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  Star Wars strip, RUR, Hardman, Prospero X-3Mar 30, 2013 4:38 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:It's interesting how a different character can inspire a different style--I think I get a little uptight when trying to model Selenis' svelte suit, but with the Major in his bulky body armor it feels right to go in thick and chunky with the brush. Fun! : )
 
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Hey what say we try thinning out the huge archive of bookmarks in the ol' newsbag? Items:
 
- It didn't run in any of the local papers I remember as a kid, so I was somewhat surprised to learn that from 1979 to 1984 there was a nationally syndicated Star Wars newspaper comic strip, for most of its run written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Al Williamson, who turned out some incredibly detailed daily black and white space scenes for the strip--dig those lovely ships and planetoids, even if they're a wee bit exaggerated by some of the writing. I found out about the strip by stumbling across a fan blog putting it out day by day, Daily Star Wars, but the format isn't handy for sequential reading, and it seems to have stopped updating a month ago, as it happens. You *can* find large helpings of it elsewhere on the internet with a little Googling. I was curious to see if there was a print collection, and it looks like the most recent are the first three volumes of the "Classic Star Wars" series from Dark Horse in the mid-90s that chopped, edited, and *shudder* colored the strips up into more of a graphic novel format. I *did* find an earlier, 1991 collection of the strips in more of their original format--presumably--on eBay for a mere $2,499.00.
 
- Robots are everywhere in science fiction, but where did they come from? The word "robot" first appeared in a Czech play written in 1920 called R.U.R., which stands for "Rossum's Universal Robots." The "robots" in R.U.R. are not mechanical, but organic, human-like creations grown as a servant class--as you can imagine, the status quo takes some knocks in the course of the play. Of the word's etymology, Wikipedia says "In its original Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters' lands, and is derived from rab, meaning 'slave.'"
 
- Here is a gallery of nice inky artwork, mostly of mainstream comic book characters, by comic book artist Gabriel Hardman, showing a lovely dark brushy style.
 
- Prospero was, among other things, the final name given to the the first and only British satellite ever successfully launched by a British rocket--in 1971. The 66 kg Prospero, also called X-3, "was designed to undertake a series of experiments to study the effects of space environment on communications satellites and remained operational until 1973, after which it was contacted annually for over twenty-five years."
 
Here's a photo of the X-3 flight spare in London's Science Museum (you can also see a bit more in the museum's gallery):
 
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image by Geni (source)
 
The Prospero flew on the last Black Arrow rocket--the rocket program had already been cancelled, but permission was given for this one last launch--and was renamed from "Puck" to "Prospero" once it was learned this would be the last one, I suppose a reference to that other character from Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, whose famous soliloquy (it's been a while since I read it, I'm just cribbing this from Wikipedia : p) laments his imprisonment and loss of rockets--I mean, of magic. It was lucky this final launch succeeded, as the previous Black Arrow, carrying the X-2 "Orba" satellite, had failed to reach orbit. The last Black Arrow turned out to be a feisty one, continuing to thrust after releasing Prospero in orbit, colliding with the satellite and knocking off one of its four radio antennae.
 
 
 
 
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  This is your final final final final noticeMar 29, 2013 2:53 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A year or so ago, I guess, I had what I felt was a super-keen idea for a little webcomic, and first things first I registered a domain name for it. I carried a notebook around and jotted down jokes as they occurred to me, and this was great fun until one day I read what I had and realized it wasn't very funny. Also I was starting to remember that it was nuts to try to do a second comic alongside A*! So the thing was off and of course I wasn't about to renew the domain name registration. Well, the domain registrar I use, Network Solutions, wasn't about to take that laying down; they REALLY don't want you to let your domain name expire—which is reassuring, in a way, but after the second or so FINAL NOTICE reminder arrived in my inbox, the charm started to wear a little thin; still, I thought I'd see how long they'd keep it up. Answer: a long time, even well after the expiration date—apparently they allow a bit of a grace period juuuuust in case you want to change your mind and pay them to renew the registration. Just look at all this love and appreciation they sent me about it over the months:
 
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Now that's a host who makes you feel cared for, eh? :P
 
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Pencils for today's page (excuse the odd lighting, I was a bit lazy there):
 
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It's supposed to be a cast shadow of Selenis on the left; I don't really do cast shadows much, which is kind of odd when you think about the art style I employ for A*. I really should practice them more. Also notice that in cleaning up the pencils a tad I erased the hand part of her shadow without noticing it—had to add it in directly in ink later once I realized that.
 
 
 
 
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  A*'s up for a Smackie!Mar 28, 2013 12:01 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I mentioned webcomic hosting site Smack Jeeves yesterday, and one reason I know about them is they're one of a number of places around the internet where I also post A*. Well, as chance would have it I've just been notified that some of my readers over there have gotten A* nominated for a Smackie, which is what they're calling their annual webcomic award thing this year. In the "Best Science Fiction" category, of course! Whee! So that's a really nice shot in the arm. :) Big thanks to A*'s readers over there--and wherever you may be reading from!
 
Here's a photo from just partway into the inking of today's page; I went for a sleeker look to the ship this time, trying to get away from some of the clunky look I sometimes have--well, not that you can see it very well in this early version:
 
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You know I kinda like it more abstract like that, that's one thing I gotta get more confident at is learning when to stop filling things in; I still tend to get obsessed with rendering everything.
 
"Weapons locker" is one of those interesting phrases--if you think about it too hard the plural in there starts sounding pretty weird! : P
 
 
 
 
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  Long answers to simple webcomic questionsMar 27, 2013 12:17 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Last week I got an email from TonyDoug Wright of Champion City Comics, who was canvassing some webcomic authors for their opinions on some comic questions of the day for a presentation this past Sunday at Gem City Comic Con. Never needing much prompting to start rattling words of the keyboard, I sent him what turned out to be a ridiculously long reply, but when I asked he said I could use it in my blog, so yay, now I can inflict it on you, my adorable readers!
 
The three questions were basically: 1) with a resurgence in print comics, interest in webcomics is declining: agree or disagree?, 2) has Kickstarter hurt webcomics, and 3) what makes webcomics better than print comics? You can see there's a bit of an edge even in these paraphrased versions; just the kind of thing, apparently, to spur me to write at length. :P Anyway here's what I came up with after much pacing around my apartment:
 
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I should start by pointing out that I don't have any really special insight into any of this, and I can only speak from the point of view of someone who makes a small comic on the web and doesn't make much money at it. I certainly don't have any more information on these topics than any other casual user of Google search, and in general these topics are probably so contentious precisely because nobody (aside from Google, perhaps, and they aren't talking ;) has real, hard data on them one way or the other.
 

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I have to disagree that interest in webcomics is on the decline, and that there is an inverse relationship between the number of print comic readers and webcomic readers, simply because I don't know of any data showing either of those assertions to be true.
 
Lacking any real data, I can, of course, speculate on these topics, and since it's fun and perhaps leads to some interesting points to think about, I see no reason not to indulge myself. :)
 
To start with, it depends on what is meant by "print comics." I am going to take this to mean comics of the type that have traditionally been managed by a small number of key publishers: newspaper comic syndicates, and, most particularly, the big superhero comic publishers, Marvel and DC. I suppose we could also throw in what have become traditional "alt" comic styles, such as those published by smaller houses like Fantagraphics.
 
But many of those have started to show up in digital forms as well, rather than on printed pages, so "print comics" becomes a bit of an outdated label for them; still, I'll stick to it here because it's handy.
 
Similarly, while "webcomic" traditionally means a comic that appears on the web, many webcomics are now available in print, some from major publishers--but I think we'll just have to be content to know that, by and large, the label means comics of a more individual stripe that began as, or became, independent little things on someone's more or less personal web site.
 
Having established that, I don't know of any real data showing that print comics pose a threat to webcomics--that if a webcomic reader happens to start looking at print comics, that reader then throws off webcomics and reads print comics exclusively. I've never even heard individual accounts of that happening, although I'm sure they must exist somewhere; I *have* heard personal accounts of people who started out reading webcomics, then discovered print comics, but they didn't stop reading webcomics as a result.
 
Furthermore, I'm not aware of data showing that webcomic reading is on the decline. I spent some time poking around Quantcast (quantcast.com), which is a service that people can use to directly and publicly measure traffic on their site, with records stretching back years, and tried to see what I could see about readers of popular webcomics. There aren't many that use Quantcast's service, alas, but Questionable Content and CTRL-Alt-Del do--and their numbers have indeed declined a bit in recent years.
 
That could support the point, but it's also perhaps not surprising in either case: Questionable Content is a long-running story comic, and the longer such things go, the less they feel inclined to market themselves to new readers, and the more complicated they get for a new reader to pick up. And CTRL-Alt-Del has had a major change in format of late, which would be expected to impact its numbers. So I'm not sure anything can be concluded from those; I would have liked to have had numbers from long-running gag comics, such as XKCD or Penny Arcade, but XKCD doesn't use Quantcast, and Penny Arcade appears to, but its data isn't loading.
 
Traffic for webcomic host Smackjeeves, as measured by Quantcast, has leveled off, and Gocomics, which puts syndicated newspaper comics online, has remained steady. So we can at least say that those two support the notion that online comic reading of those formats--smaller webcomics newspaper comics--and has not been skyrocketing, and I suppose from that you could say that if they did at some point have a honeymoon period of large growth, that period is indeed behind them.
 
One comic site that is skyrocketing in Quantcast numbers, though, is Comixology--a site that publishes digital versions of traditional print comics, particularly superhero-style comics and graphic novels. Its numbers are way, way up; if there's a honeymoon going on, that's where it is.
 
Actual printed versions of "print comics," however, don't appear to be shooting upward, although they do seem to have stabilized after years of decline; I don't follow these numbers at all, though, and just gleaned this idea from a quick skim of some sites that sound like they do:
 
- http://blog.comichron.com/2013/02/overall-print-comics-market-topped-700.html
- http://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html
- http://goodereader.com/blog/digital-comic-news/the-digital-comics-surprise-sales-are-up-while-print-stays-stable/
- http://www.cnet.com/8301-34103_1-57472171/bizarro-world-print-comics-boom-as-digital-sales-rise/
- http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=43773
 
So if "print" is really up, it's up online--whereas webcomics online don't appear to be up to nearly such an extent in recent years.
 
However, as I was saying earlier, it isn't clear that webcomics and print comics--digital or otherwise--are actually in direct competition for readers. I mentioned that some of the biggest webcomics are daily gag comics, and, aside from a certain common language of drawings and word balloons, those have very little in common with comics published in print or on Comixology by the likes of Marvel and DC. It's hard to see a reader of Kate Beaton's one-off humor webcomics, for instance, chucking them in favor of digital downloads of Spider-Man or Batman.
 
But on the other hand there *is* that common language they share, and if any type of comic is able to attract a reader to reading things presented in paired pictures and words, it seems to me that that reader, versed now in the comic language, and knowing that there is value to be had in it, is now more likely to read any sort of comic, anywhere; in the broad scope of things, more comic readers of any type should be good for comics everywhere.
 
And, more particularly, if print-style comic reading is growing online, that could be quite a good thing for webcomics done more in the style of print comics; realistic or semi-realistic graphic adventure comics have been very under-represented in webcomics as compared to print, so it seems to me that they could stand to reap some fairly direct benefits from a larger online audience of adventure comic readers, even if that audience starts out on a different site.
 
Should it turn out that that audience *doesn't* migrate outward across the web, I've heard that print publishers have been increasingly finding new authors and artists who began in webcomics, and if the "print" business picks up, those publishers will be looking more and more for new talent to meet demand--and they'll most easily be able to find that talent online. That means webcomics becomes an increasingly attractive place for comic people to make their start.
 
Traditional comic authors and artists too, though, have been finding their way more and more into free webcomics, even if it's just as one-off stories now and then. With the rise of print comics coming online, and many webcomics coming out with print versions, or webcomics people being hired to produce books for traditional publishers, the lines between webcomics and print comics have been blurring more and more as time goes on.
 
Besides, it's hard to see the demand for free, high quality comics on the web going away. With the rise of Comixology there may be more competition for, say, selling pdfs, or putting your comics behind a paywall, but those have never been huge money makers for non-pornographic webcomics as far as I'm aware.
 
No, I would say that the real challenges for webcomics aren't coming from print comics, but from other online forces, and even other webcomics. From what I have heard, for instance, ad revenue--what someone running a web site can hope to get paid for putting someone else's advertisements on their site, traditionally a significant income source for webcomics--is down everywhere on the internet since the early glory days of web speculation and investment capital, and that's a blow right to the heart of the usual webcomic business model--one that has nothing to do with print comics.
 
And there are simply more and more webcomics as time goes on, so it seems logical to assume that it gets harder and harder to get potential new readers to pay any attention to your own comic, because there are many more free comics clamoring for their attention. While Marvel did a big free comic giveaway on Comixology recently, which had such a huge rush of readers that it knocked out Comixology's servers temporarily--and you can still see the spike in their numbers in Quantcast--there are many more free webcomics coming out all the time than there are free giveaways on Comixology, and it seems to me that it's those free webcomics that are the much more direct competition for other webcomics.
 
If the webcomic honeymoon is over, it seems to me that it's simply a stabilization after the initial period of rampant growth of the new genre, and in any case it's hard to find any evidence that print comics have caused an overall decline in webcomic readership.
 

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Regarding Kickstarter, I have to confess that I object to the way Kickstarter does things. Still, I can't claim that I know the things to which I object about Kickstarter harm webcomics in any really tangible way, and if Kickstarter helps comic authors keep making comics by giving them an income they wouldn't otherwise have had--and that certainly seems to have been the case for a number of people--that can only be a good thing.
 
My objection to Kickstarter comes mainly from the way in which projects are allowed to be "over funded," and so people who use Kickstarter spend a great deal of time trying to persuade a relatively small audience to throw more and more money at them for additional gewgaws and claptrap that really have very little to do with actual, quality comics. Everyone saw, for instance, that Order of the Stick made millions, and since then it has seemed to me that there's been this feeding frenzy of people looking to cash in; I've seen even certain big and successful webcomics running campaigns not for publishing books, which is what Order of the Stick was doing, but for things that aren't really comics, like "art books," or removing ads from their already massively profitable sites.
 
That's great and all but part of me fears that the actual comics get forgotten in the gold rush; you see now comic authors taking breaks from their regular webcomic publishing schedule to work on their next Kickstarter campaign, or withholding work they would ordinarily have put on the web to save as bonus content for their next Kickstarter. You even see people rearranging their entire business model to base it around regular Kickstarter campaigns, and I worry that these people thus become entirely dependent on Kickstarter and its parent Amazon for their livelihood, and that there's no guarantee that couldn't just stop some day--and then maybe we lose the comic altogether, free or otherwise.
 
I've also seen or heard of many cases in which the manager of a "successful" Kickstarter campaign has found that in the end, after all the time and money spent on the campaign and rewards and extras and the percentage that goes to Amazon, they haven't actually made any money at it. You could say that these people have simply mismanaged things, but as we see more and bigger people and companies jumping onto the Kickstarter bandwagon, that increase in competition will inevitably make it harder and harder to make a clear profit at it.
 
Another thing I don't think is a good trend in the long run is an increased price of comic books; I mean that, if you look at the total money a successful Kickstarter takes in, and divide that by the number of contributors, you find that people have spent an average of maybe something like $50 on what is really simply a collected comic volume! Sure you could contribute at the lowest level and get just the comic, at a reasonable price, but many people seem tempted to overspend through Kickstarter, and it seems to me that they may very well end up buying fewer comics as a result, since they simply can't afford it after throwing a great deal of money into a few campaigns. And if comics are encouraged to become, in essence, more and more overpriced, eventually we could reach a point where what began, in the olden days, as a widely affordable entertainment medium, is now exclusively for the well-to-do.
 
In short, it seems to me that before Kickstarter it was more about the comics, and since Kickstarter, for some it has been more about the money. That's to be expected when money comes knocking, and, again, it's great that some people have found a new livelihood in comics, but from a poor idealist's admittedly mean, spiteful, and jealous point of view, it's a bit of a come-down.
 
It would be hard to argue that Kickstarter hasn't helped comics, but has it helped free comics on the web? I'm less sure about that.
 

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I don't see that webcomics are inherently better or worse than print comics; if I find myself reading more webcomics than print comics these days, that's because I'm poor and can't afford all the print comics I'd love to have. Okay, so I guess I really have to say webcomics are better, because I can afford them. :) But content-wise, there's at least as much stuff in print that I would love to be able to read.
 
Well, I will admit that there's one print comic I do have--a lovely reader bought it for me from my Amazon wish list--that I haven't read as much as I'd intended, simply because the thing is so huge and heavy that I don't actually have a way to read it comfortably! Poor planning on my part, you could say, but in that sense webcomics can sometimes be more convenient to read--on the other hand, I have smaller comic compendiums that are more convenient to read in certain situations than things on my computer or smart phone screens. So I suppose I can't say I see either side having a clear advantage there...although come again, I have limited shelf space, so in the long run, comics in digital form may have the advantage just in terms of storage room--although these *could* be webcomics or digital downloads of print-style comics, now that I think of it, so again, maybe there's no clear victor!
 

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(You made it to the end!~ :ooo )
 
 
 
 
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  Go limp, I'll catch you!Mar 26, 2013 2:35 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Hm well this page was a lesson in tightening up vs staying loose. Some of the blow-by-blow :P:
 
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My third pencil sketch (I didn't take a photo of the first) was finally nice and loose yet still a pretty solid construction, so that was good. When I went to ink it though I tightened up ("ooh this is for real now") and first the hair came out all weirdly jittery, and then the eyes lost their original idea, and even the ear got all stiffened up and dull. Got to have the guts to go in loose with ink! Well anyway I hadn't so then I spent a long time trying to get some of the original meaning back into the eyes, and then the hair and the ear, too. There must be twelve layers of ink just over that one darn eye! :P
 
Huh you know now that I look at it again though, what probably didn't help was the pencils being quite so messy, I should have cleaned those up just a bit and then maybe I would have had enough confidence to go right in with ink the right way. Welllll we'll see if any of this learning experience helps come tomorrow. Some day I'll be able to get things right the first time like Kim Jung Gi.
 
EDIT: Nope that eye is just still not right, face looks better without it, it gets the chop. Rrr!
 
 
 
 
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  Painting from Taft's Midway studio; eyeballsMar 23, 2013 8:08 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Boy, maybe that art re-think I had a couple days ago—about concentrating more on forming a clear black and white design in the pencil stage, rather than relying on ink effects later—was indeed the right way to go, because I feel pretty good about this page so far—good enough that I even went for drawing two eyeballs in the same head, which normally I've avoided like the plague because I'm so finicky that I drive myself absolutely batty trying to align the two eyeballs so that the person looks like they're focusing on the right thing, but without looking cross-eyed or otherwise misaligned in the eyeball region. I still ended up making late adjustments to both eyes, but I guess I was okay with doing that because I felt good enough about the rest of the thing. And I never get the eyeballs lined up quite perfectly I don't think but do you want to know a secret? Look at the eyeballs in most any realistic-ish comic—I mean really look at 'em hard—and you'll see most of them, even from the top artists, are a bit out of whack! So that discovery a month or two ago made me feel better about the eyeball situation.
 
Anyway I promised you a nice landscape painting in oil from my ol' college days, so here we are, on 11"x14" canvas board:
 
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I guess it's more properly called a cityscape, come to think of it; it was the view, on a wintery afternoon in early 1996 I think, looking west-southwest over the south side of Chicago from the little second-floor painting studio I'd been assigned in a section of the rambling Lorado Taft Midway Studios, which is just about the south-westest part of the University of Chicago campus, separated from most of the rest of the university by the old Chicago Midway, a huge long grassy triple strip used as a vast showplace in the 1893 World Fair. Sculptor Lorado Zadoc Taft,
 
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image published by Bain News Service (source)
 
who led much of the sculptural effort put into the Fair, created the studio for himself from some old barns standing at the edge of the Midway in 1906. Here's a view east-north-east along the Midway, not too far from the site of those old barns:
 
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image by Google Maps (source)
 
I used to play ultimate frisbee there! But back to the barns: the ramshackley assortment of buildings joined together into a sculpting studio by Taft, made a National Historic Landmark in 1965, exists now, much enlarged into an even more ramshackley complex by the addition of later structures of all sizes, including this rather old manor house looking thing in front
 
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image by Google Maps (source)
 
as part of the U of C's Visual Arts area; in fact, when I was there in the mid-90s, it was *all* of the school's art complex. What you see of the linked complex itself in that photo is actually a bit smaller than what was there at the time, though, because several large painting studio rooms along the north-west side (the side of one of them is seen at the center right of my painting) have since been removed in favor of a massive new development of modern buildings for art curriculum that, from the looks of the aerial view on Google Maps, have at least quintupled the school's visual arts square footage since my time, carving their massive footprints out of the old brick apartment buildings and row houses that used to be there, and which still surround the visual arts complex west and south.
 
Anyway, my small painting studio was on the second floor of that big brick house-looking thing in the old complex, which at that time was something of a run-down old firetrap; the third floor was an unused ruin of paint chips. The second floor was a bit better, but still sufficiently decrepit that I could happily pretend I was some old time romantic painter working away in a rickety garret somewhere, with only a lonely sunset view over icy rooftops to cheer me up. Ah, that's the stuff! Anyway that sort of corrugated plastic skylight covered with snow in the painting is still there, I think—you can just see the top/side of it in the aerial view—but the painting studio beyond is gone, and the haunting old apartment building in the distance has been replaced by a big modern "Center for the Arts," from the looks of it. My view from the second floor was approximately along the line of the magenta arrow below:
 
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image modified from Google Maps (source)
 
Ah, those carefree olden days! Anyway there you go, next week we're back to our usual course of non-old-art blogging.
 
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Oh yeah I took a photo of the pencil stage for today's page:
 
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Notice how the eyeballs were a little more out of alignment at that point. ... I think. Actually at that point the eyes were a bit too far apart. Oh 'dem eyeballs! Now matter how you adjust them they'll inevitably look cross- or cock-eyed if you look at 'em too long, gar.
 
 
 
 
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  Creepy college self-portraits in oilMar 22, 2013 5:55 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This would have been a really easy page to draw...if I'd planned for it to end up this way. : P
 
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Enough art angst, let's get back to the ol' oil painting work I did for my senior project as an art major back in college. Today I'll get the self portraits out of the way--these came out particularly creepy. So as not to scare you right off, I'll start with the less creepy one, which I think came out later, chronologically speaking--probably in '96, and on a pre-stretched 20"x24" canvas:
 
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And then the even creepier one that I think must have been earlier, maybe in '95, 'cause as you can see my use of lighting and the paint itself, not to mention my draftsmanship, is much clumsier. This is on an 11"x14" canvas board:
 
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Egads! And you see it wasn't until later that I learned to hide my face from the light. Or with the light.
 
There were worse ones than this but I will spare you. Tomorrow we'll actually have a nice little landscape painting to finish up, if things go according to plan.
 
 
 
 
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  Yet Another Art Re-think: lasso dreamsMar 21, 2013 2:31 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:As not infrequently happens, I was frustrated with the result of yesterday's A* drawing efforts, and even with ink in general; I realize now that I'd been trying more and more to achieve certain surface effects in ink, like various gray tones using dry brush, lithographic-style line hatching detail, and so forth, and these took a long time but still came out rather...grungy looking, and not in a way I'd intended. I often flip back to the digital work I did on A* with Photoshop's Lasso Tool, and yearning for the lasso's snap and cleanliness, I dredged up the ol' drawing tablet--for some minutes I thought it had expired due to a year and a half of neglect, but then I remembered the little power switch on the side :p--and did a sketch of nothing in particular
 
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and it was heartbreaking to see how neat and bold and energetic it came out in just a few minutes of tabletting--although those few minutes were sufficient to remind me of one of the major reasons why I stopped using the tablet, because my wrist hurt for hours afterward. ;P Still, it was upsetting...until I got to thinking about it, and realized that some recent ink efforts had achieved a not entirely dissimilar strength of black and white design. I called these up and, considering them, it occurred to me that to each of them I had devoted some forethought to how the black and white areas would map out and serve to create a cohesive, strong image--and that I've begun to neglect that kind of planning sometimes in favor of a pursuit of surface effects. Some of those relatively lasso-y ink examples from this current episode include page 16
 
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parts of page 65
 
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and page 76, which also had a nice surface effect in the lower right, which was accidental, the result of ink not absorbing easily into parts of the paper that had already absorbed oil from my hand where I had held the page while sketching:
 
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And I think it was that accidental texture that had triggered the subsequent obsession with surface effects--an effort that did not, I think, work out in the end; they're passable in small doses, but used over too large an area, they just look confusing and messy.
 
There were also some recent sketches with the lasso-style clarity and vivacity, and in fact it was a desire to rekindle that kind of liveliness that had got me into squeezing in some sketches in recent months; anyway the two more successful in that line were this one and this one, I think.
 
So that review gave me some hope that I *can* translate the things I like about lasso drawing into ink--it just requires a little more deliberate planning, and a conscious effort to keep the drawing loose and quick in the face of the much greater accuracy pencil and paper offers over the relatively slick tablet surface; and besides all that, I've learned that the brush can create a much wider variety of marks than the lasso can. With today's A* page, then, I tried to pay attention to those things, and not to rely on surface effects so much, and I think the result is more graphic and easily read than many of the other pages I've done in recent weeks. There is much room for improvement in this vein, but that just gives me more motivation to stick at it. So I'll be working on this, and do let me know if you have any thoughts on the subject!
 
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Oh yeah, I forgot I had a photo of today's page at the early inking stage:
 
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And I got pretty good feedback so far on the lasso sketch...more than I've gotten on any regular A* page in some time, at least. Which is nice, but also frustrating, because if I can't get things going in an equally appealing fashion in ink, then the only thing I can think I could possibly try--and this would still be a come down in some ways, for instance it's much easier on the eyes and body to sit at a drawing table rather than a monitor all day, and then there's the potential actual income to be had from sales of original art when working in ink; not to mention that fiddling around digitally is so easy that you don't really improve much at drawing things, because you can almost just fiddle around not knowing how to draw what you're drawing, but eventually it kinda comes out right--would be mounting a Cintiq on my drawing board, so as to be able to work with a stylus at the correct height and angle that *maybe* wouldn't annoy my wrist too much...but that's a very expensive experiment. Hrm so I'll be trying to bring the ink work up to snuff for the time being I guess.
 
Hm another point is that I posted that lasso drawing during the afternoon, whereas my usual updates haven't been making it up until bizarre hours when the vast majority of my audience isn't online. If I can keep working briskly maybe I can finally correct that!
 
 
 
 
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  No lines, no blogMar 20, 2013 4:58 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I intended to get another oil painting or two from my college days ready to show you today, but I mismanaged my time so well that it's way past when I should be asleep, so I'll just have to make do with showing you part of the pencil sketch for today's A* page, and you can amuse yourself by finding all the ways in which I wasn't able to follow my own guidelines when it came to inking the thing:
 
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There's one thing I can say for sure about this no-outline style I seem to have settled on lately, and that's that it takes way more time than it darn well should! :P
 
 
 
 
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  College senior art project oil paintingsMar 19, 2013 12:25 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A month or so ago I was posting photos of old prints of digital artwork I did for my college senior project in art & design, and I probably mentioned that the theme was flower and self-portraits, in oil versus digital work. Well, my parents have continued to dig things up (they're getting ready to move to a new house!), and now they've found some of my old oil paintings from that 1996 senior project. The best of them I either sold to my dorm mates or gave to my family, but a few of these I have left are fit to be shown, so here we go.
 
This one is oil on canvas (pre-stretched; I was too lazy/scared to stretch my own canvasses :P), 24" x 20":
 
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I was never anywhere close to a maestro with them, but aren't oil paints nice for getting some gleamy, glisteny colors!
 
 
 
 
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  Compositional slackin'Mar 16, 2013 7:40 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:While I was on a break from the strip in order to move apartments a week or so back, a kind reader wrote me some words of encouragement that I very much appreciated, and they also passed me a link to a fantasy comic that, while no longer updating, was done in a very intense black and white style that makes what I'm doing currently look positively gray by comparison; the comic is Dark Places. An interesting example of how to push black and white pretty hard in a sharp digital style!
 
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Here's one of many unused pencil layouts I tried for today's A* page:
 
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Unfortunately boring! I've caught myself doing some plain side views in recent weeks, and I've got to stop doing that so often, I think. A while back I started doing it more than I had been before, and was making the excuse to myself that well if you look at the popular comic pin-up illustrations online, or even popular photo portraits on tumblr and so forth, they're almost all just from a side view, which is not only what we're most used to seeing when looking at people around us, and thus perhaps most easily comprehensible, but which is also the easiest view to draw.
 
Furthermore, if you really look at say the print comic professionals and what viewing angles they use, even those you might have tended to think of as very dynamic don't use dramatic high or low perspective angles willy-nilly--they'll kind of save them up and just use them once in a while when they really need the effect. Reading super hero comics and how-to-draw-superhero-comics stuff at an impressionable age, the use of dramatic perspectives and foreshortening really impressed themselves on me, and I sort of fell into a habit of almost always attempting some kind of radical perspective in every character drawing I did. The problem with that is that it's difficult to pull off well; again, if you scrutinize what the pros do, generally speaking they'll stick to something relatively easy to pull off for their rare dramatic character perspective shots, and if they don't, quite often even the most technically precise among them will still not quite get every aspect of the characters perfectly rendered at the correct angles and sizes--and even if they *do*, it can often lack emotional impact since it's harder to decipher human expressions when they're seen at unusual angles.
 
So all of that got me into making excuses about using more plain jane side shots, but eh well there are still ways to make those dramatic, even if you do overuse them, that I wasn't always doing, like using dramatic near/far size contrasts, subtly angled character poses, or just, you know, arranging objects and lights and things in the image to make a visually interesting composition, regardless of the camera angle. I made a conscious effort to do a bit more of that in the previous page, and I think it helped. So that's just something I'll need to keep reminding myself to put in the extra effort on, so I don't end up rendering away all night on what is, irrespective of any labors of detail or brushwork, just a blah scene design.
 
 
 
 
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  Lithographic bubble burstingMar 15, 2013 7:09 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I found myself wishing I could use the delicate black and white medium Alfons Mucha used for (warning: mild artistic nudity) his printed illustrations of the "Our Father" that I rambled on about a couple days ago; that was lithography, a printing process that starts with the artist either (I think?) drawing an image with an oil-based medium, or scratching it into one, and then there's something with gum arabic and acid, but eventually you get to a point where you've got a plate with a copy of the drawing on it in a substance your ink will stick to, surrounded by a substance the ink will not stick to; a century or two ago those plates were the semi-smooth faces of big stone tablets, like these in an archive in Munich:
 
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image by Chris 73 (source)
 
I guess it might be a little complicated to produce. :P It's appealing to me though because you can start with a pencil-like drawing process yet end up with a permanent, black and white final image. The simpler way to do that for me would be to do what real ink artists do, and work with a dip pen, but those jam and sputter and can only move in certain directions across the paper, blah. Well I suppose then what I really should do is just work with markers, like a lot of people do, but markers don't produce as dark or varied a line as I would like. So I guess I'll just keep trying to get good with a brush; the brush doesn't always do what I want it to do, but it usually does something kind of interesting, so that's fun. Anyway here's the pencil work for today's page, and I should just give up trying to convert the pencil sketch directly into brush strokes, because those thin lines just look silly and cobwebby in the full black of ink:
 
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Yep too much white space, can't have that. I thought I could yesterday but it just wasn't right and I added more and more black until I couldn't really add any more black and then it was almost okay. :P Today I sort of knew I couldn't really do that but tried a really light but dense liney approach for a while just to see how that would go; in the end it still wasn't strong enough and I had to work over it in thicker black and white, but the final result has a bit of play in it that appeals to me--well, more than yesterday's slightly different approach did. I suppose it's a tad closer to a lithographic look, too, although I really should give up any notion of pulling that off with brush and ink.
 
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Here's an article with some interesting points, insight, and history on Google's announcement yesterday that they're soon going to retire their "Google Reader" RSS reader, which is funny in a very Google way given that I think it's the RSS reader used by like 90% or something of people who use such things; not many other companies would ditch something that's dominating its field. I'm sad about it too because according to their stats about the A* RSS feed, there are some 465 people who subscribe to A* updates through Google Reader; Google said that the use of Reader has been declining, and I guess the whole RSS reader field isn't big enough for them now that they've got super big stuff like cell phones to worry about, and they couldn't seem to get their ad system working right in RSS feeds, which means they couldn't make enough money off it for their liking, but dang Google, 465 people is pretty good as far as I'm concerned! I hope those folks'll be able to find a good alternative--certainly there *are* other RSS readers out there, even conveniently web-based ones like Reader, and it will be interesting to see which comes to the fore now that Reader is retiring; hopefully this will all inspire a spurt of growth and innovation in the field.
 
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Oh yeah also scientists at the CERN supercollider have collected 2.5 times more data on high energy collisions since their first announcement of having possibly detected the long-theorized Higgs boson, the subatomic particle thought to convey mass by means of an energy field permeating the universe, and since this further data has been consistent with the initial finding, they've now announced that it pretty much definitely is a Higgs boson--"a" Higgs boson because some theories beyond the Standard Model say it could just be the lowest-energy particle in a while series of increasingly powerful Higgs', or something.
 
Also, other scientists have been trying to drum up drama by saying that the existence of Higgs means the universe will almost certainly be wiped out in some tens of billions of years by a chance permutation in the Higgs field somewhere in the universe. That, at any rate, is the theory of false vacuum, which postulates that, with the Higgs boson and another particle, the "top quark," being just massive enough to cross a mathematically calculated boundary for stability--how near they are to this border is still a matter of speculation, since their masses haven't been measured with sufficient precision yet--then the energy field they constitute across our universe is not a perfect low-energy state, and a more stable state, a more perfect vacuum, could exist; given that, the right chance permutation in the Higgs etc energy field somewhere in the universe should inevitably find that more perfect rest state and, it being nicer and cozier than the universe around it, it would "catalyze the conversion of our universe to a lower energy state in a volume expanding at nearly the speed of light, destroying all that we know without forewarning."
 
Neat! Although some other articles I was reading earlier today pointed out some significant quibbles with that dire interpretation of theories and masses; for instance, the known universe is already expanding at the speed of light--or even a tad faster perhaps due to cosmic inflation, I dunno--so even if that perfect vacuum bubble did show up, it wouldn't necessarily catch up to the rest of the universe anyhow; and that if this kind of thing *does* happen, we should see ripples or echos of past vacuum bubble burstings, or something, and apparently we don't, yet.
 
At any rate, various theoretical physics bubbles are still constantly forming and bursting, which is reassuring--for a while there I was afraid theoretical physics was rather running out of steam!
 
 
 
 
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  The malls are welting againMar 14, 2013 5:20 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Ugh, woozy. Gotta go get that little fan I put in storage--wanted a clip-on fan to stick on my drawing board, but couldn't find one in local stores--apparently it isn't fan season yet--and so without the convenient large ceiling fan my old apartment had, I've been left inhaling more fumes from the noxious white ink I use than is strictly Surgeon General. Woahhhhh.
 
 
 
 
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  Alfons Mucha's inspirational "Le Pater"Mar 13, 2013 4:35 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Not that you could tell, particularly after the translation from pencils to ink, which for me is still a fairly destructive process, but a few days ago I had been inspired by some illustrations by Czech artist Alfons Mucha--a series of illustrations, in fact, that he had printed in Paris in 1899, collectively called "Le Pater." While Mucha is primarily known on the internet these days for the colorfully flat, flowing, gracefully outlined graphic style he developed for his commercial work, and which became highly successful across Europe as what was dubbed "Art Nouveau," that very success rather galled him, apparently, and he "declared that art existed only to communicate a spiritual message." So what he considered his masterpieces were not the popular images he created for advertising of all sorts, but deeply personal works in more muted tones and deep shadow. "Le Pater" was one of these: seven illustrations of the traditional Christian "Our Father" prayer. Executed in exquisitely delicate black shading, they're extraordinary not only for his technical mastery in rendering the human body, drapery, and landscapes in deeply volumetric black and white, but also for the emotional impact conveyed by the figures in their turning, rising compositions.
 
There is some very mild artistic nudity in these, so be warned. I found them here, where you can see them in order with their accompanying illuminated French and Latin manuscript pages, and I posted the seven main illustrated plates on my tumblr here, where, if you click on the thumbnails, you can flip through them in order, with the subtitles showing the part of the prayer each plate is meant to represent. The first plate, for instance, illustrates the famous first line of the prayer: "Our Father, who art in heaven..."
 
While a theology professor father and Jesuit high school didn't end up molding me into someone who's particularly religious, more art like this probably would have stood a better chance, because these are just fantastic. In a somewhat related but much more colorful and Art Nouveau vein, in 1931 Mucha created gorgeous stained glass window scenes for the St. Vitus cathedral in Prague, which you can see here.
 
 
 
 
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  Battering your smart phone into A* submissionMar 12, 2013 3:22 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Yay after a move from one apartment to the other and getting my studio all set back up and comfy, we're back to regular A* updates again, thank goodness! Hopefully I won't have to move again for at least another 15 years. :P This new place is actually a little swanky: most of its floor area is actually level, which is nice for loads of things, including setting up a drawing table. :) At this point I'm a little paranoid about my daily brush cleaning clogging up the nice bathroom drain with various waterproof inks--we're not supposed to use Draino here--but eh well I figure I'll just have to get adept at the ol' backing soda and vinegar and boiling water methods, because the ink must flow, that's for darn sure.
 
In addition to the apartment move I've been trying to move to a new phone, because a friend gave me their old smarty phone, and I've spent way too much time over the past few days trying to wrestle it into submission. In the course of that I of course checked out A* in the tiny mobile web browsers on the thing, and noticed that while the screen on this thing should be just about the perfect size for the A* site and comic when you hold it sideways, the browsers insist on having a HUGE address bar at the top of the screen that pushes everything down so much you can't read all the subtitles--and for some reason they don't have the bar disappear when not in use, so it's just there all the time, blocking 20% of the internet.
 
Fortunately, at least with the Firefox mobile browser, there is a solution, namely a browser extension called Auto Fullscreen, which does what the browsers should do in the first place, and hides the gigantic address bar so it isn't taking up all that screen space (it comes back when you scroll), and A*'s subtitles and all fit just nicely. Although the little text page navigation links on the A* site are a little hard to see, much less click, on a tiny handheld screen, you can just click the comic image to go to the next page, so! Now you've got all you need--well, a fast Wi-Fi connection or something is also handy--to read A* on a fancy phone.
 
And if you're going somewhere without a good connection, you can always go to the episodes & e-books page and get the pdf versions of the episodes to download and then read later. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how well the pdf reading experience went on the small screen of this Android thingy.
 
So yay! Maybe tomorrow my phone number will have finished porting over and I'll actually be able to use this phone for phone things. : P I'm still paranoid that my reception with this new provider is going to be awful, being on the ground floor of an old brick apartment building right next to another old brick apartment building as I am, but eh in theory I can always just switch my number back to the old phone/provider if necessary, right? Right? :o
 
EDIT: A well-equipped reader has informed me that the Safari browser on iPhones is smart enough hide the address bar by default when the device is held in landscape mode, so they work just dandy with A* right out of the box. Jeesh you'd at least have thought Androids would'a copied that. : p
 
 
 
 
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  New A* art show; new A* pages *next* weekMar 05, 2013 8:57 PM PST | url
 
There's a new show of A* art in Seattle! Yes in all the excitement of moving to a new apartment I'd kind of put everything else out of my mind, but fortunately other people keep track of such things so at the correct time I interrupted my apartment-moving activities and went to help hang the artwork today at the independent and rather unique Lighthouse Roasters in Seattle's Fremont district, where your art gazing or coffee drinking is supplemented by such sights as workers pouring cascades of coffee beans from vast burlap sacks, or maybe a cute little dog snuffling between your feet like an excited little vacuum cleaner targeted specifically for crumbs of tasty snacks. It is a pretty funky place and for the next month or so it has A* original art arrayed along the big wall in the cafe. Also their banana bread is huge and quite scrumptious. My stuff will be there for the rest of this month and probably some of the first week of April.
 
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What with getting the show started today, and additional trips I didn't exactly anticipate like a proper Nostradamus in this moving business, such as wrestling a five-foot-long, 81 lb TV stand / bookcase out of Ikea (I had to dismantle my car's back seat to fit it in! I never knew the seat just sort of completely detaches :o) so I don't have to pile my books on the floor like a caveman as I did in my old place >_>, or going shopping for a new vacuum cleaner that can actually suck up something larger than crumbs (that's about all my old one can manage on a good day, and it isn't as cute as the doggie, either), it's finally dawning on me that I'm not going to be done with all this living situation stuff until the end of the week. So I won't have any new A* pages going for you until *next* week.
 
On what I think will be a plus side though, part of my moving adjustment is switching myself over to an actual daylight schedule--since my new place has, like, the sun, as well as lots of neighbors on fairly normal daytime schedules--so in theory I'll be able to get new pages up by early evening-ish, rather than in what was usually technically the wee hours of the next morning. And I have a window I can draw at, so my lucky neighbors in the building across the way can watch me at my drawing board and get a jump on the story. No doubt they will take telephotos and put them straight up on Twitter.
 
Ooh and speaking of which, if I have any other smallish updates on stuff in the meanwhile, they will tend to go up on my Twitter, so follow that if you feel a need to be sure of getting the very latest. Currently it looks like it may go something like this:
- Wednesday: drive down south to get lamp for drawing table; drive up north to get splash guard for new tub; go back to old apartment, get every last thing out of it, and scrub
- Thursday: receive new mattress and wrestle it into apartment somehow; hm and uh figure out what I'm doing with old mattress; final pass on old apartment; take keys back to old landlord; cancel old electrical service; unpack some books
- Friday: unpack books, unpack kitchen, vacuum cleaner shopping, put everything left that I'm not going to use in storage; whew
 
 
 
 
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