tried painting another one from scratch and it was still bad--like really unavoidably bad this time because it was a subject with more detail than the previous day's, and it was all just not coming together somehow.
 
Then I realized that in trying to get a good evaluation of it I was constantly picking it up and holding it at arm's length--to the point where I would do that, then make like one brush stroke, then hold it out again. After an hour or so of that it occurred to me that perhaps I was working too close to it. See I've been adjusting my drawing table now and then to try to reach some ideal point where all my various nerve endings will be happy simultaneously, and over the past few days I had...moved it too close to my face. Yes. Not that it was blurry or anything, but the image-evaluating part of my brain just wasn't functioning properly at that distance. It probably didn't help that I was trying to do a close-up of Selenis, either.
 
So I canned the close-up, which wasn't all that inspired anyway (we're due for well I guess two more in the next few days so we'll have plenty anyhow AND HOPEFULLY THEY'LL WORK OUT BETTER GAR), thought up another angle for the drawing so as to have something fresh to attack, and...was still having trouble. I lowered the desk, erased and started drawing the pose again for the umpteenth time, and...it sorta worked like it should have. So that was nice. Hopefully that'll be the end of it (at least until I find some other mysterious way in which to discomfit myself). MAN.
 
I did get an exceptional amount of reader feedback on yesterday's page, though, so that was one up-side to the whole debacle. There were a lot of good comments, although my favorite may have been the one remarking that the examination appeared to have transformed the Selenis clone into Cthulhu.
 
 
 
 
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