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  A* episode 14 - free HD digital downloadJul 31, 2012 5:04 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:(I was dreading drawing this page, thinking just a bee would be a bore/chore to draw, but it was actually really fun! I should definitely draw more fuzzy arthropods, it's so much easier than, like, mostly hairless things with external flesh lumps. :D Oh and also I found scuffing the horsehair side of this big brush across the paper makes a *great* drybrush stroke--man I can see myself doing a lot of drybrush texture fills now; I'd never been able to get them big and consistent before, but the side of this brush is a whiz at 'em!)
 
Over the weekend I've been pounding away at getting digital comic downloads (or "e-books," if you must use that dreadful term! :o) ready to go out together with the impending subscriber mode, and after much wrestling with the silly PDF format and PayPal and so forth I think it's pretty close to ready. And if you follow me on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook, then you may already have been enjoying this free release of A* episode 14 as a high-definition digital download (.pdf, 2.31 MB) for the past 16 hours or so.
 
I *will* charge a tiny fee for the other episodes, of course, since they're much longer. Here's a peek at the revamped "episodes" page I'm working on that will incorporate the digital download stuff--they'll come per-episode and also in larger bundle packs that give you a chunk of 'em for a discounted price:
 
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So that's been exciting!
 
 
 
 
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  PDF vs ZIP and other brain dribblingsJul 28, 2012 6:07 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Boy, I was in a fighting mood with this page. Phew! I did kind of like what happened with the background, though, which was that I slapped on some ink wash that was way too dark, and wiped it off with a paper towel, which then left a sort of texture across it. It's also nice to have some really big black areas once in a while (although I was pretty happy with the more sketchy scrawly pages from yesterday, which I think must have been inspired by the work of this great old British comic artist I was looking at...I'll have to write up something about him when I actually get around to doing a halfway decent blog post instead of just mashing a bunch of keys before throwing myself into bed :P).
 
Getting close to done with the subscription mode thing, which I'm going to work on over the weekend here, although first I think I'll be PDF-ing up all the comics and putting them into a little store page for digital downloads--which then I'll launch simultaneously with subscription mode (in a week or two? maybe?) since part of subscription mode will be always having a free download link to the latest PDF collection of A* pages. Hm...gotta figure out if the downloads should be straight PDF files, or .zipped up--guess I'll just buy some from some other webcomic sites and see how they do 'em.
 
Oh yeah Monday I'll probably just have a single new page (and a late actually wee hours Tuesday morning type of thing...not that that's abnormal for my publishing schedule :P), since some friends of mine for some reason decided to put the sun-fearing webcomic artist in charge of a beach party. 8|
 
 
 
 
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  Yeah yeah so his cloak is shaped like a brainJul 27, 2012 8:07 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Page 32 was one of those pages that took a bunch of tries and wasted sides of paper until something non-completely-awful would come out. O won't someone think of the trees! ;_;
 
And I didn't plan it this way at all but after I pretty much had it finished I noticed that it bore something of a similarity--in a very poor and feeble way--to another painting someone did once...
 
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:P Man! This just got complicated. :PPP
 
(Also you will note that Michelangelo, like a lot of clever and professional cartoonists, did not attempt some sort of goofy perspective there, like I am always tempted to. >_<)
 
 
 
 
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  PDFs ahoy, drama drawing, internet fritzingJul 26, 2012 6:11 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:After working happily all day my internet sort of went on the fritz just as I wanted to upload this last page, wouldn't you know it. While assiduously unplugging and replugging my cable modem a few times, I was having nightmares of half a page having uploaded. :P And at one point downloading was working, but uploading wasn't--haven't seen *that* before in what over a decade of having a cable modem?
 
Umm so what can I get in here before beddy-bye... I got some positive feedback on the "A* comics as downloadable PDFs" scheme I was talking about yesterday--by which I mean, a few positive Twitter replies and a Like on Facebook ;)--so I will probably be doing those! They should launch simultaneously with the subscription service, I guess, that would be tidy. Payments would (will?) just be via PayPal, since that's what I kind of know how to use, so hopefully that would work for people.
 
Ooh I had something else to ramble about, what was that... Ah, yeah, see I was getting a little distressed about what to keep drawing for this non-actiony, rather lengthy conversation we're in the middle of (hm no more like 3/4ths+ of the way through now...eh...six more pages, to be precise), and then I thought you know, it's my comic, I can draw whatever the heck I want. So that's sort of what I'm doing now; that is, possibly making the drawing a little more dramatic than it needs to be, but it's a lot more fun to draw that way. ":) And hopefully more fun to read!
 
 
 
 
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  PDF downloads of A* comics?Jul 25, 2012 6:43 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Here's the back of this page:
 
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It was one of those where I wasn't sure about the initial layout, and turned the page over and did another, then couldn't decide between the two, so I kept flipping the page back and forth and working on both of them until one finally won out. :P This piece of paper got a pretty good going over!
 
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I was thinking today, not for the first time, about putting A* pages together into PDF files for digital download--for reading offline or on the go or whatever people are supposedly doing these days. Something like about 40 pages--give or take--for $2 of the recent, traditionally done stuff--and those would be the 1080p high-resolution versions. And for the smaller, digital pages before those, maybe something like 80 pages for $1--so episode 1, which is 70-some pages, would be $1 for the whole episode, for instance. How does that sound? I haven't done digital downloads before so maybe that's all wrong, I dunno. Oh and subscribers--to A*'s subscriber mode of high-definition, ad-free comics, which isn't too far off now--who would have already paid $25 for a year's subscription, would always be able to download the latest PDF for free; since 40 pages is *about* what I do in a month now, that means the subscription would essentially include $24-worth of PDF downloads, I guess, for no additional charge.
 
Too crazy? :o
 
 
 
 
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  Who needs warmup sketches?! Oh, right.Jul 24, 2012 6:36 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Page 25 is one of those pages that really makes me irritated with myself afterward, when I belated realized that it was much more stiff and picked at than I want to these pages to be. Then I took a few stabs at page 26, wasted both sides of a piece of paper in equally stiff layouts, and decided I'd better try loosening up with some sketches in the remaining white space. This one seemed to start going into the more expressive territory I would like to be in
 
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and sure enough when I went and tried another layout for page 26, it flowed along much more successfully than the previous attempts.
 
I read about a lot of artists saying they do like a daily warmup sketch or something to loosen up--I suppose a Monday after not having drawn all weekend would be a particularly useful time for such an exercise. I've thought about doing more regular warmup sketches before, but I'm always worried that--knowing me--I'd get too into them and they'd start taking up way too much time; like, if I wasn't doing the sketch I'd be able to get another A* page done or something. So I guess I'm still waffling about committing to something like that. They do seem handy sometimes though.
 
The gray tones in that sketch (and, for instance, in the hair of page 26) kind of happen accidentally with this big brush I'm using now: it's so thick that it's hard to dry thoroughly after rinsing, so especially when I first start using it I sometimes tend not to towel it off very thoroughly, dip the tip in ink, and then start drawing; this starts out drawing deep black from the pure ink at the tip, but gradually rinse water from the inner depths of the brush starts working its way down to the tip, so the painted line gets gradually lighter and lighter. It can be pretty handy, actually! And stuff like that is a big part of sumi-e painting (that's the type of brush this is), at least according to the little booklet they had at the store: in fact, in sumi-e you're supposed to be able to get really sophisticated and, like, triple-layer your brush in different tones of wash, so you start a stroke with one and then it shades to the other, and eventually the third, or something.
 
... I'm probably not going to try that. :P
 
 
 
 
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  Black hole event horizons as "firewalls"Jul 21, 2012 5:31 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Man this is a long conversation! Gonna go through next week, too. What more will we learn about trees?!? Anyway after that the ultra-violence starts and lasts for pretty much the rest of the episode, so maybe I should have more patience for these little chunks of civility. :P
 
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There is a new theory on the event horizon around a black hole--the radius from their central singularity past which not even light can escape their gravitational pull--that stuff falling through the event horizon doesn't just sort of go through without much happening (in that split-second, anyway; because momentarily, as the object gets close to the singularity, it's supposed to be pulled apart in long strands ("spaghettification" :P) by the stress of differences in the gravitational force across it), but instead more or less gets destroyed at or maybe just past the event horizon. Two research papers on this have slightly different ideas of exactly where/when that destruction would take place; they can be found here and here (I got those links from this Sixty Symbols video on the topic, but I can't really recommend that one as it meanders awfully and is not very clear.)
 
This idea that the event horizon is destructive came from thinking about the quantum properties of the Hawking radiation emitted by black holes--that's where a particle/antiparticle pair spontaneously appears right next to the horizon (these are also appearing everywhere in the universe at all times as far as we know, even RIGHT BEHIND YOU AAAUGH), but instead of annihilating each other instantly, as usually happens in the rest of space, one gets sucked into the the event horizon, while the other is flung away--so one is eaten by the black hole while the other escapes, and these escaping particles are what form this theoretical Hawking radiation.
 
But these two particles, because they were created by the same event, or something, are also entangled, which means that if one is acted upon and undergoes a change of some kind, its entangled pair particle, no matter where it is in space, also undergoes that change. Pretty wild and not really understood well, but this "quantum teleportation" has been verified experimentally.
 
The particle that got sucked into the black hole should in theory be accelerating at an incredible rate and having all sorts of ridiculously energetic things happening to it as it approaches the singularity, and so its entangled partner should also be getting supercharged or something, even though it's just drifting through space away from the hole. So the theory (to the small extent that I can fathom it, at least) goes that around the event horizon of an "old" black hole--one that's had time to expel an appreciable amount of these entangled particles as Hawking radiation--you'll have all these supercharged Hawking particles forming a veritable "firewall" around the event horizon, powerful enough to atomize anything falling in more or less immediately.
 
Or possibly I've read all that wrong! In any case, if you were planning on doing some black hole diving any time soon, you may want to wade carefully.
 
 
 
 
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  Brush size up! The supermassive Haboku XJul 20, 2012 5:49 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:The first attempt at 22 was a real wash-out (which none shall see! unless you buy the original of 22, which has it on the back, because why waste paper? :P) and I was generally frustrated with gray ink washes, so there's some unadulterated ol' black and white for you. I even briefly went on a web search for stick-on tone sheets, but man those are pricey! Anyway they probably don't scan that well. Then I was messing around with generating halftone dot patterns in Photoshop until I came to my senses. :P
 
A contributing factor to this momentary confusion may have been today's new brush! Yeah, I already got a new brush at the beginning of the week, the Yasutomo "Haboku Artist Brush," size S ("Small"), which was way bigger than the European sable brushes I'd been using, but yesterday evening I got to thinking... If this bigger brush was better, maybe I should try the biggest Haboku, size "X" (they go S, M, L, X). So I got one! It was about $13 instead of $8, but that's still a pretty good bargain in the ink brush world; sable brushes, come to think of it, seem to scale up in price almost exponentially as you go larger. As you can see here, the Haboku X is about half-again as large as the S--the head of the X is about 1 and 7/8 inches long:
 
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And yeah I cut off the end again for balance. Although I noticed some things over the past few days with the S that also probably apply to the X as far as I can tell so far:
 
- Trying to hold these larger brushes like I'd hold a pencil or small brush makes my wrist hurt for some reason, so it's actually been more comfortable to let my elbow and hand up off the table somewhat. Still working on exactly the best way to hold 'em, but it's getting better gradually.
 
- I mentioned some red color rubbing off the S brush on the first day; I think that's a sort of undercoating on the brushes, not the actual outer layer of paint on their handle--but that outer layer of paint doesn't quite cover the brush end of the bamboo, so I think a little reddish stuff bled off there. I didn't see it again after the first day.
 
- I also mentioned losing at least a half-dozen of the outer horse hairs on the first day with the S brush. Fortunately I didn't notice any more falling out in the succeeding days, and in fact I didn't see any fall out of the X brush. So that's encouraging as far as their potential longevity is concerned. And since synthetic bristles tend to be pretty durable, and the Japanese-style inward-pointing conical tips naturally hold their shape well, I'm thinking these brushes may prove fairly long lasting--but we'll see.
 
- I noticed a single, unpacked Haboku Stroke Brush at the store, sort of laying next to the packaged Haboku Artist Brushes. Remember, I was saying earlier in the week that the Stroke Brushes look pretty much identical as far as their shape and head go, but they're like four times as expensive for some reason. This bristles of this one certainly felt just like those of the Artist Brushes, so I'm still not sure what their deal is; it was only about twice the price of an Artist Brush, though. I wonder if they're sort of being phased out in favor of the Artist Brushes, which may be directed more at the English-speaking market, since they have English printed down their sides rather than Japanese (or Chinese?) characters.
 
- The handle of the X was much easier to cut than that of the S, even though the bamboo used in the X's handle is thicker--but it cut evenly rather than splintering like the thinner bamboo of the S's handle did.
 
- The S was so "thirsty" that when I dipped it in ink, I could see the little bubbles on the ink's surface getting sucked over and into the brush!
 
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One reader suggested these brush size upgrades mean I'm probably heading for the big time in terms of brush footage. ;) The X is prrrrrrobably about as big as I can handle, really; come to think of it, part of my problem with the washes earlier was probably just because I sucked up too much ink wash into the brush, and it was kind of going all over the place on the paper. Gotta watch that.
 
And in any case, I'm not aware of any larger brushes made stiff like the Haboku brushes; I've seen these big, white, fist-sized Japanese brushes around, but they're all floppy--like the one in that video, in fact, which is apparently all horsehair; and the horsehair outer coating on the Haboku is indeed pretty floppy on its own, but works great when backed with the stronger inner core of synthetic bristles.
 
 
 
 
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  Subscriber mode soon, here's a screenshotJul 19, 2012 4:10 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Got a lot done on the A* subscription mode over the weekend, in fact all that's really left now is tidying up, filling out a subscriber FAQ type of thing, and a final test run or two. So it should be pretty darn close to roll-out! Here's a screenshot of what the front page would look like to a logged-in subscriber:
 
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^ So as you can see the ads and big colorful social networking buttons are removed in the subscriber's view (the social networking links are still on the "about" page, should you need them). You may also notice a few small changes around the UI there, which even non-subscribers will see. They won't have the subscribers' "view larger" link at the lower right corner of the comic, though, which will load up the 1080p version of the artwork; and since the last selected view mode (large or small) and your login status is saved by your browser, the next time you visit the site, it will come right up without ads, and displaying the comic in your viewing mode of choice--unless you logged out or cleared your browser's cookies in the meantime, of course.
 
 
 
 
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  The Space Fetus Nebula! Or a nice sunset.Jul 18, 2012 3:52 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Late last week there was a pretty gorgeous sunset--almost looked like something from a Hubble space photo! So I rushed in, got my camera, and some of the photos actually came out:
 
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Now that is obviously the Space Fetus Nebula, hovering conveniently in the skies just west of my apartment. Wider shots:
 
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  The Haboku: a sawed-off sumi-A* brush!Jul 17, 2012 8:09 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:(^ In cheesy old TV shows this would be where they bushwhack her! Hm come to think of it that beardy guy in profile there probably does look like a bushwhacker.)
 
Exciting art day! I tried out a new brush! A Google+ conversation last week got me thinking again about those bamboo-handled "sumi-e" paint brushes you see in art supply stores, and today I swung by the art department in the University of Washington's bookstore, which has a good selection and pretty good prices too, and I knew they had a whole sumi-e section. Their selection of regular "Yasutomo"-brand (that seems to be the one (and usually only) brand most of the art supply stores around here carry when it comes to Japanese art supplies) brushes was pretty picked over, but off to the side were all these jars of big Haboku Artist Brushes, in four sizes from Small to XL. A handy booklet nearby explained that these were stiff brushes with a blend of horsehair and synthetic bristles that gives them a lot of spring and carrying capacity, which sounded nice. Even the S size is wayyyy bigger than the European sable brushes I've been using, so I got that one. Turns out the UW bookstore is the place to get these things, because it rang up at just under $8, which you'll notice is 50% less than the price in Yasutomo's own shop at the link above--50% less than Amazon, too! And they had the XL for $12-something.
 
If you do look at that Yasutomo shop page you'll also see a "Haboku Stroke Brush" listed at the bottom as an "optional accessory." It's actually a completely separate brush, but the brush head is the same size and appearance as the "Artist Brush," and the description might as well be describing the Artist Brush--only the Stroke Brush has what I guess are probably Japanese characters printed down the side--and is 4x the price. HM. Guess I'll stick with the Artist Brush.
 
As the descriptions say, the brush has both horsehair and synthetic bristles: the stiffer synthetics form a central cone, with the coarser but more flexible (that doesn't sound right but it is) horsehair bristles forming a ring around it. Seems like a funny setup but it means that you get a really sharp, strong tip from the synthetic bristles, but with a boosted water carrying capability from the surrounding horsehair; plus, if you sort of hold the brush sideways a bit, you can get all soft and brushy with those softer bristles.
 
As I mentioned, even the S has a pretty big head, and the smoothed and painted bamboo handle is quite long; it's weighted to be held midway and dangled straight down from between thumb and forefinger as shown in this video, but I need to work not so abstractly, so that won't work--for the standard pen-type illustrator's grip, holding it right up near where the bristles go into the handle, the weight is way too far back. So I sawed the end of the handle off, learning that bamboo is surprisingly tricky to saw through in the process. It took two clumsy slices to find the right balance, and it might be a little front-heavy for someone working on a flat table surface, but since my hand is pitched upward on my sharply inclined drawing table, having the balance more toward the front of the brush is a good thing. Here it is dwarfing the brush I've been using before this, a Raphael 8404 size 4, and the brush I used before that (and which I still use for white ink), a Winsor & Newton Series 7 size 3:
 
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I did a bunch of little sketches to test it, then I used it for today's two pages. And--it's neat! Its stiffness and ink/water capacity mean that I can do bigger/sharper/longer lines with it, yet it can still do pretty good detail with its tapered synthetic cone tip. This lets me work a lot more expressively, which is fun. I'm almost tempted to try a larger size like the XL, whose head is half-again as long as the S's, but that probably *would* be pushing my hand too far off the paper for good control, not to mention ergonomics. And I'm not even filling the S to capacity when I dip it in ink, anyway, because it can just swallow so much ink.
 
I've seen it shed at least six bristles so far; I think they were all horsehair, so that doesn't worry me too much, and it probably won't shed at quite that high a rate after its first day of use. I hope. :P At a third of the cost of the Raphael 8404, though, it should still pretty easily last long enough to be cost-effective; the 8404's tips have stayed in good shape through about 20 or 25 A* pages, I guess, and have pretty much been toast after about 40 pages (I guess I am hard on brushes :P), so if the Haboku's tip can stay in good shape through 8 pages or so, it's even. I'd think it will last a bit longer than that, but we'll see!
 
The other downside I've noticed so far is that the dark brown/purple paint on the bamboo handle comes off a bit--or, at least it leaves light reddish stains on the things I've rested it on for a bit, in spots where the surface was damp. Strange not to use waterproof paint to paint a paintbrush! Huh. Well as long as it doesn't start making the pages red (not that that would show up in the grayscale scans anyway), I guess that's all right.
 
Here are the practice sketches I made with it first!
 
This one is all Haboku except for the upper right corner, where I did some Raphael 8404 doodles for comparison--I noticed with those that I couldn't maintain lines like I could with the Haboku, just because the 8404 dries up a lot faster; from the central, Haboku-painted figure, I found the longer Haboku head probably can't cross-hatch quite as easily as the 8404--but maybe that's for the best since I kind of want to get away from tons of little hatched lines anyway (and in this set I prefer the figures in lower left and lower right, which don't have much hatching at all, but just a lot of black ink flowing out of that Haboku horsehair:
 
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And then this one was all Haboku:
 
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(It says "Black Star" on it because the other side is the test drawing I did with Black Star ink back in my ink round-up. :P And the first set has "D4" because that one's on the back of the Deleter Black 4 test page. Hey, this nice paper ain't cheap! :PP)
 
So I'll probably stock up on a few more of these Haboku brushes and keep going with 'em, at least unless they turn out to fall all to pieces after a few pages. And I'll have a new art store to check for them, because an actual art supply store just moved to Ballard (my neighborhood in Seattle), so yay! No more having to go across town, or mooning around the arts and crafts aisle in Fred Meyer ;P. Although Dakota's prices, at least when it was in its previous, Roosevelt location, weren't quite competitive with the bigger local stores like the UW Bookstore or Daniel Smith; still, it should be plenty handy for when I need (okay, "want" :P) something on short notice.
 
 
 
 
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  The winding road to black; nuclear invertJul 14, 2012 10:10 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I've been doing something silly on recent pages--I've been drawing a figure with detailed interior, spending a lot of time doing hatching and cross-hatching on it, and then finally getting tired of that and blacking out most of it; if I could just go straight to the solid black phase I'd save a lot of time! Here's an earlier stage of today's page:
 
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I think I often feel like I start drawing in too cartoony of a fashion--and I don't really want to draw cartoonishly, but that just kind of happens because it's easier.
 
I'm also not drawing quite as I keep imagining I would like to draw, which is this sort of nutty slashing at the paper and carving things out in tapered lines. Maybe I've got that idea from looking at brushwork by Sean Murphy, who gets very angular brushwork somehow. I dunno. But these nice and expensive sable brushes I've been using bend and flex and make squiggles rather than slashes. I suppose I could try diluting the ink a bit and going with lighter pressure on the strokes, but eh then it wouldn't be dark enough.
 
Anyhoo on G+ yesterday a reader asked if I'd done any sumi painting, and I said no but the ink I used up through the bar scene in the last episode was black sumi ink, which is pretty much like any black pigmented ink really. But that got me thinking about those cheap-ish bamboo sumi brushes one sees at art supply stores, with their really stiff bristles. They don't seem like they'd be capable of really intricate detail work with the rough tips they have, but I've been wondering about them enough that maybe I'll pick one up to play with and see what it does.
 
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Reader Latrans strikes again with his interesting A* inversions; this one is from a recent page that showed an exterior view of some domes on the surface of this planet, Nena:
 
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Switching the black and the white makes it look like something else entirely, doesn't it? :o Well...we won't get to that until later in the episode. ;)
 
 
 
 
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  An eye for an-- Oh forget it :PJul 13, 2012 9:38 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:I have stuff I should post but for some reason drawing two pages is taking more and more time. Rawr! Need sleepy!
 
EDIT: Put the eye completely in shadow--notice how that (and raising the corner of the lower lip slightly) magically resolved some parts of the face and background that were sort of fighting with each other in presenting slightly conflicting viewing angles to the camera ;|:
 
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Hmrrr. More and more often I'm finding that I do a page, scan it in, then sit around experimenting with tweaks in Photoshop to fix something that's been bugging me that I haven't quite been able to put my finger on--then of course have to go get the ink and brush back out, touch it it, re-scan it, etc. Dang Photoshop! It keeps pulling me back *in*! :"o
 
 
 
 
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  The tiniest moon: Pluto's 5th discoveredJul 12, 2012 7:41 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Just about a year after researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope to look for a ring system around Pluto discovered Pluto's forth moon, researchers using Hubble to check for objects that might collide with the New Horizons probe when it passes near the (dwarf) planet have discovered a fifth moon of Pluto, according to NASA. With an irregular shape that may be something from 10 to 25 km across, moon S/2012 P 1 (or more simply, "P5") has taken the record from P4 for being the smallest known moon. Here's the updated family photo:
 
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image by NASA; ESA; M. Showalter, SETI Institute (source)
 
Scientists have been surprised by the complexity of the Pluto system, and think it may be the result of a collision between Pluto and some other object out in that distant and mysterious part of our solar system known as the Kuiper belt. One thing that suggests this is the nearly circular and nicely resonant orbits of the moons; if they were captured objects rather than moons that formed around Pluto from orbiting debris, their orbits would likely be more elliptical.
 
Pluto's shaping up to be a pretty funny little dwarf system indeed! Its inner, largest moon, Charon, is fully half as far across as Pluto itself is (1207 vs 2306 km), while the other known moons are wee little things possibly under 100 km across (source). There's a nice diagram showing just how much Pluto and Charon dwarf the other moons (except for P5, which wasn't discovered when this diagram was made) right here (wide image).
 
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Some rather awfully rough character design sketches from the past few days:
 
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  In your satin tights fighting for your rightsJul 11, 2012 9:09 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Eep! Getting later and later, how does this always seem to happen to my weeks? ;)
 
Picked up the unsold stuff from my summer art show--and a check! Enough to cover a month's rent, yay for art! (I have stupendously low rent, but still. :P) And the owners of the place told me that they had a bunch of people come in because they'd read about the show on my site, so that's pretty cool. Thanks to everyone who checked it out!
 
Man there are so many layers of white and black ink on this last page, urgh! And no I'm sure Selenis' look here has nothing to do with me currently watching my way through the old 70's live-action Wonder Woman show on The WB. >_>
 
... Also I'm sure that has nothing significant to do with my schedule slipping a little more each day. Nope!
 
 
 
 
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  Art show ending, subscription progressJul 10, 2012 6:52 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Two pages! And it is past my bedtime, dang. Gotta get up to collect the stuff that didn't sell from my art show here in Seattle that just ended--a good deal of stuff did sell though, so that was pretty nice. Ummm oh and I made some good progress on the subscription mode for A* (HD-sized comics, no ads) over the weekend, finishing up the back-end account management stuff...except for a FAQ I should write for it, I suppose...and then getting on to the actual comic displaying part, starting out by tidying up the comic interface a bit; it's mostly small stuff you wouldn't notice anyway even once it does go up (it isn't up yet), but tidying up interfaces makes me happy, *and* unless I hit a major speedbump somehow (famous last words! :p), the rest of the stuff I have to do for the subscription mode shouldn't take all that much longer, I think.
 
 
 
 
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  Roy Lichtenstein would've had the best tweetsJul 07, 2012 8:34 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:The angst of losing a comic or social networking subscriber, Roy Lichtenstein style:
 
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Although in the long run, as long as you keep doing good stuff, it will generally work out okay.
 
The source image for that is Lichtenstein's 1963 piece, Drowning Girl—the words having been changed somewhat, of course; the replacement font is an itailcized form of the free font VTC Letterer Pro, which doesn't really match Lichtenstein's lettering, but I think it still looks pretty nice anyway. :P
 
While this is an outright copy-paste-Photoshop rip-off, it is interesting to note, as Wikipedia tells us, that Lichtenstein recreated the image and dialogue pretty directly from another source: a splash page in issue 83 of the DC romance comic, Secret Hearts, that came out in '62. And the waves, by Lichtenstein's own admission, were adopted from prints by the famous Japanese Edo-period printmaker, Hokusai.
 
Lichtenstein's real genius—the one for which he quickly became famous, anyway—was in the selection, distillation, arrangement, and presentation of comic art, and the style of crude emotion and violence it was used to convey—and he cranked this up to the maximum in his bold minimalist way. One trick was working big: Drowning Girl is nearly six feet by six feet. But he's also found and heightened a notably absurd moment of despair—couched in the odd language male comic book writers of the day often gave to their stereotypically emotionally overwrought and physically helpless female characters—popping out in the bold, super-sized Ben-Day print-style dots of color he used so powerfully.
 
And I just like the name, "Brad"—that was all Lichtenstein, I think. He used the name in several pieces (depicting domestically anxious women, generally, which was a peculiar and popular specialty of his), and once "stated that the name Brad sounded heroic to him and was used with the aim of cliched oversimplification." In the original script for the panel in Secret Hearts #83, the boyfriend's name is "Mal." ... I would say "Brad" was quite an improvement. (What the heck kind of English name is "Mal"? In French it means "Bad"...)
 
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Re: page 5: I hadn't realized there was a an Elvis Presley song called "Earth Boy" until I was Googling it today in my usual lazy procedure for gauging how likely I am to get sued when I give something a name. I figure I'm probably pretty safe in this case.
 
Re: page 6: I kinda like this style, but like most of my stuff it sort of happens unbidden, and I've only had it happen like twice before in A*, I think—those were fairly recent pages, though (episode 16, pages 82 and 95), so hopefully that means it's catching on in the part of my subconscious that decides how to draw things.
 
 
 
 
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  Darn YankeesJul 06, 2012 6:54 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:No real blogging today 'cause it's past my bedtime already! :P I didn't really plan on doing an exterior shot for this panel but then it seemed like the best place to get one in, and I thought I wouldn't have fun drawing it but actually it was fun! Hm.
 
The "I <3 NY" T-shirt was kind of fun, too. ;) I've never actually been to New York...but neither has Selenis, so it's okay!
 
 
 
 
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  Honeybees, 99 Luftballons, and Episode 17Jul 05, 2012 7:36 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:I tried using my old non-waterproof white ink to sort of squidge in the planet's cloud layer here, but I probably won't try doing it quite this way again as it was a pain and came out sort of soupy or omelety. =p Oh well it was a learning experience and I only got a *little* ink on myself!
 
Wondering where the silly names in today's subtitle came from? Well you could try looking them up yourself...or...just keep reading 'cause I like explaining my silly names. :P Ready? Okay.
 
"Mellifera" is from Apis mellifera, the scientific name for the "Western" or "European" honey bee--they actually came from Africa, mind you, which still boasts the most honey bee subspecies. And the scientific name was something of a disaster too:
 
The genus Apis is Latin for "bee", and mellifera comes from Latin melli- "honey" and ferre "to bear"—hence the scientific name means "honey-bearing bee". The name was coined in 1758 by Carolus Linnaeus who, upon realizing the bees do not bear honey, but nectar, tried later to correct it to Apis mellifica ("honey-making bee") in a subsequent publication. However, according to the rules of synonymy in zoological nomenclature, the older name has precedence.

Smooth move, Linnaeus! Oh well; "bearing" makes more sense than "making" for the "bee" connection that will be coming along later in this episode.
 
"Nena," the name of the planet in this episode, comes from the name of an ancient supercontinent of Earth:
 
Nena was an ancient minor supercontinent that consisted of the cratons of Arctica, Baltica, and East Antarctica. Forming about 1.8 billion years ago, the continent was part of the global supercontinent, Columbia. Nena is an acronym that derives from Northern Europe and North America.

(The supercontinent Nena contained pieces of what are now Northern Europe and North America, you see.)
 
Being a short word, there are of course a lot of other "Nenas" that have sprung up, according to Google; for instance, there's Nena the German pop singer, best known for her 1984 hit, 99 Luftballons ("99 Balloons").
 
Having achieved widespread success in Germanic Europe and Japan, plans were made for the band to take the song international with an English version by Kevin McAlea, titled "99 Red Balloons". The English version is not a direct translation of the German and contains a somewhat different set of lyrics. The later-released English translation, "99 Red Balloons," was the version that became popular outside of Germany, with it topping the charts in Canada, the UK, Australia and Ireland. Interestingly, it was the original German version that American audiences preferred, becoming the highest Billboard charting German song in US History, when it peaked at #2 in the US.

Here's the original German version, which was indeed the one I remembered:
 
video on Youtube
 
The 1984 English version is here, and there's a translation of the lyrics (which are still a bit hard to make out) in the uploader's comment on the 2009 German/French version; it's a song about an apocalyptic war that starts when a trigger-happy military mistakes a flock of 99 red balloons released by children as hostile UFOs or something. :o This will actually fit in with this episode in some ways, how about that!
 
And if that isn't enough coincidence for you, Nena herself has a bit of dark-haired Selenis (yeah she'll still have her hair dark in this episode) about her, as you can see in this photo (source).
 
Uh... Oh and "Earth's Revival" was first mentioned to Selenis by Solvan Mar, as the source of his information on advanced technology, way back in episode 11.
 
 
 
 
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  CERN claims discovery of Higgs-like particleJul 04, 2012 5:54 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:The big news of the moment is, as the BBC puts it, "Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC." There's a photo of Peter Higgs in that article! He was present at the announcement, such is the excitement of probably finding something *similar* to this massive mystery particle that's supposed to be the thing that gives mass to everything, and which CERN's huge particle accelerator in the middle of Europe, the Large Hadron Collider, was more or less built to find--because to isolate the traces of the decay of a huge, incredibly unstable particle, you need to create a very powerful (remember, energy = mass, as Einstein told us) event in very controlled conditions. A juicy quote from the article:

The CMS team claimed they had seen a "bump" in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 125.3 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) - about 133 times heavier than the proton at the heart of every atom.
 
They claimed that by combining two data sets, they had attained a confidence level just at the "five-sigma" point - about a one-in-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.
 
However, a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma - a one-in-2 million chance.
 
Joe Incandela, spokesman for CMS, was unequivocal: "The results are preliminary but the five-sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle," he told the Geneva meeting.

Now, if you're like me and wondering, for instance, how something 133 times heavier than an atom of hydrogen could give hydrogen its mass, the BBC's Higgs Boson Q&A is well worth a read as it does a much better job than I possibly could of describing these highly unintuitive quantum things.
 
As someone who has taken the opportunity to doubt the existence of the Higgs boson at every turn, let me be the first to say "well I'll be darned." Mind you, they aren't sure this *is* the Higgs boson that would so neatly tie together some of the loose ends of the much beloved Standard Model of our understanding of the universe (minus gravity and a few other things maybe), but it is probably something, and something of a similar energy level to what was predicted for Higgs. But I do join (apparently) scientists in hoping that it isn't exactly the thing predicted by the Model, because that would be boring, and might not get us very far, since while it might confirm some things, it wouldn't necessarily point to something beyond the current theory, which we've been stuck with for eh hm decades? without really earth-shatteringly significant progress.
 
So! Higgs or not, hopefully it will be something that will lead us to new levels of understanding this nutty universe of ours.
 
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And in other senses-shattering news, we have reached the end of episode 16! Episode 17 *probably* starts tomorrow--if I survive fireworks. Aaand if I get the first actual dialogue lines written. >_>
 
 
 
 
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  Emerald Winter and Roger's RocketshipsJul 03, 2012 6:34 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Whew well it's late so let's see what I can scrounge up in a hurry from my dusty yet ever-accumulating "news" bin... Aha, some links saved for a rainy day:
  • Emerald Winter is a sorta manga-style fantasy adventure webcomic, done in ink wash, kinda like A*, only a little more properly. Actually from the comment on the latest page it sounds like they're doing their inks maybe in pen, scanning them, printing them out, then doing ink wash on the print out... Hm although some of the earlier pages are actually textured like watercolor paper, so I dunno if they've changed their process or if that's just a Photoshopped texture or what. So many ways to slice ink wash, I guess!
     
  • Roger's Rocketships > Docking Bays is a pretty darn big encyclopedia-type thing of sci-fi rocket ships, largely from old movies and magazines. For instance, it's got Wernher von Braun's Moon Passenger Ship, with the impressive illustration I think from the series of articles von Braun wrote for Collier's magazine in 1952 (according to his Wikipedia page); while his ideas for large-scale space flight to and colonization of the Moon sound a little out there by today's standards, von Braun wasn't just any sci-fi schlub, but rather the emancipated German rocket scientist who became the "father" of the U.S. space program--so it's neat to see a drawing of one of his huge proposed Moon ships--along with lots of other crazy stuff from other classic (if usually less scientific) sources.
Hm need picture... Ah! I've shown this one before, but here it is bigger and bolder: von Braun, circa 1969, next to the five F-1 engines of the first stage of perhaps his most famous creation, the Saturn V rocket--which actually *would* take men to the Moon ("to date, the Saturn V is the only launch vehicle to transport human beings beyond low Earth orbit").
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
 
 
 
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