Added 1 new A* page:I know I'm posting too much about boring art stuff, but each week I promise and then fail to keep myself to a schedule that would give me time to both sleep AND post about something I'd actually have to research a bit. Sooo some more art excitement!
I broke a brush today! Perhaps I was discombobulated by the following dilemma: which pencil layout to ink for today's page?
Yeah I'd waffled and ended up doing two pencil layouts: in the first I made the somewhat mistake of second-guessing my initial idea, thinking Selenis seen directly from behind lounging in the chair would be a boring or even indecipherable silhouette, so I turned her a bit to the side; that in fact ended up seeming rather boring, so then I did another sketch, sticking to my initial directly-behind idea--after a few redraws to try to get it halfway right--and that did I think end up being a bit more direct and memorable somehow. So after much wibbling and wobbling I sat down to ink that one.
I inked up my big Japanese sumi-e "Haboku" brush to lay down some of the larger black areas, moved it over my paper--and promptly dropped it. Eep! It somehow managed to avoid hitting the page directly, bounced off the back of my hand--mm, inky--and my drawing table, painted a streak down the side of my bookshelf, kicked off my hand-mirror, knocked a ruler over, and finally came to rest among the eraser shavings on my ancient brown shag carpet.
After a bit of a rinse-off--and clean up of various parts of my room--the brush seemed fine, but when I was all done and went to clean it up, I noticed the brush head sort of shifted a bit--the whole head was loose, and didn't take much coaxing to detach entirely:
That's one ex-Haboku-X! This was the longest I'd used one, since I don't need them for precision work now that I'm using sable brushes for that, so I used it well past the time its tip ceased to hold a point--which isn't very long with these things. I'd kind of been wondering how long it would last--watching it shed a hair every day or two--and now I guess I know. As you can see in that photo, the head has only a few millimeters of blunt end with which to seat itself in the hollow bamboo handle; there was some kind of glue tasked with doing most of the holding, but I guess it just wore out after use, repeated washings, and maybe tonight's eventful drop. Not too surprising given the rapidity with which these things lose their point and bristles, I suppose. But they're pretty cheap, so I guess it works out. Good thing I thought to stock up with two or three spares!
Oh yeah while the brush head itself didn't hit the page, some ink spatter did--you can see it mostly around Val's left hand. That wasn't too bad, in fact I kind of liked it, but later I thought it looked a little lonely, and besides I could use a way to sort of break up the white/black area to her lower left a bit, so I thought I'd accompany the accidental black spatter with some white spatter. That worked pretty well I think, except I forgot how messy little white ink spatters on white paper make when it comes to trying to get a clean scan--they leave shadows. I should have masked off most of the page when going to do the spatter, but I thought I wanted a kind of rough and wild look anyway--and then had a lot of white-on-white spatter shadows to tidy up after scanning. Mmmaybe I'll mask some areas off next time.
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