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
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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