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  The burning threat posed by Greek statuesJun 01, 2010 8:45 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Boy howdy (that's the kind of clever thing we say here in the West) that last one took me forever. You'd think just drawing a character close-up would be pretty straightforward, but nooo... For some reason I just wasn't getting it working, and ended up redrawing it--except for some eye bits--about 4 times. Since I'd like to at least get something out of those otherwise wasted versions, I'll show you the third one; it was going to be the final, but then I flipped back to the first one, and there was just something about it that seemed more compelling, so finally I redrew most of the first one again, and that became page 78. Here's that previous, third attempt:
 
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(Notice it shares some of the eye on the left with the final version.) Now, that one's fairly polished, and I could have used it in a pinch, but it's also in a sort of smoothed, simplified cartoonish style that I'm continually trying to get away from, whereas something about the eyes in what became the version I went with struck me as much more realistic, almost like a high-contrast b&w photo; in fact I'm almost certain they remind me of a specific photo or movie character or something but I can't seem to figure it out!
 
Guess I'll have to sleep on it. I've got a lot of other stuff I really want to talk about, including some very cool art by other people to show you, more rambling about my struggles with cartoonishness vs realism, and the other comics I spent pretty much the whole weekend on, BUT... It looks like that'll have to wait for tomorrow. :P
 
Oh! I was going to say though that that alternate version of page 78 there (which lives from now on in the episode 9 gallery) struck me as kind of classical Greekish in its strong abstraction of forms--that big straight nose, for instance--and maybe that isn't such a coincidence, because part of what I wasted so much time on today was another long Wikipedia "research" ramble, which among things like Suleiman the Great's slave-made-wife, his great sea-captain Barbarossa (not to be confused with the earlier Holy Roman Emperor), the Spanish Empire, the Ottoman empire, female corsairs, and browser-history-knows what else (checking: oh yeah: T. E. Lawrence, Knights of Malta, Crusader castles, John of Austria aka Don Juan of Austria (charming illegitimate son of emperor Charles V), the Hapsburgs, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the replica Parthenon and its giant gilded statue of Athena Parthenos in Nashville, electrum, Artemis, Diane, Hecate, and, originally, Seléne, the ancient Greek moon goddess, whose name means "moon" and which is where A* bounty hunter Selenis' name comes from. So yeah maybe the down side of looking at too many Greek statues is that you end up drawing everyone like a Greek statue. :P
 
I'm not going to show you the other two failed versions of page 78, because they are horrible. >_<
 
 
 
 
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