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  Scene!Feb 11, 2014 1:34 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:The Supermassive Art Sale is off to a pretty good start, with lovely readers like you buying up 16 pages of A* original art over the weekend. : ) What's the Supermassive Art Sale, you ask? Why, simply that all the original art for sale on this site--the actual pigments on paper behind the A* daily comics, and many of the pieces in the episode art galleries--now cost a mere $10 each. Before Saturday, most of 'em were $50! So take advantage and snap up your favorite pieces before I come to my senses. These are one-of-a-kind works, so once someone buys one, it's gone! Just look for the "original art" link next to your favorite comic page or gallery listing.
 
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I was pretty irritated with myself for the previous page (the luau), I guess because I felt like, not having a good idea of a layout that would let me stay in a more preferred drawing mode, I kinda fell back on a wide overhead view with a pretty cartoonish rendering of the scene. I guess that sort of fit the mood of the page, but still it bugged me. Later I did some pen drawings to try to cleanse the palate--also I hadn't tried pens on this heavy watercolor paper I switched to last week:
 
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The pens work pretty good on it! The big black marker in particular soaks in really nice and dark.
 
This morning while waiting for my tirelessly generous father to bring some A* art over (some of the pages people ordered off the site over the weekend were ones we had in a collection we'd been keeping at his place of pieces we've taken around to art shows), I decided to try some costume sketches for the new scene that started in today's A* page; I think I shouldn't try drawing before breakfast but anyway here's one of them:
 
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Toga, toga! Thinking it over later I decided it would be better to go for a more casual sorta silk jammies look or something instead of the Roman thing there. : P
 
I didn't have the full dialogue/staging for this scene written coming into today, and I guess that was worrying me subconsciously because I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't fall back asleep so I lay there thinking about the scene, and then it all sorted itself out in my head and I had to jump up and jot it down, and then I could go back to sleep! Whew.
 
Oh yeah here's a snapshot of the pencils before I doused them with watercolor. I should'a noticed at this stage that the hair part of the head was too big--had to pare it down with the watercolor already one it later, which was a pain--but I tend to have a blind spot for big domes on Selenis:
 
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Also almost inevitably the eyes changed around on me through the "inking" (aka watercoloring) stage. I gotta get better at preventing that, it is really hard to try to fix 'em afterward, bleh. Although I suppose part of where I went wrong was that after I'd "finished" the pencils and sat down to color them, I realized that I needed to color them darker than I'd drawn them--bigger shaded areas and much smaller highlight areas, you know--since this room is supposed to be pretty dark, but then I was too lazy to redraw the shadows, like across the face and stuff, and just colored them in freehand instead. : P Not the smartest!
 
One thing I tried did work pretty well though I think, and that was coloring first with the lighter purple shadow wash across most of the picture, then once that had dried, going in with a smaller brush of darker purple and finally white ink to bring out the details. The first big brush stage goes pretty quick when you only have to worry about one color. : D
 
 
 
 
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