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  At least it isn't ground-up sapphiresDec 31, 2013 3:00 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Today's page got a little crazy with the spattering and spackling and finger painting, but apparently that had to happen. In a slightly tidier vein, I've put that little Pentel Pocket Brush sketch I did late last week up for auction on eBay, starting at just $0.99--with free shipping, even! You'll recall it looks something like this:
 
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Speaking of shipping, in my usual Monday run to the local post office this morning I found that the self-service mailing robot has revised its prices back down to its old, pre-holiday-rush super-discount prices; I'm not sure why it charges significantly less than USPS shipping calculation formulas say it should be charging, but I'm not gonna argue! So anyway I can set shipping on the A* art I sell on eBay at just $3.95 (and if you buy multiple items together, you only have to pay that once), at least as long as the robot's kindly whim lasts; if it holds, I'll be able to refund the $6 difference to whoever wins the auctions ending this week, which I set up last week under the robot's earlier, more expensive shipping prices.
 
This is slightly offset by my having to raise the starting bid prices for A* pages to $4.99, but my realization at the end of last week that hey, I'm starting to run out of blue watercolor forced me to do some math and face the fact that I need to start the bidding at a price where I'll at least be more or less able to cover the material costs involved in making these wacky pages. So the $0.99 gravy train for lucky bidders has to end (not on the sketch, though!), but hey at least you'll be saving some on shipping, and I won't feel like a loss-leading moron as I ship off your item. : P
 
UPDATE: *** Well it's the next morning and I've chickened out on the $4.99 price point already--back to the $0.99 starting price, whee! There's something so nicely egalitarian and free market about it, I dunno. My one concession to material reality will be adding $2 to the shipping fee to at least cover the cost of the box (I've switched to some really nice and sturdy new boxes, plus they're more compact and have this cool folding, tab-locking opening flap thing) and tape and stuff. ***
 
Also I'd like to thank all the folk who've been bidding on the recent watercolor pages over the past three days or so; I was worried there for a while as they weren't seeing much action last week, but I guess that really was just the holiday effect, and now they're actually doing rather well. Whew! Now I can stick with the watercolor for a while.
 
Yay, 2014! : oo
 
(Oh yeah and regarding watercolor refills and paint prices and all that, I came across an article discussing watercolors that come dry in a little pan vs those that come in tubes, and apparently the pan ones like I've been using work out to "anywhere from three to five times the cost of tube paints." Oh! So instead of getting replacement pans for my blue, I've ordered tubes of my three primary colors: Ultramarine Blue (Green Shade), Winsor Green (Blue Shade), and Quinacridone Magenta; in (color) theory, I should use more of a proper red than a magenta, but the watercolor reds I've tried haven't impressed me with brilliant color--and anyway I like magenta. Color wheel be darned!)
 
 
 
 
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  Them Ultramarine BluesDec 28, 2013 4:42 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Character design sketches with the Carbon Pen:
 
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Can you tell which one I settled on? Does today's page hold a clue? :p
 
I'm kind of missing the neatness of ink, how, you know, it's easy to get it so it's all one solid tone, not all internally messy like ink wash or watercolor. Tried the extra-pointy 8408 brush I mentioned uh maybe yesterday with ink--to my surprise, after it didn't work well at all with watercolor, it did work pretty well with ink:
 
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More ink, this time from the Pentel Pocket Brush (which doesn't do brushy very well, but does do solid all right):
 
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Hm I wonder if I should put that up as a 99 cent auction on eBay. Although I may have to raise my starting price for regular A* page auctions to something more than 99 cents, or switch to ink for shadows rather than doing "black" with a color, because somewhat to my shock I found today that in a week or so of blue shading I've already carved pretty much clear through my half-pan of Ultramarine Blue (Green Shade):
 
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Eek. Guess I'll have to order another one or three already, although given that they cost $8 a pop, I'm not sure how this is going to work out, economically. : p Meanwhile I could probably just dump the redder blue to the left of it, I don't really like that one--probably the purple next to that, too, come to think of it, although possibly I'll come up with some use for that one.
 
 
 
 
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  Sketch CarbonationDec 27, 2013 12:40 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Whoops, I just noticed I probably drew this guy way too similarly to the guy on the beach. Uh. His pecs are totally different. Also his chin and hair, kinda. Yeah. He looked unmistakeably different at first, but it was different in a badly drawn mutant sort of way, so I redrew his head and it came out um more like every other head I draw, neat.
 
Sketches! More agonizing over whether or not to go crawling back to pen--but I can't really see black ink working well on these, I think it would really break up the whole lighting effect you get with watercolors. Anyway I pulled out my old Carbon Pen that I got back when I was in the midst of my big pen obsession uh a year or more ago now, probably. It's got a metal nib point, a tiny "extra fine" one, but it doesn't gouge into paper like most metal nibs I've tried, and it also takes ink cartridges, so you don't have to dip it in ink and risk spattering and dripping and all that. Hadn't used it in ages but it started up just fine (whereas my School G that lots of people seem to swear by, which I used much more recently, is totally clogged now, pfft), and it draws a heck of a nicer line than those fiber-tipped Tikky Graphic pens I'd been using for sketches and stuff. Like, ridiculously nicer; it basically fixes the things that were bugging me with the Tikkys: lines breaking up, and pooling at corners, primarily. And it glides and writes much nicer on hard paper, like the Bristol I've been using for watercolors. (The sketchbook here is softer paper though.) Its specially formulated ink has great flow, but isn't the darkest black ink in existence; it is nicely waterproof, at least, which is highly unusual for fountain pens.
 
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But then I went and tried inking with it over some pencil sketches, and although it moves multidirectionally much more easily than most metal nibs I've tried, it still doesn't *quite* move any which way with equal freedom, and I wasn't able to match the flow of the pencil lines. And then I did this little pencil sketch
 
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and realized there was no way I was gonna be able to ink that effectively with anything. : P Go go pencil power!
 
I may try some more sketchbook sketching with the Carbon Pen, though. And as far as inking in the actual A* pages goes, lately I've been semi-inking some of the lines with watercolor, which I'm finding nice to use--it's so thin it flows into fine lines effortlessly, whereas the very black ink I use is a bit on the thick side, and can be tough to get down in thin lines; I could water it down, of course, but I can't really bring myself to do that and lose the inky blackness. : P
 
EDIT: Oh yeah and my 8408 brush came, which is basically a skinnier version of the 8404 I've been using; intended for fine linework, the tip really does go down to a single hair tip. But when I tried it with watercolor, I guess it just didn't hold enough fluid to push color through that narrow tip, because I couldn't get consistent fine lines with it. I've yet to try it with ink but I kinda think it'll have even more trouble there.
 
 
 
 
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  Big WashyDec 25, 2013 2:31 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I was afraid I'd overworked the figures in today's page (well, I had) with too much colors and cross-hatching, but it's amazing what a big shady wash will do for you in with watercolors--sort of washes away/unifies the unwanted detail and makes a bold new statement all at the same time. Pretty handy! And I probably wouldn't have come up with this big washy shadow look otherwise, so huzzah for mistakes. : D
 
Also Merry Christmas if that's your thing! I'm taking the day off for the usual seasonal burst of hedonism, but I'll be right back at work on A* on Thursday. In the meanwhile you could check out an initial sketch (it was out of scale and position so had to erase it : P) of Selenis' friend here that I posted earlier on my Tumblr, as well as on my Instagram and my Twitter--but I mention the Tumblr first because if you're looking to kill some extra holiday time, you could check all the other stuff I stick in there, namely a lot of art and stuff by other people that I think is neat.
 
(Hm. I don't usually post versions of drawings I have to erase in the process of working out an A* page because--(well okay mainly because I don't like stopping to get up and fetch the phone/camera)--in general they either end up being a) better than the final version, which is frustrating : PP, or b) worse than the final version, in which case, why show them? In this case, I thought it was pretty good and maybe I *wouldn't* be able to do better, so...I dunno. It did help though because in my next version (which I intentionally didn't take a photo of, because it was a little boring : P), the knee her elbow (and thus chin) was resting on was crossed over the other leg, so it was higher, and thus she wasn't slumped over as much, and didn't look as unamused--and I didn't realize that until I thought to pull up the photo of the earlier version to compare, and from there it was clear the earlier pose had been better, and although I'd now found the correct scale and position for the figure, I should erase it *again* and--keeping the new scale and position--bring back the earlier pose. So I guess the photo was good, even if it made me go back to the drawing board yet again. : P)
 
 
 
 
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  Robots may be coming for you...slowlyDec 23, 2013 11:22 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I'll be plugging away at the drawing board as usual Christmas Eve--tomorrow--but I *will* be taking Christmas off for holiday feasting. I'll be right back at A* on Thursday, though!
 
Science: Google robot wins Pentagon contest tells how a Chinese company (recently acquired by Google) fielded the winning robot in a contest held by DARPA, which revolved around the robots performing a series of tasks that might be useful in a search and rescue / repair operation--this came up as a vital topic after existing robots proved their uselessness as anything other than observers in the recent-ish Japanese tsunami-caused Fukushima nuclear power plant radiation leak. The winning robot triumphed rather handily--with notable failures to accomplish just about anything posted by many of the contestants, including submissions from other US government agencies--and you can see it in video action in the article, showing just how...slow it is, even though it got a strength boost over the competition by using capacitors rather than a just battery for its movement; this is because a capacitor can use up its whole charge all at once--camera flash bulbs are capacitors to deliver that big flash of energy, for instance.
 
So it may be once step closer, but at the rate its going, I guess we don't need to worry about *this* generation of robots being the one that takes over the world...unless they're already doing it so slowly that we can't see it happening. >_>
 
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  The NeckcrackerDec 21, 2013 6:46 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Or heck here's the whole thing rotated 90 degrees to save your neck:
 
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  Dear Watercolor <3Dec 20, 2013 4:09 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:You always hear people talk about how difficult watercolor is. You know what? Try ink wash for a year, and then watercolor will feel like a walk in Sunshine Park. Because once the ink is down, it is down, but watercolor--you can move that stuff around for, like, days. Well, minutes. If you don't like how it went, you just shift it, or mix in a dash of water or color; it's like your own liquid CTRL+Z. And those poolings or overlappings that would be ugly blotches in ink? Rainbows, man--freakin' *rainbows*.
 
Yeah I just fell in love with watercolor. Realized I'd been overdoing it on the previous pages; two base colors is all you need for just about anything. And I didn't touch a *drop* of black ink to it, because, psh.
 
Also, about three days ago my signature suddenly started flowing. Like, the "C" and the "h" at the beginning are just two rollercoaster loops now; I'm not even sure how that happens but it sure goes down smooth.
 
 
 
 
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  I thought selling out was supposed to be easyDec 19, 2013 4:16 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Another wacky traditional/digital art hybrid for today's page : P. I got worried after doing watercolor or pencil and watercolor for the last two pages, because well nobody has ever bought any of my artwork that didn't have ink in it, and those pages have been no exception so far--whereas nearly all the stuff with some sort of blank ink in it has sold lately. So I thought I should put ink in, and even went back over yesterday's page and inked it, with maybe mixed results as you can see if you turn back to it (you might have to refresh your browser's view of it). If you've forgotten, here's what it looked like in pencil:
 
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Now, another reason I inked that one, and pretty heavily, is that the one I had done with heavy inking a few days ago, looking totally different than the final version of that page in the comic
 
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is doing relatively well on eBay. But trying to repeat that fat inking didn't turn out so hot (although admittedly this second page is more zoomed out, which probably makes the thick ink lines less appropriate, and also it's messier with the pencils because I put watercolor over the pencils instead of replacing the pencil lines with ink *before* going in with watercolor). I was a little worried my brush's point was already getting worn out, so I did a test sketch a couple inches wide, trying for delicate lines:
 
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Seemed like the brush was okay (although I did just before that finally order the extra-pointy version of these Raphael brushes I use, that'll be interesting to try out), I'd just been ham-fisting it, maybe a bit out of practice what with all the pen and digital work lately. So I went over today's watercolors fairly delicately with the ink, not screwing up too bad for the most part I think. : P But I'll confess I'm massively conflicted about what approach to take, particularly for the traditional art side. Like, I'm pretty sure now that I won't be happy with the final output unless I get to do some digital polygonal Lasso Tool work over it to sharpen things up where they need it, but to what degree should I do that, and how should the traditional art be executed? The pen work was selling pretty well, for instance, and it's pretty fast and zippy to do
 
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and if I'm careful it can be incorporated pretty well into lasso work (this is the last page of last episode):
 
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Or there's the heavier hybrid watercolor merged with pencil lines under lasso outlines thing I tried a few days ago, but that results in a rather loosey-goosey-looking original art piece due to the need to avoid ink lines...although I could try doing it *with* them, I suppose. Then at the other end of the spectrum there's pure lasso work based off pencils; for instance, I think page 8
 
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was one of the most successful pieces I've done in a while, and nary a whiff of the original artwork comes through (although even more confusingly, its bizarre hybrid brush/pen ink job sold okay). Will the original art for today's page, which is much more on the loose watercolor side of things, and which took a lot longer to make, do as well? Would the sort of richer final page it helped generate have improved the bold flat look of page 8? Will I ever be able to loosen up and sort of go big and gestural and abstract with the watercolor, and to any good effect? Because I've been doing a bit too much careful filling in of things with it to be really interesting, I think.
 
Hum. I suppose I can't read too much into sales results based on such a small sampling, but darn it, the temptation is there because working toward some kind of income from A* artwork is vital if I'm going to keep this up really long term. But really the only conclusion I've been able to draw up on my own this evening is that the approach I take to the traditional art depends heavily on the subject at hand: big brush strokes work better for close-ups, for instance, and maybe watercolor showing through fills works best for filling out large shaded sides of things, I dunno. I suppose tomorrow I'll end up doing some other permutation of all these variables! : oo
 
 
 
 
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  Makin' a mess of thingsDec 18, 2013 12:27 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Just ended up going whole hog with the pencil and watercolor today--this way I can simply use an eraser to remove the lines that don't need to be delineating things, like on the right side of the head and neck of Selenis' self-appointed new friend. Got a bit messy in places...maybe I need to start to learn to use messiness properly instead of hiding behind nice tidy digital translations, I dunno! Was pretty fun though, I guess it's definitely more expressive this way, not having to try to convert my pencils to something else and somehow preserve all the nuances of expression along the way. Was so into letting things go I even left my signature in there, bam.
 
Hey while I'm being full of myself, I was totally mentioned in a video! That makes me real! It was the nice folks behind the fightin' mad Webcomic Underdogs group, who mentioned A* smack dab in the middle of an interview right here. Thanks, Underdogs!
 
Ooh hey I'm behind on showing my sketches here; I'd be more behind, only I've been slacking and not doing as many warm-up sketches as I should'a been; in fact, the second one of these isn't even a recent thing, but just a small pencil sketch I dug up while organizing my miscellaneous pile-o-art shelf--actually I've probably shown it before, but thanks to the magic of my bad memory, it's new to me---and maybe to you!
 
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(That first one was just drawn with a black pen, but whatever Instagram filter I used made it look a funky glowy blue. I kinda like that one.)
 
 
 
 
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  Lasso'ed pencils and watercolorDec 17, 2013 1:06 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:After the ink & watercolor drawing I worked up from the previous A* page, I thought maybe I'd leave out the ink and try to take the actual physical, original artwork into a "no lines" style like what I've been doing with the digital coloring; watercolor painting is generally done with not much for lines, after all. Not that I know much about watercolor painting really! But that didn't stop me from giving it a shot, and then it occurred to me that I could take that watercolor, scan it in, and use it as a fill for the digital fill. Why? I dunno... Because! : D So it sort of went like this:
 
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Ie I scanned the pencils, pulled them back out and painted purple watercolor over them (pulled back with white ink here and there), erased the pencil, scanned the watercolors, created a digital fill based on the pencil lines using Photoshop's Lasso Tool, then layered the scanned pencil and watercolor layers into that lasso-cropped fill. And it kinda worked out I think; the watercolor gives the fill a volumetric, organic quality it wouldn't have had otherwise, and the pencil lines make the polygonal fill lines a little more natural-looking in spots, and give the watercolors some weight and definition, particularly for facial detail. In retrospect I suppose I could have scanned the pencils and watercolors together (I mean, waited until I did the watercolors over the pencils, and then not erased the pencils), but it isn't like I had this planned out exactly or anything. : p But it did seem to fit together surprisingly well; heck, I didn't even have to adjust the color or value of the scanned lines or watercolor, they worked fine straight out of the scanner and just set to "Multiply" over everything.
 
Oh and the final step was cropping out some of the distracting pencil lines around Selenis' neck, and the guy's hand. Outputting the final version was slightly tricky; normally I'd have done it as a jpeg, but dark blue in particular comes out really blurry in jpegs; ended up going with a 256-color PNG.
 
 
 
 
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  Watercolorsh!Dec 14, 2013 9:55 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Instead of just sort of duplicating it with pens, I decided I'd pull my old brushes and watercolors out and play with them over the pencil sketch:
 
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Not that I'm very good at it, but watercolor's pretty fun! Also have some little tubes of gouache that've just been sitting around (I last used used these things in a brief flirtation with traditional coloring early in episode 18), those are slightly trickier to use over ink but maybe I'll try playing with them a bit next week. Or is this just silly? Whee, colors! : D (Also this is the very first watercolor piece I've ever put up for auction! : o)
 
 
 
 
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  Process, process, processDec 13, 2013 10:37 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Okay, so I tried the new process today, namely scanning the pencils, then inking the pencils, then coloring from the pencils, ie
 
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Weird, huh? But it seems to work, more or less; each medium has its own advantages. I think I need to improve most with the pen; today I tried using a single pen for the whole thing, rather than different tip sizes for depth and emphasis and so forth, and that did give it a more cohesive look, but I think it's still a little too...facile. I need to get down and dirty with it, really work that pen. Hm, maybe tomorrow I'll make myself fill in the dark areas with a "big brush" marker, that would force a different take, and could help give me shading ideas for the coloring.
 
EDIT: Oh. Ohhh. I thought of something much more radical to do for the inking stage. Heeheeheeee. This is gonna be fun. : D
 
 
 
 
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  Pencils surprise victors in pen/brush meleeDec 12, 2013 9:21 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Tried using my tiniest brush instead of pens today, and...it didn't work at all. At all. I hadn't realized it, but in the week and a half that I've been inking with pens, I've already gotten used to their increased accuracy and responsiveness vs a brush--a brush is plenty fun to freehand with, but now that I'm putting more and more work into my pencils, apparently what I need most of all is sheer accuracy in translating the graphite into a more permanent form, and for me the pen is way better at that.
 
Here were the pencils:
 
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And it was a darn good thing I took that photo, because as I said the brush inking kind of got away from that exact image I'd wanted; I went in over the brush marks with a pen to touch it up, and that helped (you can check out my unusual pen/brush hybrid inked original page in its auction on eBay), but certain details were no longer where I needed them to be. So, for the digital coloring, I worked from the photo of the pencils, rather than the scan of the inks.
 
And that worked really well. In fact, I'm thinking that tomorrow I'll try scanning the pencils, and coloring based from those. I may still need the inks if I want to add in some organic lines, so I'll have those, too--and now that I'll have the pencils as the primary coloring template, I can kind of cut loose on the inks, that'll be fun : ). But the pencils should be the most accurate for the coloring; for instance, those lines around Selenis' eye were traced with the polygonal Lasso Tool from a selection of the pencil lines--I'd been unable to get quite that same look from her any other way.
 
Pretty stoked about the results I got and hopefully will get from this method. Only down side so far is that it's taking me a good deal of time, but eh...well, first you get good (I'll settle for halfway decent!), then you get fast, the comic pundits on the podcasts always say. We'll see if they know what they're talking about, I guess! Uh, eventually.
 
 
 
 
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  The smallest brushDec 11, 2013 6:37 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Spent a long time agonizing over the lines in today's page--that's right, the ones you don't see. I'd actually tried a few new things with them (as you can see in the original art), like confining the shading to relatively tidy little arrays of parallel lines, and using a large Faber-Castell "big brush" pen to fill in a large black area. None of that would really matter with this no-liney style I've been using for the past week or so, except that it seemed like the page really needed some lines. So I was gonna let the lines come through for a while, here's what that would have looked like:
 
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But I dunno, I don't think I've got my pen lines quite smooth enough. So I ended up just tracing a few key lines with the polygonal Lasso Tool, and I'm not sure why it took me so long to think to do that, since I did it in yesterday's page. : P Duh.
 
It's funny because the first page of this pen work--the last page of last episode--has kind of a mess of cross-hatched lines that I didn't really plan out all that well, but somehow I like the lines there. Maybe it's because they fit the mood and action of the image, whereas in images with less motion I'm less tolerant of lines being scratchy and all over the place. Or maybe it's because I went in heavier and a bit more chaotically and I've been getting too tight and regimented with them lately, which goes right against the idea behind trying the pen, which was to work on being sketchy. I'm still going the wrong direction on that.
 
Not for lack of practice sketches, though! Here are the ones from today:
 
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^ That last one was actually from last week or something, but the black around it is new, that was me testing out the "big brush" pen to see how it would work in conjunction with the finer pens. It worked pretty well, in fact it made this sketch look a whole lot better--decent enough to take a photo of finally, at least. ; ) (Also for this last one I'd found Instagram's sorta hidden "Advanced" camera and "high quality processing" options... Does that one look a little sharper / less jpeggy? Not sure really. I should have stuck with my usual "Lo-Fi" filter on these, though; "Inkwell" wasn't giving quite as much contrast.)
 
After coloring the A* page and wondering about the line quality of the pen lines, it occurred to me that I've got a bunch of small (size "0") brushes laying around, because the place I've been buying my usual size 4 brushes from has been including a small brush along with the bigger brush, for free (right here). And part of the reason why I switched from the brush to pens here was that I didn't think I'd be able to do a lot of fine linework in a bright environment like this beach with my regular brush. But a smaller brush, hm... So I tested out the size 0 brush with some smallish sketches
 
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and those seemed to go pretty well--the small arrays of shading lines take a little more effort than with the pens, maybe, and maybe aren't *quite* as thin, but they're smoother than my pen lines. Also you get that playful thick-to-thin line stuff going on that you can't really do with a pen. So, hm. I think I'll try using the small brush for the linework tomorrow; still going to try to bring in that sketchy energy, too, we'll see if I have better luck doing that with the brush than with the pens.
 
 
 
 
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  Episode 20 e-book availableDec 10, 2013 3:12 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Finally got the episode 20 e-book posted--it's the first one all in color! You can get it on the episodes & e-books page; as always, the price is up to you.
 
Warm-up sketches from today:
 
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Gotta work on my focus. :P
 
 
 
 
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  Sketch Blitz!Dec 07, 2013 10:38 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Oh my gosh, Christmas came early for me this year 'cause a ridiculously generous reader got me the second volume in IDW's giant-sized "Definitive Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim" series of Alex Raymond's gorgeous 1930s Sunday comics, which I had just put on A*'s Amazon Wish List. These collections are amazing, and this is great timing since I just finished pouring through the first volume like yesterday. Thank you dear reader!! I'll have photos and stuff about this volume in the blog next week--skimming through it I think I spotted the strip in which Raymond switched to drawing from live models, which makes a really interesting transition in his art.
 
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I finally got around to posting my backlog of sketches from the past week, when pen testing and my plunging into warm-up sketches suddenly produced a pile of them. Because I try to keep my computer off during the day (darn those internet distractions, you know), I just take them with my cell phone and post them through that to my Instagram, which is kind of a new thing for me. And I use the Instagram app to cross-post them to my Twitter and my Tumblr, in case you want to follow any of those things. I won't pack all of them into this one blog post--just the ones that turned out at least fairly decently. : P Actually I've even tried an experiment and put what I think are the two pretty keen ones up for auction on eBay, starting at just $0.99, with free shipping (I can just pop them in an envelope and send them out in the regular mail : ). Those two, with links to their auctions, are:
 
"Line Portrait" - This was a practice sketch I did earlier in the week with the thickest Tikky Graphic pen, the 0.8 mm one--and also just testing the quick line response of that and I think maybe a few other "fineliner"-style markers, which often have trouble with ink flow when drawing fast lines--the very "wet" Tikky Graphics are the best I've found at it:
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"Beat Cop" - A test sketch with the 0.3 mm Tikky Graphic that I did late last night; I'd been using the 0.8 mm for the past few A* pages, but then kinda realized it was too thick for what I was trying to do. The 0.3 may end up being my main drawing size, with the 0.1 mm for finer/lighter details.
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I'm not sure why it ended up being a cop but I like the light and sketchy way it came out; at that point I was frustrated that the previous two A* pages--done mostly with the thicker 0.8 pen--had come out looking slower and heavier than I'd kind of like. I'm still struggling to keep the light and sketchy feel in the more complicated drawings I do over pencils for the A* pages, thus this making myself do warm-up sketches to try to get in the flow. After this sketch turned out much more in the style I'd like I was tempted to try doing the next A* page with pen only, no pencil first, like I did a lot of brush-first pages back around episodes 16/17, but I also remembered that that didn't really work for doing anything beyond very basic layouts and poses. So I guess I'll just have to keep trying to get myself to stay in the sketchy mode and not be so precious while going over pencils, hrmph.
 
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^ A maybe 0.3 Tikky sketch hiding among a page of bad sketches that I did last weekend; I'm not sure why they ended up being an archer : ) but this is really the sketchy style I wish I could pull off consistently.
 
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^ The page of brush pen sketches I did on Sunday after finally getting myself another Pentel Pocket Brush Pen (the plastic bristles on the one I'd gotten a year or so earlier to experiment with had broken down really quickly : P); it's also the page of sketches that convinced me that maybe I *should* try pens again vs brushes, since the particularly mushy feel of the Pocket Brush bristles was just a big disappointment, guess I'd forgotten how they felt. The sable brushes I've been using for A* feel much better, but even they can't do the hard, snappy, sketchy stuff I'd like to play with.
 
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^ From last weekend, just experimenting with the different tip sizes of the Tikky Graphic pens I have: the ones I got (and which have mostly been sitting in my art supply cupboard of shame for the past year or so) are 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, and 0.8, although they also come in sizes between those; this page has 0.3 on top, 0.1 on the bottom, and 0.5 in the one at the middle left.
 
Oh yeah I forgot to mention that if you see a sketch that strikes you, and it isn't one that's currently up for auction, feel free to email me to see if I still have it, 'cause for like $5 I will happily tear it out of my sketchbook and mail it to you.
 
Oh and I forgot to mention, the sketchbook in question is a decades-old recycled, acid-free 110 lb Robert Bateman Cover Series sketchbook from a cache I bought back in my school days--was pleased/amazed to find they're even still making these things! Although the old ones have much whiter paper than the newer ones, which are leaning toward a light gray. I'm using larger format newer ones for the main A* pages now, since they take pen lines particularly well--I'll have to do a blog post on these sketchbooks some time, I like 'em.
 
 
 
 
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  I was up all night drawing and have no blogDec 06, 2013 7:18 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Today I learned--a little belatedly--that this no-liney polygonal approach is trickier than it first appeared yesterday, where I had the advantage of working in silhouette; when you have the light on the side, on the other hand, you actually have to, like, define surfaces instead of just shapes, and also you don't get that magical eclipse glow that sort of masks a lot of things for you. The glow had also let me carve off the edges of the figures with light, slimming them, and I liked that result--but now I have to learn how to do it when the light is at a wider angle; with the light coming from the side for this page I didn't have that eclipsing glow to trim the figures for me. Of course, if I learned to draw the figures how I wanted them in the first place instead of letting my pencil and pen lines sort of bulge all over the place, this wouldn't be a problem. : P I've been aware for some time now that I haven't been getting the leanness and angularity I'd like in my hand-drawn lines, but I haven't really been able to figure out how to make it come naturally as I draw. Maybe I should just pretend that everything I draw is eclipsing the Sun!
 
I realized also after defaulting to doing it that with this approach you don't want to use counter-reflection in most cases, because that just complicates everything; keep the highlights just on one side of the figure. I default to drawing counter-reflections in, and once I realized this wasn't working well in this I had to spend a lot of time editing the left-side highlights back out. And sometimes for legibility you'll have to do something that doesn't strictly obey the light source: in page 4 here for instance I ended up having to put some outlines to the right (illuminated) side of this new character on the right, and I had to leave her face a little more illuminated than it should be, in order to show her eye looking at Selenis. Maybe if I planned this stuff out better I wouldn't have to cheat like that. I also had like sand in the background and stuff but in the end it just seemed either dull or distracting. So hm yeah composition is gonna be extra important with this style, apparently.
 
 
 
 
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  Lasso's RevengeDec 05, 2013 2:20 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Today as a final experiment after coloring, I again tried removing the line art just for fun, and...it worked. With just the colors. It worked really well.
 
I think this is pretty keen because it means that the whole process--pencils, inking, and coloring--becomes a progressive boiling down to some sort of essence of the thing. The colors--drawn in this case with the polygonal Lasso Tool--couldn't come out that way without the zippy lines of the pen to work from, and the pen lines wouldn't come out that way without the florid, repeatedly erased and redrawn pencils that came first.
 
Plus it makes for really tiny file sizes so the pages load super-fast. : )
 
Here's the magic trick:
 
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Lines, add colors, remove lines, hey presto!
 
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By the way, to help keep the zip in my ink lines I'm finally making myself do the warm-up sketches I've been saying I should do but never doing for like a year now. And I'm taking suggestions for what to draw. Gimme some ideas by tweeting @smbhax. Today's was "Raccoon on a Bicycle," suggested by @gilbertandgrim:
 
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  The Tyranny of LinesDec 04, 2013 3:31 AM PST | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Just the colors with the lines removed:
 
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...What the heck am I drawing all these lines for, anyway? : P
 
I think I'm still not quite hitting these pen lines with the confidence I'd like, but I suppose that will come. Another thing that it took me a while to realize sometimes leads to drawing frustration is static or mostly static pages--like this one, where it is very intentionally supposed to be inert; I always feel like I have some trouble generating interest--my own, the subject's, the viewer's--in pages without some sort of implied motion. Like, I was starting to hit that unmoving wall during those conversations at the end of the last episode. So I gotta remind myself to find ways to inject motion whenever possible, even if its just a slightly turning head or blowing hair. Didn't allow myself to do it in this page; next page, though--!
 
 
 
 
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  The Way of the PenDec 03, 2013 3:55 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:End of episode 20!
 
Trying out a new inking method, too--well not entirely new, because I used pens for parts of the ink work way back around episode 16--line detail on the back of the rocket there, for instance. But this time around I'm using different pens--these are Rotring Tikky Graphic pens, which have a much "juicier" line than most "fineliner"-type markers, which means that I can make big drawing motions and the ink flow keeps up with my hand, rather than skipping--and I'm going to try to use them in a more stylistic, expressive way, sort of like some of what I did when I was working solely in pencil last episode. With a bit of practice I think they'll give me a nicer line quality than what I've been able to get with brushes--and I'll still be using brushes for certain effects, and big black areas; I didn't use any brush in today's page because it's sort of a dissolve to white, so I kept it light.
 
Speaking of which, I wasn't quite sure what line width pen I wanted to start with in today's image--I have these pens in 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, and 0.8 mm tip sizes--so I did a test sketch with the 0.5, sighting from the pencils, approximating the same scale:
 
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I decided that was a bit too thick, and went with the 0.3 for the main outline instead. In retrospect, though, I think I'll mostly use the larger sizes for main figures like that, get a bit of a bolder look. And I like the expressive lines of the sketch; my final pages almost never seem to come out with that same freedom, I suppose because I cramp up or I get too locked into following the pencils closely. Maybe I should actually do the final inking not directly over the pencils, but on a separate piece of paper, just sight sketching from them. Hm. I suppose I could give that a shot, after all it just costs a sheet of paper.
 
Speaking of paper, it was sketching in my sketchbook, a little 5"x7" Robert Bateman thing with thick and soft 110 lb recycled paper--I got a bundle of these back in high school, and this is one of them, which makes it like 20 years old! still looks like new, though; I never used them much aside from a sketch of a tower in Scotland (or was it Ireland?) and people at the airport on my trip over there...no idea what I did with those sketches. Anyway what I meant to say was that it was sketching in that sketchbook with the pens over the weekend especially that convinced me I should give it a try for A*, they just had a great feel and nice solid line on that paper. So I wasn't too surprised when I tried them on my regular A* paper--Canson Bristol--and they didn't work as well, I guess because the purpose of Bristol is to be hard and smooth, whereas a softer, slightly fuzzy paper is what will take marker lines much more effectively: paper like the sketchbook! So I looked and wouldn't you know, they come in a whopping 14"x17" size, just right for an A* page (actually two, slicing it in half), and the art store across town had them in stock!
 
Lucky day, I thought, rushing over there. Until, paused in some unexpected traffic, I noticed a carload of gaily caparisoned people disembarking in an adjacent parking lot, their color familiar--the colors of our local football team, in fact...because oh yeah, today they were playing on Monday Night Football, in the stadium that happens to be right between me and the art supply store. Noooooo. Kickoff wasn't for two and a half hours, but it still took me two hours to make the 14-mile round trip there and back. : P
 
Anyway I got the paper (and at least our team stomped the opposition something fierce : PP). It's nice! It's actually darker than the 20-year-old version in my smaller notebooks, although it's actually kind of easy on the eyes, a nice neutral light gray rather than the slight off-white yellow that even the whitest papers usually are. And it takes the pen lines just as thirstily and solidly as the old stuff, which is the main thing.
 
So, I think this will be fun. Might also be a life-saver for the next episode--starting tomorrow!!--because it's going to have a lot of very bright scenes, and I was a little worried about trying to get that across with brushwork alone, which easily gets a bit heavy. (Actually, come to think of it, what really convinced me to give pens another try was that I finally gave way to temptation and picked up another Pentel Pocket Brush brush pen over the weekend, figuring it'd be handy for brushy sketching--and found that it was too brushy, and smushy, and just way less impressive results-wise than I'd been getting with the pen sketches.) Episode 21 will involve some almost literal shark-jumping, so, you know, why not go for it!
 
 
 
 
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