comic | episodes & e-books | store | about
< previous post | next post > | all news from Oct. 2011 News archive | News search | RSS
 
  Stupid Snake (comic), stupid painting, RCW 86Oct 25, 2011 7:30 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Yay that webcomic I'd wanted to link to on Friday, with the really nice grayscale artwork and silent storytelling, is back! It is called Stupid Snake, and I'm linking you there to the first page (one of the few in color, as it happens) since the current latest page is a pretty graphic (and impressively detailed) sequence of skinning a rabbit--so I'll let you work your way up to that one yourself. ;) "Stupid Snake's" story is pretty hard to describe, so I won't try aside from saying that it kinda strikes me as collection of old Norse folk tales gone weird--I mean, even weirder than the old Norse stuff was, which is saying something.
 
Stupid Snake's artwork is exquisite--really masterful use of grays and black lines: the kind of stuff I'd like to be able to do but probably won't ever manage! So yeah, Stupid Snake! Check it out.
 
~~~~~~~~~
 
Today's painting was relatively successful; I only ended up repainting the entire head. >_> This gives kind of an interesting effect since when the white ink I have layers with black ink, you get slightly bluish tones rather than the flat grays the black ink yields by itself. So whoever buys the original of this one (once I have that system in place, I mean :P) will see very slightly blue highlights on the hair; you won't see that in the comic versions since I scan them in in grayscale.
 
Also its looking like some of the originals--like this one, and at least one of the ones I did last week--will have SUPER BONUS alternate layout sketches on the back, since sometimes its easier just to flip the whole darn thing over and start on the other side rather than erasing the one side yet again. ... I have been doing a lot of erasing. Doooh the learning process!
 
EDIT: Okay well after fixing and re-scanning for the head, I decided that the arm was wrong too. Repaint, rescan... I hope that one of these days I'm gonna get better at picking out layout problems in the penciling phase! That would sure save a lot of time. =p
 
Huh and then I had to rescan again because of a piece of lint or something that snuck onto the scanner glass in between scans. :PP
 
~~~~~~~
 
You may notice that the recent painted pages are suddenly sharper; I got tired of them looking a bit fuzzy after I'd reprocessed them without Smart Blur and Unsharp Mask on Friday, so over the weekend I redid them with no blur but way more Unsharp Mask than ever. It's been a couple days and I still like the results from that, so maybe I'll actually end up sticking with these settings. :PP
 
~~~~~~~~~
 
NASA just released a pretty picture, and I suppose it could even be black hole related, since those are often the result of big ones of these:
 
Image
image by NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/CXC/SAO (source)
 
That's a combination multi-wavelength image of supernova remnant RCW 86; the blue and green show where gas superheated to millions of degrees by the supernova is emitting X-rays, and the yellow and red are infrared readings, showing dust that's several hundred degrees below zero, which is still significantly warmer than the rest of space as we know it in our galaxy.
 
RCW 86, 8,000 light years from Earth, is what's left of the oldest recorded supernova in human history: Chinese observers recorded it as a "guest star" that stayed in the sky for eight months in 185 A.D.
 
With these new multi-wavelength observations, scientists have determined that RCW 86 (I think the "RCW" part denotes it as an object described in the RCW Catalogue, a catalogue of space objects put together by Alexander William Rodgers, Colin T. Campbell and John Bartlett Whiteoak in Australia in the '60's) was a white dwarf that sucked enough material off a companion star to grow large enough that the gravitational pull of its own mass caused it either to detonate in a massive fusion reaction, or collapse at near light speed as the weight overcame the degeneracy pressure of its super-dense material, then rebound outward in a massive explosion.
 
Also, there was a bit of a mystery about how RCW 86 had grown so big: it is 85 light years in diameter, which I guess would mean that material from its explosion has been expanding through the interstellar medium around it for the past 2000 years or so at an average of over 2% light speed, which is unusually fast. The new data shows that the white dwarf blew out a strong solar wind before it exploded; the wind blew a "bubble" in space around it, effectively clearing the vicinity for the coming explosion, which could then travel outward faster than usual in the low-density cavity.
 
~~~~~~~~~
 
I said on Friday that I hoped to have the A* subscription system up and running some time this week, but having now had a full night's sleep for the first time in two weeks or so, I kind of like the feeling, so I think I'd better not push myself to try wrapping up the subscription thing too quickly :P; also, I've already got what is for me a large amount of other stuff I have to get done this week, like getting some art together for display at a local venue, and doing a portrait commission that I already put off from last week (bad!). I'll be working away steadily on the subscription stuff, and it will probably be a number of weeks before it's ready to go; as Bobby Bland sings in "Sunday Mornin' Love," "whatever you been doin' woman, take your time and do it right"; I heard that *just* as I was thinking this subject over this afternoon, and it kinda spoke to me--well, the studio version I heard had "baby" instead of "woman," which probably spoke to me a bit more, but still, wise words, I think.
 
And anyway in the meantime there's the subscription preview of giant ad-free comics for free anyway, so I suppose I won't get too many complaints if I take some time getting the real (not quite free) subscription model in place. =p
 
 
 
 
·····
 
 
 
 
 
< previous post | next post > | all news from Oct. 2011 News archive | News search | RSS
 
© Copyright 2024 Ben Chamberlain. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy