Added 2 new A* pages:A*'s 1000th news post! Gosh! To think it all started with a very short post back on March 18th, 2009. And here we are, 999 posts later!
NASA celebrated this supermassive milestone (*cough*) by announcing the discovery of millions of supermassive black holes (the article also mentions the A* comic's namesake, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy!) in a new all-sky survey by their Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer ("WISE"). Light gets stretched out into the long infrared wavelengths as it travels across the universe, AND lower-energy light--infrared light--goes through gas and dust more easily than higher energy light, because it vibrates less and is thus less likely to hit something as it moves along, or something like that. AND energy escaping from a black hole tends to be shifted to infrared as well due to...hm well I forget, something to do with the gravity, obviously. So WISE is a good tool for seeing things that might be very far away, obscured by gas and dust, and maybe black-holey--like say the supermassive black holes sitting at the center of galaxies. More specifically, these supermassive black holes are quasars, which means they're actively sucking down material, and in the process creating an energy buildup around themselves, which can be seen from far off by instruments like WISE.
This image shows the overview of WISE's survey, and a zoomed-in view of just one tiny section, showing just how many supermassive black holes, for instance, it found in that one section--"an area about three times larger than the moon":
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA (source)
WISE found about three times as many quasars (or, properly speaking, quasar candidates) as a previous survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This even-more-zoomed-in view shows how the additional quasars WISE spotted were sometimes messy, dust-obscured objects, whereas the smaller subset the visible-light SDSS was able to see (blue-green circles) were quasars that weren't obscured:
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/STScI (source)
WISE also found about "1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever found"; called by the rather awful name "hot DOGs" ("Dust-Obscured Galaxies" :P), these rare objects are emitting twice as much energy as normal quasars--more than 100 trillion times the energy emitted by the Sun. They are thought to be creating stars very rapidly, and there are some theories that they're an important, heretofore unknown step in the galactic evolution, and might even indicate that in galactic formation, the central supermassive black hole forms first, then powers star growth around itself with its intense gravitational vortex. Go, supermassive black holes!
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Another big milestone for me today: I caved in and have gone back the crutch of doing a layout of an A* page in pencil before starting in with ink. I stopped using pencil layouts around page 29 of episode 16, and I've had a lot of fun working only in ink, and it definitely made me learn a lot about ink handling and just how to create images out of whole cloth, as it were--I think it's helped my brush control and planning immensely--but I've also come to realize that there are things that I just won't be able to do *without* pencils--cool things like a white figure outlined in gray, as I did with Selenis' feet behind her flashlight beam in today's page 71. It's also very hard to do complex poses and angles when you can't lay them out in pencil first. So gradually I started to feel like I was getting to the point where not using pencil was holding the art back more than it was helping, and it was time to bite the lead and pick up the ol' mechanical pencil and eraser and get back to filling my old shag carpet with eraser shavings.
A test sketch I did earlier in the day pretty much cinched it: just a quick, very loose 0.5 mm pencil layout, then inked in with a Pentel Pocket Brush brush pen, and finally a bit of graphite shading added with a 2 mm lead holder. It resulted in a very nice, airy look that I realized I've been missing in the all-ink pages; working only in ink, it's hard to skip and leave gaps in your structures, so things tend--at least for me--to feel a bit too heavy and solid all the time.
I even thought maybe I could start doing shading with pencils, you know do a sort of hip multimedia approach :P, but it turned out that the pencils didn't scan very well--kind of all speckly. You can't see it too much at the size at which the A* comics appear (relative to this tiny little test sketch):
but at subscriber HD size the graphite speckliness starts to become apparent
and at larger sizes it's pretty bad--this is about 300 dpi (I scan at 1200 dpi):
which is a shame because it looks pretty good in person! But maybe it's just as well, since the pencil might smear at some point. I'll just have to stick to ink wash shading, which is fine. Anyway the ink part of the test worked well, and was of a quality I haven't been able to get working just in ink, so at that point I knew I needed to dig my old pencil out.
Thinking about that, though, reminded me that the thick handle on these big brushes I've been using lately has completely banished any of the wrist stiffness I used to get from drawing all day, and I wouldn't want to go back to my old mechanical pencil and have that problem come back. It's an old plastic one--so old any brand name it used to have has long since rubbed off, but I think maybe it's a Pentel, since it advances the lead with a nifty side button, and googling that resulted almost exclusively in Pentel models showing up, although they don't look quite like mine--which is one that I think I've had since high school, and maybe even since middle school, which would make it 20-25 years old. =o
And still going strong! But not as far as the wrist thing goes, and it seems like the like triangular grip things they used to make to stick around pencils and pens for an easier grip aren't very easy to find anymore, so I got to looking into what else I could do. As far as mechanical pencils with thick grips go, there's Paper Mate's "PhD" line, which I've seen in my local stores, but...well, I haven't used Paper Mate stuff since the old "erasable" blue pens back...uh 25 years ago, and those left kind of a bad taste in my youthful mouth. ;P And then I found out that there are things called "drafting" pencils, which are like mechanical pencils, only with longer tubes at the tip--for drawing along thick rulers, if necessary, and I think also for better visibility of what you're drawing, or at least that's a side benefit--and generally of much higher quality construction. And as it turns out, one of drafting pencils held in the very highest regard is the Japanese Platinum Pro-Use II 05 Drafting Pencil, which has a thick grip section! Sweet. So I impulsively ordered one of those and am anxiously awaiting it. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of coverage of it on the internet--an exciting mystery! You can bet I'll go on way too long about it once I get my mitts on it.
And if it turns out not to fit my silly little hands and wrist well, I guess it'll just join all the many pens I've tried in my embarrassingly large cupboard of art supply shame. :P I can't afford a drafting pencil addiction, though, so I guess I don't need to worry about getting quite as carried away on the pencil front. Not as much as this guy, anyway--now that's an impressive mechanical pencil collection! ==ooo
Oh yeah and here are the pencils and beginnings of inking of page 71; I'm still a bit rusty getting back into this pencil process, but I think you can definitely expect the art to pick up in terms of precision and clarity over what I was able to do with the fun and expressive but sometimes messy ink-only approach:
But I certainly don't regret trying the ink-only route; like I said, it taught me a lot, and if I can remember to keep that sense of freedom and inky expression, just guided a bit by light and loose pencil layouts, I think the art will be on a pretty good course.
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Oh yeah, I also spent way too much time this morning posting some of my favorite art by other people, and some of my own more successful efforts, on my new A* Tumblr. Some you may have seen before but some you almost certainly haven't!
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