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  Two page days are here againApr 30, 2013 10:40 PM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:^ Two pages today. : ) Working in all pencil is loads faster than trying to ink over pencils, so I think I'll be able to get two pages done most days, unless I have something else to do as well, like hanging the art show yesterday--well, and Fridays, Friday's will probably just be one page, like they were back when I used to do multiple pages regularly, which was...eh...episode 12, it looks like, a little over two years ago. (Edit: Oh except I did a spurt of them around the end of episode 16 - middle of episode 17, didn't I? Hah.)
 
Some regular readers have written me--which I really appreciate!!--about this latest art style, and it's clear that some are skeptical about it, which is perfectly understandable, given that I am too. However, one thing it really has going for it that maybe you can't really see directly is that it's a huge relief to be able to sit down every day to draw and just be able to draw whatever my pencil wants; I didn't really realize it before I'd done this for a few pages, but now I know that the spectre of having to ink a drawing in was really affecting how and what I sketched out in pencil--somehow it caused me to tighten up and drawn conservatively, so I never really got to the loose and slightly abstract style I wanted to reach; somehow in pencil, large eraser at the ready, my brain is able to relax and let my hand do what it wants.
 
Not that every page goes smoothly--page 12 here took at least four full re-draws, and hopefully that's just due to the head-down perspective I always try and always struggle with, rather than drawing fatigue in trying to do two pages in one day--but at least I don't constantly feel like I've really failed to reach the type or degree of drawing I wanted somehow. I've still got a lot to figure out about various things I can do with the pencil, but I feel like there are way more possibilities open to me than there were before, with ink; like, that hatched-over face in page 10--it's dark, but there's still a face behind it--wouldn't have worked at all with my inking, but in pencil it's so simple to do, and subtle value relationships are very intuitive and flexible.
 
That probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Anyway, hopefully there will be lots of days in this style where I'm able to get more than one page posted. I'll update my Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and tumblr as each new page comes out, so you can follow me on one of those if you want to catch the pages as they occur--or you can just keep reloading the front page of this site, that's fine too. : D
 
I think this pace will also help the pacing of the story; with one page a day I always feel compelled to try to condense things a lot, probably often too much, like parts of the complicated sequence at the end of last episode, which ended up being even more confusing than it should have been; with two pages most days I have the space to let things breathe a bit more.
 
 
 
 
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  A* art show at Spin's Barbershop, SeattleApr 29, 2013 10:19 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Dad and I put up a new show of A* art today at Spin's Barbershop in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood, 4501 Interlake Ave N. Get a nice modern haircut from the talkative owner in his old-time barber chairs while enjoying the scenery, which includes loads of colorful postcards, old comic books, plastic swords and battle axes, a WWF championship belt, and, through June, original A* art. : )
 
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If you've got Netflix streaming, you've got a day to catch a couple pretty good movies that are leaving the service May 1st: "Death Rides a Horse," a spaghetti western starring Lee Van Cleef, a wild Ennio Morricone score, and heavy-handed dialogue like "Hate's hate"; and "The Lady Vanishes," an early Hitchcock movie that is my favoritest film ever.
 
 
 
 
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  Seattle sculpture nerdery trilogy finaleApr 27, 2013 12:20 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I've been talking about sculpture around Seattle for the past few days, and a month ago I talked about sculptor Lorado Zadoc Taft, whose old studio building formed part of the art department facility at the University of Chicago, where I studied art. Well now the two can come together, because Taft's 1909 sculpture of George Washington stands proudly high on a pedestal above a square in the University of Washington campus here in Seattle:
 
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image by Joe Mabel (source)
 
I probably walked under it at least once in ancient times (I wasn't a UW student but I did cross the campus on a few occasions) but I don't remember it. Should probably go and reconnect!
 
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Not sure about the drawing in today's page--I think I've probably been seeing a few too many of Giannis Milonogiannis' sketches on his tumblr. Like, I'm not at all sure what that neck is doing. Ah well. I did figure out a way to get the pencil lines to come through a little more crisply--basically, apply the contrast increase (Levels adjustment) *after* resizing the image, not before. Duh. : P More laborious to do it this way but better results, I think.
 
 
 
 
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  Isamu Noguchi's Massive "Black Sun"Apr 25, 2013 8:56 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Yesterday I was talking about Changing Form, a piece of public sculpture in Seattle that was part of a series of "gateway" pieces in 1969 that framed views of the city. Another one is Isamu Noguchi's Black Sun in Volunteer Park, which also encloses a view of the Space Needle:
 
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image by Ben Tesch (source)
 
Even Google Maps has a pretty good "street view" of the sculpture, and you can see how it's placed at the head of a reservoir. Some weeks back I also posted a very processed but still pretty keen photo of the sculpture on my tumblr, which has the Needle neatly seen through the hole in the center of Black Sun. (UPDATE: I've removed that tumblr post, since it was pointed out to me that while I found it on a different site, the photo originally came from the site of photographer Brian Matiash (about midway down that page), which says that his permission is needed to use them, and I've been unable to get in touch with him.)
 
There's even a local urban legend that the sculpture was the basis for Seattle band Soundgarden's song Black Hole Sun, but I was unable to find a scrap of evidence for it by Googlin'—although I did find some attestations to the contrary—so I'm skeptical of that. And it didn't inspire the creation of this Supermassive Black Hole A* comic, but it did inspire this blog entry, so hey, there's something. Anyway it's not at all bad as far as modern art goes, if you ask me.
 
(There is, by the way, no chance that the Sun could form a black hole—it would have to be many times more massive than it is in order to explode and collapse into a black hole—so no worries there. : P)
 
 
 
 
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  Seattle & Doris Chase's "Changing Form"Apr 24, 2013 6:50 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:More amateur photography! Apparently this is a hazard of being awake during daylight hours, especially when it's finally a really nice day like it was here in Seattle today; I finished drawing the A* page but didn't get it posted for a while because I made the mistake of looking out the window at all that sunshine. An irresistible urge overcame me to rush down to the park a couple blocks away, so I did. It has a nice view--you can see over to West Seattle and out into Puget Sound
 
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plus there's a great view of the Space Needle with Mount Rainier in the background, well at least if you aren't avoiding the big crowd at the central viewing point like I was--eh I think you can see the base of the Needle through a gap at the bottom of those tree branches on the left-ish:
 
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Fortunately I have some better shots of the Needle that I took three Sundays ago when I wandered down to the same park with a friend--well aside from the blurry-faced people who were in the way:
 
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That thing conveniently hiding the people a bit is a sculpture
 
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It even has two levels:
 
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Originally, the idea was that visitors would be able to rotate the top part, but "to avoid damage to the piece and prevent injury to park visitors" (source) it was decided to weld it in place at a spot chosen by the sculptor, Doris Chase. Her 2008 Seattle PI obituary has some interesting details about her and her work.
 
My learned friend told me that "Changing Form" was actually part of a series of sculptures commissioned for a number of scenic spots around Seattle, that could serve as frames of iconic views of the city. Next time I'll show you one that ties in nicely with A*! : D
 
 
 
 
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  Hey there's a big fireball in the skyApr 23, 2013 3:44 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I've been doing weird stuff lately, like getting up early. Today I got up way too early. The world looks funny this early. I mean, I used to see it all the time, sorta, from the other end, but I never tried looking at it closely because I was supposed to be going to bed. Now I'm just getting up and noticing stuff, like this whole sky thing happening outside my window:
 
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I mean, who knew? It's eerie. Yesterday there were other suspicious goings on, as well. It started innocuously, even pleasantly enough:
 
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but then later those same chairs were doing this:
 
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Also the lawn had shrunk. And I mean I don't know if I even want to think about the crazy spirit lights
 
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So yeah man. Daylight. Not sure about all this.
 
 
 
 
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  Episode 18 e-book & a new sketchbookApr 22, 2013 8:54 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I got the episode 18 e-book finished up over the weekend, so if you'd like to read that episode in e-book (pdf) form, it can be had for a contribution of any amount you choose over at the episodes & e-books page!
 
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While I was picking up various pencil-related art supplies at the end of last week, I also picked up a new sketchbook, and broke it in over the weekend with a couple quick little sketches:
 
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(I think that fellow in top hat and monocle came along because I'd been posting a lot of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painting on tumblr. :P)
 
I haven't kept a sketchbook for fifteen years or so, I think, so it's kind of exciting! No more having to doodle on odd scraps of paper, nope! :) This one is um let's see here...a "Super Deluxe" from the Bee Paper Company, 9"x6" (I would call that 6"x9" but whatever :p).
 
I used that Cretacolor Monolith pencil for those sketches, and I was thinking I'd use the Monoliths for some fill-in or shading for today's page, but I tried a bit and it reminded me that these wider, softer leads tend to leave a speckled line, which I didn't really want. So I erased that and just stuck with the 0.5 mm drafting pencil for the whole thing, that's what I'm used to anyway. I think it'll be a while before I figure out just how I want to do shading and so forth with it, but there are certainly a lot of ways to use it and I think I'll have fun experimenting. : )
 
 
 
 
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  Supermassive not-so-black hole A*?Apr 20, 2013 7:08 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Before I get into the hardcore art supply nerdery, here's an interesting video of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wringing out a washcloth in microgravity on the International Space Station; since the water has no gravity to tell it where to go once it's squished out of the cloth, well...maybe you can guess what happens! Anyway it looks cool.
 
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I had quite an exciting day--by my standards--experimenting with various art tools and techniques. These experiments won't look like much to you but, as probably they say in science somewhere...ahem uh we can learn more from failure than success! And I learned an awful lot. =o
 
A couple readers on Facebook pointed out intriguing art supplies I hadn't considered before: water soluble pencils, and those kneaded rubber erasers--generally you see them come in gray, like the Prismacolor ones I got, but I discovered they also come in all sorts of bright colors, too. The water soluble pencils I was able to find were a 4B Cretacolor Monolith woodless pencil, and 6B and 8B Derwent pencils--you can tell water-soluble pencils these days because they'll have some sort of wet brush head icon printed on them. I experimented with these things and scanned and processed the results like I'd want to to get them good and black in Photoshop, with this ghastly looking page of results:
 
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Which I won't attempt to sort out in full, but here are the main bullet points:
 
- The Derwent 6B and 8B pencils are rated at darker grades, but don't look darker than the Cretacolor 4B when used like normal pencils
- The Derwent pencils, which are rated darker and should thereby be softer, feel much rougher and scratchier and even oddly more uneven than the Cretacolor, which by contrast is a joy to push against the paper
- When water is brushed over them, the resulting wash from the Derwent pencil marks is much darker than that from the Cretacolor
- Even though I can get a sufficiently dark tone for my purposes from the Derwent pencil wash, it kind of looks awful in person--the pencil marks are still visible under the wash--and there's still plenty of elbow grease needed for laying down the pencil marks in the first place
- The kneaded rubber eraser doesn't erase as much as my white plastic eraser
- On soft pencils (4B and softer), the white plastic eraser tends to smear before it erases, while the kneaded rubber eraser doesn't smear at all
- Dried pencil wash doesn't erase all that well
- Oh also there are some unrelated upside-down thumbnail pen sketches in there : p
 
That was sort of mixed results, so I then tried something I tried briefly early on in that color phase of episode 18, which was using a light ink wash together with pencils. I had made this chart back then to figure out how many drops of ink to put in one of my little water jars to make the right tone of wash:
 
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With the Photoshop contrast settings I want to use, 22 drops, once Photoshopped, makes a good black: that comes out to 1 drop of ink for every 100 of water. The reason to use a wash rather than pure black ink is that it is easier to manipulate than pure ink, which is thicker and doesn't spread as well, and it more closely matches the darkness of the pencil lead, so you can get a better idea of the relative overall darkness of the pencil and wash composition when you eyeball it while working--and besides those important considerations, there's also much less chance of a rug-ruining disaster with a highly dilute wash than pure ink, plus it's much less likely to ruin your brushes, which is nice.
 
So I used that 1:100 ink wash for the black space background in today's A* page--my arm was already starting to ache from various tests I'd been running, blacking in large areas with only dry pencil--and that seemed to work so well that I was even inspired to try, at the end, a bit of a gray tone with a 1:400 wash; that, unfortunately, turned out to be too dark with the Photoshop settings I'm using now--I think I'd have to use a 1:800 or so. Incidentally, here's episode 18, page 23, with the setting I'm shooting for now (levels 208,1,255; back then I was using 253,1,255, ie max black, which I now realize was really the cause, together with too-light pencil strokes--of the dark, rough lines that I couldn't stand):
 
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Kind of a neat effect, actually, if not exactly the black I would have wanted.
 
But the real problem with this wash idea, I realized a while after having scanned today's page for a third time, was that washes cause the paper to warp quite a bit--far more than just plain ink does--and that can make it very difficult to scan without getting shadows in the scanned image from where the scanner's light hits the cockled paper at an angle, even though I've got it pressed down on the glass under a weighted board. That old page 18:23 scanned pretty cleanly this time, but it's been straightening out under a board and a pile of other pages for months now. Anyway, I recall now that this shadow problem does tend to happen with the ink wash pages--it manifests on today's page in slightly off-white areas at the edges of the larger ship's fuselage, for instance--and that is a bit of a pickle.
 
Another thing to consider is that with these fills, the original art looks a little bizarre:
 
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In theory I could just use pure ink and have less warping and shadows, but there would probably still be some here and there (and the originals would still look rather bizarre, you'd just see the big black fills and the lighter pencil lines would be pretty much invisible). But I think the real real problem here is that I'm trying to put gradated pencil lines up together with large pure black areas, and when you do that, the pencil lines are just going to have a tough time looking like they belong; in fact, there's a bit of a disconnect between the pencil and the ink areas that's a little jarring if you think about it too much. I tried to mitigate that a bit on the previous page, where the black fill was with a dark pencil, by allowing a little white to creep in between hatched fill lines in a couple corner spots, but the large black areas drowned that attempt at mediation out quite easily.
 
So now I'm thinking maybe the thing I have to learn is that black doesn't have to be black, you just have to be able to understand that it's black relative to the rest of the drawing. That's part of what I liked, I think, in page 2 of this episode: there's a bit of pure black around Selenis' eye there, but we also read that zig-zagged hatched area on her nose as near black, because it's the next closest thing to black on the page, and, moving farther away, even those very loose zig-zag fills on her arms read as possibly black, because there's nothing else near that line density around them, and together these different "black" areas, by changing density with distance from left to right, also convey a sense of an atmospheric glow, all with just a few strokes.
 
So I'm going to try to work more from that angle here next and see if I can make my not blacks seem black in other drawings. And I *am* concerned that this is sort of taking the black out of supermassive black hole A*, that's why I tried full-on black areas in the past few pages instead--but well heck black holes aren't even black, you know: you can't actually see the singularity that pulls everything including light in, and the event horizon around it won't really look black, I don't think, even if it somehow isn't active and nothing much is being pulled into it or orbiting at radiant speeds around it, because gravitational lensing will be warping images of its surroundings from every angle--or at any rate very unusual angles--at you like a very odd funhouse mirror. I think. Anyway, it ain't black. Well maybe that's wrong, I dunno. I'm gonna try this technique anyway. : P
 
 
 
 
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  Grading pencils: still needs work!Apr 19, 2013 4:35 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:The "wrapping" subtitle threw people for a loop more than I'd expected--like, I didn't mean for people to think their browser was acting up! Oops! Hm although now the mischievous side of me is thinking how many wigs I'd blow off if I moved the subtitle bar one of these days...
 
I ran out to the art supply store and got a batch of Cretacolor Monolith woodless pencils today, 'cause I need something big and graphitey to fill in large dark areas since I'm not using ink at the moment. I wasn't sure what grade to get, so I just got one or two of each (I got two of the lightest and two of the darkest, since I figured I always take things to extremes and would most likely end up choosing one of those). You may remember about a year ago when I talked some about the grades of pencil "lead," ie how it's kind of a monochrome spectrum ranging from super light/hard to super dark/soft. The lead I've been using in my 0.5 mm drafting pencil all this time has been H (the softest of nine grades on the "hard" end of the spectrum), which for me is the perfect balance between non-scratchiness and non-smudginess. Well, the Monolith pencils only cover the soft side of the spectrum, going from HB, which is kind of the hardest of the soft side, to 9B, which is kinda more like a crayon than a pencil, it's so soft. Here's a little text patch I did with the various pencils:
 
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Obviously HB is closest to my 0.5 mm H, so that's kind of naturally the one I'd go with, but I was wondering if maybe the softer ones would just be easier to fill in large areas with--but they really aren't, and in fact the super-soft ones are so soft that they start to flake a bit as you work them into the paper. They do get pretty awesomely dark, but since I'm adjusting contrast in Photoshop, what I'm more concerned about in the hard copy is being able to get a reasonable tone match between the 0.5 mm lines and the fill. So HB wins, and it's actually probably just as well that it's a little darker than the 0.5 mm's H, because I tend to press harder in certain areas of emphasis with the 0.5 mm, which makes them darker than normal--about as dark as a medium-pressure HB line, really. The eyes in the sketch there are pressed-in H, for instance, while the fill around the head is lighter-stroked HB, and they look about the same to me--and, more importantly, to Photoshop. So I think this pairing may work out pretty well.
 
I'm less sure about the filling method I used here, which I think was maybe a bit too slow and methodical, not brisk enough. So I'll have to see if I can loosen up with that a bit, but on this first try I was probably overly worried about getting it dark and even enough. And I was anxious about the regular 0.5 mm pencils, too, and ended up drawing *way* too light with them, which meant I had to apply more contrast in Photoshop, resulting in a grungy appearance to this page, even after some cleanup. I knew I'd start worrying more over the pencils if I knew they were to be the final version. Poo. Gotta work on that.
 
Oh yeah, one thing I forgot to mention is that I found that the softer the lead gets, the more difficult it is--at least for my white block Staedtler Mars eraser--to erase cleanly without leaving a smudge (on the other side of the spectrum, I know that I had a harder time erasing 2H lines than H lines, because the 2H lead was so tough I tended to dig channels into the paper with it, and the eraser had a hard time getting to the bottom of them to get all the graphite out); once the 9B is on there, it doesn't really want to leave and just smudges when the eraser hits it. Maybe those kneadable gray erasers are better for getting that super-soft stuff out? That would explain why they're still around, I guess. The large patch in the lower left of the test paper is a soft of gradient from 9B on top to HB at the bottom, and then I took the white block eraser up the left side of it.
 
Even the HB does smudge up on my hands and stuff a good deal, and I had to keep taking additional time to go back and clean up subsequent finger smudges on the paper. Hm. Maybe I'll try a page where I just do fills with the 0.5 mm H lead--will take longer to make a fill but might work out about the same, time-wise, if there's less cleanup necessary.
 
 
 
 
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  Episode 19: the pencil episode??Apr 18, 2013 2:02 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Well ehm yes this page is in pencil, not ink. I'd planned to ink it, and tried to, in fact
 
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but I kind of knew beforehand that I didn't have any way of duplicating that kind of freedom and subtlety of linework and gradation in ink, which is why, if you look back, you'll see that I (after perhaps a few failed experiments) strove to avoid large areas of gradated ink crosshatching in previous pages--small areas are okay, but it falls apart in larger areas, like close-ups of faces. In part this is due to the ink not flowing as freely as graphite from the tip of a pencil, and I suppose I could help that a little by watering the ink down a bit, but that results in grayish blacks which to me defeats a lot of the purpose of having a nice, really black ink original. Anyway brushed ink hatching over faces tends to result in disaster for me, and I think my most successful inking has thus come from pages that took a simplified approach, breaking shading down into either full black or full white, as on episode 18, page 16. I've been able to get some decent drawing done that way, I think, but I guess it becomes a bit more limiting than I would like.
 
Anyway I suspected I'd screw today's page up in ink, and I'd also been wondering again about scanning pencils--which you may recall I concluded failed to capture the graphite in adequate quality in that little outburst of computer coloring over pencil and ink wash I had just a little later in episode 18--I suppose that was my reaction against the constraints of my inking--so I scanned it in, and thus had a high-resolution version of the pencil stage as a backup, albeit one that wasn't as eraser-tidied as it might have been if I'd been sure it would be the final version. But one nice surprise was that messing with the contrast in Photoshop resulted in a nice dark fill around the eye, which I hadn't really thought my scanned pencils would be able to produce.
 
Coupled with the inking failure on this page (I tried pushing the facial shading more and have ended up with basically a black hole where the face was : P), this has got me thinking that maybe I'll try pushing plain pencil as far as I can for a while and see what comes of it. I think this will be interesting, and I hope you'll be patient with me while I continue to experiment (I keep thinking I'm done and have settled on something, too... : P). The next pages should be tidier because I'll spend a little time cleaning them up with the eraser before popping them in the scanner; I'm also going to run over to an art supply store tomorrow and get some of these Monolith woodless pencils from Cretacolor that I've sort of been lusting after for over a year now, but had no real use for up to now--but now I'm thinking they should come in quite handy for filling in large black areas. So if I was going to do today's page over on purpose in pencil, for instance, I'd have done some heavy black pencil fill on Selenis' suit.
 
So uh sorry for the mess, I'll try to get better at this! Ugh and I'm not sure what this means for my plans of working up some side art to sell on places like Etsy and eBay, huh... Apparently I'm allergic to earning money. : | On the other hand maybe I...well...I really shouldn't think it but I already have so whatever, maybe going pencil-only could get me up to two pages a day, although...hm well knowing myself it just means I'll spend a lot of time fussing over the pencils for one page. I really do think the pencils tend to have a beauty that I routinely fail to convert into ink, though, and the vague unpleasantness about the inking had been bothering me more and more of late.
 
Meanwhile, if you can look past the wild art, I think you'll enjoy this episode, in which we'll meet a lot of new characters, and Selenis will have a murder mystery to solve, the results of which will surprise even her!
 
Oh and it will be left a little mysterious, but it should still be clearer (and will even tie into stuff directly talked about but left dangling in a few previous episodes!) than the end of episode 18, which I think confused pretty much everyone, not just Selenis. WHY the robot thingy blew up instead of shooting Selenis was supposed to be puzzling, for now; why she went back outside and into the beast's path confused not just a few people too though, I think, and that was entirely the fault of my drawing, which meant to show her being forced back to the entrance by all those little laser beams that sprouted up in the interior. That part was *not* supposed to be totally mysterious, so my apologies for the confusion there. Eh hm well in fact I know a lot of that whole final sequence was hard to follow, and I'll try not to do that too often, and I really appreciate those of you who've stuck with A* through all these shenanigans!
 
 
 
 
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  End of episode 18!Apr 17, 2013 12:26 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Yes, this uncommunicative page is the end of episode 18! Which means that tomorrow is...the start of episode 19! I'm not even sure what the first page will be yet! We'll all find out tomorrow! Er hm and I'll get the episode 18 e-book wrapped up eh probably over the weekend.
 
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Here's an interesting article about NASA's largest rocket ever, the Boeing-built (well, the engine core, anyway), unfortunately named "Space Launch System" ("SLS") designed for flights beyond low Earth orbit, ie maybe to launch ships for a trip to Mars or something, and how it's on track for its 2017 test flight, although they're still in the design phase. At a planned 384 feet high it's...that many feet taller than the 363 feet Saturn V rockets that launched Moon ships in the Apollo era. The article talks about how they're using hardware based on tried and tested models, like solid rocket boosters similar to those that launched the Space Shuttle.
 
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Pencils for today's A* page--you know they say ink adds 10 years...
 
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This was one of those funny ones where the head was the first thing I drew (or rather, kept), and it was nice so then I went on and drew a body beneath it, then that was all right except something was a bit off with the face, and I picked and picked at it until the face was gone, and I had to draw a completely new one back on top of the body, and was cursing myself for wasting a perfectly good head and leaving myself in a position where I now had to put a head on a body that was already in place, which isn't the usual order of things and is thus a bit tricky for me. All for the best though, this one has a lot more feeling to it.
 
 
 
 
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  Cat on a sailboat in front of some mountainsApr 15, 2013 10:38 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Always end every episode with an explosion, mother used to say. Well okay she didn't, but it seems like a good rule of thumb somehow. Oh there's still one final page for this episode, but we're close.
 
Some sketches I did today:
 
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Those were with a Rotring Tikky Graphic 0.3 (the skinnier lines) and a Faber-Castell "big brush" artist pen (the thick fill around the asteroid), which I guess have ended up being my two favorites among all the pens I bought back in my pen phase. >_> They also happen to be the two wettest--probably no coincidence there!
 
I had an interesting talk with the plumber (the senior plumber--the junior was actually down behind the sink drilling out the clog) today about selling artwork on eBay, which I think I mentioned a while back that I want to get to doing at some point--larger compositions not necessarily having anything to do with A*, just cool pictures. And I mentioned last week or two about getting some smaller ink drawings worked up for selling on Etsy, and that seems like a good starting point, well maybe. Anyway if I get a handle on this time management thing--trying to go pretty much cold turkey on the wasting-time-on-the-internet thing this week, although I did waste some posting a photo of a rat sleeping on a box of Rice Krispie Treats on Tumblr that has already proceeded to become the third most popular thing I've ever posted there (it was reference for the little rat who crept into my old Princess and the Giant comic; pretty sure I just got it from a Google image search years ago)--then I think pretty soon I'll be able to get cranking on the smaller sorts of pictures.
 
This plumber guy had a profitable system of taking football player photos off the internet, using the Posterize filter in eh whatsit Art Studio Pro no that isn't it...well whatever...then sketching the resulting simplified image out large using the classical grid mural-making method, and filling it in on a big canvas in bright acrylics. Also he helped me determine that the best painting to do for eBay would be a cat in a sailboat in front of some mountains; apparently the interior designers who scour the auctions for cheap art to fill in rooms like that sort of thing.
 
 
 
 
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  Spinning one's jetsApr 13, 2013 7:06 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This is a bit different, it's the not-quite-final pencils; see if you can spot the differences vs the inked version!
 
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Mainly I decided the legs looked ridiculous. : P You can also see a little scrap sketch I did in the upper left corner there to remind myself how the pack and jets were supposed to be oriented with respect to the pilot's body; after all, you can't just have the pack on the person's back with the jets pointed straight "down," because then the center of mass is below the angle of thrust and you'd just spin in circles. It's kind of cooler to draw people oriented that way, though, so they kinda look like they're superhero flying the way they're actually moving, so I made those long angled jet legs to let me fudge things a bit.
 
It took an awfully long time to draw; sort of been avoiding fully body perspective shots like this lately because it's hard to get them right, and we're not used to seeing people from those angles so it's harder to recognize them. Wait I've said this not too long ago already, haven't I? Anyway sometimes it's good for getting the dynamic of a particular movement, like here, and you've just got to do it. It made me realize though that in the past few weeks my time spent doing the pencils vs the time spent doing the inks has sort of flip-flopped: whereas I used to spend probably two-thirds of the time on the inking, I'm now spending more like two-thirds of the time on the penciling. Which is probably how it should be, because if you don't get the initial sketch right, it's never going to be a very good picture, no matter what silly things you try doing with the ink.
 
This episode will wrap up hm next Tuesday I think, and then it'll be straight on to...episode 19! :o In which we'll meet an important new character...although they're not actually totally new, having been mentioned--sort of--all the way back in the first episode!
 
 
 
 
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  It's beginning to look a lot like ChristmasApr 12, 2013 4:13 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I fell off the wagon today and did an absolutely awful job of staying off the internet. Must do better, but it's so hard when there's so much fascinating stuff out there to see and read about. Like, I've already got images for two or three blog entries all prepped, but how'll I have time to write 'em up and get 'em posted if I'm spending all this time on the internet looking up OTHER stuff? Cheez.
 
So that leaves us with the quickie solution of daily drawing progress photos; I was kinda happy I managed to get the whispy head pencils to come out pretty faithfully--maybe even slightly improved--in ink:
 
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Also here it is April and I'm still listening to Christmas music.
 
 
 
 
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  Not ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMilleApr 11, 2013 1:25 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Well I didn't entirely manage to wean myself off the internet today, but some progress in wasting less time there was made. Will do better tomorrow, hmh!
 
I was afraid I was going to screw this page up in the inking phase, so here's a nice big photo of the penciled figure that I took for posterity:
 
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The inking actually went pretty well by my standards. It's really the close-ups that can throw me for a loop, I think. But I *like* close-ups--why don't they like me?? Bah well...hm no close-ups left in this episode, I don't think.
 
 
 
 
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  Don't waste time on the internet, kidsApr 10, 2013 5:16 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Drawing trouble with this one--I always want to do this sort of chin-down close-up view thing, and it almost always causes me trouble. Also I seem to want to be hitting some sort of wild abstract drawing style but I don't really know how to get there; it's no use trying to use brush and ink like a pencil or a lasso tool. Anyway here are some bumps along tonight's road:
 
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Actually I bet what it is, or what isn't helping anyway, is that I still haven't been managing my time like I keep promising myself I will--ie I keep wasting too much time fiddling around on the internet :|--and then I'm behind and I get anxious in the pencil stage, and convince myself I've got a good sketch, then it comes time to ink it and I keep running into problems because the pencil sketch had unresolved problems. Okay, so... I'm going to try to keep myself off the internet--aside from posting updates and maybe working on an A* Etsy shop, anyway--for the rest of the week, and see if that helps get me back on track. ... MAN okay I can do this.
 
 
 
 
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  The Navy's LAWS laser & a bad sketchApr 09, 2013 1:07 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here is an interesting new article--if you're into these things--about a new laser gun the Navy is going to deploy on a ship in the Persian Gulf; the LAWS--"Laser Weapon System"--is powerful enough to burn through steel if held on target, and has been 12 for 12 in tests in taking out little things like incoming drones and speedboats. The article has some interesting details on the mechanism, like how the power level can be adjusted to, for instance, simply "dazzle" and confuse attackers, and how the energy necessary for each (presumably full power?) laser pulse costs "under a dollar."
 
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I often show some of the disasters involved in finishing off an A* page, but I don't often show the attempts that never even make it off the runway; well I had a good number of those today, so here's one of the earlier albatrosses:
 
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I'm finding myself more and more outright rejecting a layout, erasing the whole thing, and trying something a bit different. It's nice not to have to settle for your first idea, I suppose, because a lot of mine are stinkers!
 
Here were what turned out to be the final pencils:
 
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  Drawing trouble = process pictures galore!Apr 06, 2013 9:30 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Hope you didn't stay up all night waiting for this page, it sure involved a lot of hemming and hawing, I guess because I felt it was emotionally important or something. Things started out puzzlingly askew in the pencils, and a little doodling in Photoshop helped show how things could be cleared up my straightening the jaw and moving the mouth over a bit...then I just kept fiddling with the eyes and mouth:
 
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Well I inked those last pencils up and eventually I thought I had it
 
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except that the sort of shadow line along the cheek was bothering me--looked more like a scar than a shadow. So I replaced it, and simplified the hair and nose while I was at it:
 
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I thought that was finally it, but then I got to thinking about that big white unshadowed side of the face there, and again found myself doodling on the photo in Photoshop
 
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at which point I realized--well, after arguing with myself for twenty minutes or so--that I wasn't gonna be happy until I painted that shadow in. So I did, and again thought I had it done
 
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except that, looking at it, there was still a slight askewness about the face that I couldn't quite place; so once again in Photoshop doodles were made--here and there around the face, blocking parts off or adding shadows on until things started straightening:
 
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Just a little more brow and chin would seem to do the trick, simulated. So I put that into ink, more or less, scanned the page in a third time, and...voila?
 
Oops no, not quite, that brow looks a bit too happy. Photoshop says if I just carve away the happy curve of the top bit...ah. Hm and the left sides of those irises need shoring up... Scan it a third time, wash my brushes a third time, and that's all there is to it! :P
 
This process is totally laborious... It's interesting though because if I was just doing this digitally, I'd make those changes instinctively on the digital canvas, without really knowing why I'd done it, except it looked better, and that would be that--but since I have to go through a time-consuming re-inking and re-scanning/photographing process to make the changes, I have to convince myself they're worthwhile, so I make myself figure out *why* they seem to improve things, and then I actually understand something I didn't before about particular parts of anatomy. Yes it's edutainment! Although I'm really only bothering with these last changes I guess because there's a garage sale I want to hit in an hour or so now, so I might as well just stay up. :PP
 
Hm you know one new time management problem I've realized I have this week is that I can't do pencils and inks separately, with a large space of time in between--because then I come back from whatever the break was, take a look at the pencils, and inevitably decide I have to redo significant chunks of them. ;P
 
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I got a lot of support from readers for the Major; people really seem to have warmed up to him and didn't want to see him, well, in the situation in which we found him on the previous page. I appreciate that, and I was rather starting to like the ol' cuss myself. I know it *does* seem like I tend to do horrible things to characters who turn out to be fairly nice people... Uh... Huh. Well I was going to say that that won't always be the case, but come to think of it I don't think we'll really have any more nice people around for a while, anyway. I mean, there will be interesting people, and people with eh some redeeming qualities, I think... Ooh and maybe some minor characters for flavor who could be nice and might live! Oh well I guess they don't count really. Hm.
 
 
 
 
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  Major Major, MajorApr 05, 2013 12:54 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:At one point my staging note for this page in the script document read just "(Major majored)." >_>
 
If you examine the pencils you'll notice I'd forgotten how his armored shoulder pieces were shaped:
 
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They're supposed to be kind of layered rounded scales rather than big...boxes? Apparently such things (the layered scale things) are called spaulders, or maybe pauldrons for bigger ones...actually his are sort of in-between the two. How awkward!
 
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On a completely unrelated note, beware if someone tries to sell you Reliant Robin as a commuter vehicle; yes, they may be all-plastic construction, and have a uh sporty three-wheeled design, and they were quite popular in England in the '70's, I hear, and Wikipedia says their drivers are their owners are statistically Britain's safest drivers, but if you have to, oh, turn corners, there may be some handling problems. (Yes I know this is an awfully old video but I don't watch popular TV shows so it's new to me!)
 
 
 
 
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  It's a good thing this ain't rocket scienceApr 04, 2013 1:41 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Doing less well on the time management today. Also fussed around with today's page more; I think I erased and redrew Selenis about seven times to get to this final version of the pencils
 
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and you'll notice I didn't manage to get the face into ink at all; I think because part of me was thinking I should bring in heavier shading, and also maybe partly because I didn't really clarify the eyebrows vs the seam at the top of the eyelid--that's where the trouble really started when it came to putting it down in ink, anyway. Although maybe it also wasn't really the right expression for this situation, either. Anyway it was a nice face, at least I got a photo I guess. :P
 
While brooding for a while over that I also remembered that I had once again forgotten to plan out any real dramatic of abstraction of the black and white forms, urrr--but I could at least still go in and clear out some of the extraneous detail, so from this (which was posted on the site briefly)
 
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I removed the horizon line, the bolts in the sky--adding some more laser turret fizz (if you'll excuse the technical term) to take their place--and some of the lower part of Selenis' outline. That did bring the design together a little more, at least.
 
 
 
 
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  To Etsy or not to EtsyApr 02, 2013 10:28 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A friend of mine suggested I try selling some of my work on Etsy. I took a look and wasn't sure I had much that was Etsy-esque, exactly, so I thought if I had time I'd try doing some little pieces more in that vein, and maybe eventually round up the better ones and try them there. Then I looked into it more and you actually have to pay to put stuff on their site?! The barbarity! Sigh. Well maybe I'll try a few. Anyway I had a little time today so I drew this--which is, mind you, for the time being available for sale on this very A* site--here--rather than any other:
 
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I didn't set out to draw Selenis but it isn't really surprising at this point that she sort of comes out anyway! So there we are.
 
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I wasn't sure the straight-on view I sketched for today's A* page was dynamic enough, so I tried starting up a second sketch, but that wasn't going anywhere at all--sometimes I just get my heart stuck on a sketch despite perceived shortcomings, and any variant I try just won't come out because my heart is still set on the first one. So at least I recognized fairly quickly that that was happening today and didn't waste too much time fighting myself. :P The pencil sketch:
 
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  In one week, out the otherApr 01, 2013 11:20 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Oh Monday, I see I forgot most of the stuff about the way I wanted to ink things that I'd finally started working out at the end of last week; don't try to model things like this, for instance:
 
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Hum! Oh well there's always tomorrow. Incidentally, my blog posts may be extra boring this week, or something--trying to make myself stick to a sort of schedule! : o
 
 
 
 
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