Added 1 new A* page:I have to thank blog author Jason of Carpe Chaos for including A* on his reading list some months back. He also had some interesting things to say about the comic, and the experience of reading it. Much appreciated!
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I've been struggling to find a new work chair for the past week or so since finding my old one of however-many-years was slowly murdering my leg muscles (although this may be related to having a swivel chair on a rather uneven floor :P), and I was coming to the conclusion that the proper type of chair for tablet-using computer artists simply did not exist.
See back in the day (1893 Norway, for instance), there were drawing tables (or drafting tables or whatever you call 'em):
(source)
(By the way, the Wikipedia drawing board page mentions that the "back to the drawing board" expression was actually coined in a comic! A 1941 entry in The New Yorker by Peter Arno, and you can see the comic right here.)
And illustrators still seem to use drawing tables--I have seen artists leaning on them in photos! Not that I seem to have any of said photos handy...--although nowadays they're much more horizontally inclined; but I guess the idea is you have maybe a sort of high stool, and then you lean your elbows on lower part of the tilted table surface, and draw on it. This seems wrong for all sorts of ergonomic reasons, but it definitely does one thing right that I have rediscovered on the past day or two is of prime importance in a drawing workspace: keeping your wrist straight while drawing!
Now in this newfangled electronic age, people have had the idea of perching computer monitors at the high ends of those tables, and maybe sticking a retractable shallow drawer at the low end for a keyboard to sit in, as in this model, but I wonder how well that works. After all, the point of a drawing table is to look at the table as you draw on it, but when you're using, say, a tablet for computer drawing, you're not looking at the tablet, but at the screen, and trying to look up while drawing with the tablet propped on a regular drawing table seems like it'd be asking for major neck cramps, at the very least.
A year or so ago I asked a bunch of other webcomic artists what they use to support their drawing surface, and particularly for tablet users, the answers sounded ergonomically terrifying--I think all current webcomic artists will be arthritic wrecks within the space of five years, if the answers I got were at all representative. An entire industry doomed due to lack of proper furniture not having been invented for it!
But then I got to thinking of my old school days, and how we had those desks that would swing in along the side, so you could prop your elbow on them, and then go out to form a nice desk surface in front, all in a single table piece--those were good for drawing, AND they were meant for writing (or drawing, if the teacher wasn't looking) while predominately looking forward, which would work for working on a computer screen. And behold and lo, they still make desks like those, and even in left-handed varieties.
Now you will laugh, but I am seriously considering getting one of those. I guess it will depend on whether or not I can work out a wrist-friendly tablet support position with my current new chair (this would be new chair number 4 now ;P)--the main problem being, I think, the lack of a real connection between armrest and tablet support surface--which is exactly what those old school desks did so well, and why I am kinda wanting one here in my dotage. Sure it probably doesn't have super-keen lower back support, and is probably all the wrong sizes (although the listed dimensions don't look that bad on paper), and lacks any kind of rest for the other arm (that could be a real problem, since I have to use my keyboard once in a while :P), but dang, that tablet arm (they're even *called* "tablet arm" chairs!) looks so nice right now.
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