Added 1 new A* page:The Internet got me looking through some really neat drawing reference books on Amazon recently—I mean, they are really neat. I suppose I can't really afford to go around buying books willy-nilly, though, so I've settled for lusting after them and putting them in the brand new *drumroll*
A* Amazon Wish List!
Woo! The link to that can also be found on the "store" and "about" pages, just in case you don't take a hint easily. >_> *cough* ANYWAY, there are three things on there right now, and why don't I talk about why they're there? Okay, I will!
Gary Martin's The Art Of Comic-Book Inking (2nd Edition)
I'd been following Gary Martin on deviantART for some time without particularly knowing his real name or that he has a book out under that name about inking, or that it is in fact one of THE books on inking, and he is kind of a big deal. Apparently this is the case! I've been following him because while his inking style is the classic neat, precise, bold comic book style that is nothing like I can muster, it is also...the classic style that is nothing like I can muster, and I should probably sort of try to rectify that, if just to improve my technical ability. One thing that sounds neat about this book of his is that he'll take a pencil drawing by a well-known artist, then have say three well-known inkers ink their own version of it, and show them all to you so you can see how different approaches work out. That sounds like a useful kind of thing for someone like me—who's just trying to learn to ink—to see!
Klaus Jansen's The DC Comics Guide to Inking Comics
Jansen was the inker on some of my favorite 90's-or-whatever comic book work by Frank Miller, and lo-and-behold, he's written a book about inking, too! Stylistically, he's much closer to something like what I would like to be able to do. And according to the preview pages on Amazon, it's filled with some really basic but really practical stuff too that other people might not have thought to put in a book, like what to put your ink in and where to keep it as you're working.
Andrew Loomis' Figure Drawing for All It's Worth
If we really want to talk about classic drawing styles, illustrator Andrew Loomis (1892–1959)...did kind of write the book on it, at least one of the well-known ones, and at least when it comes drawing people. Check the video review on the Amazon listing to see the amazing reference drawings the book is just packed to the gills with (a lot of them are of nude models, so maybe don't watch it at work!). Man! Here are some other examples of his work I culled from the intro-nets:
 
Pure class! So that's the current wish-list. Everything on that list will be stuff that will help me make A* better!
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Oh that Russian space program! They've got another problem: this time, their probe intended for the Martian moon Phobos, "Phobos-Grunt" ("Phobos Ground"), has got stuck in Earth orbit; apparently its guidance system failed before it could point itself toward the Red Planet. They're still hoping to save it, but chances seem slim for Grunt!
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This article talks about an announcement of the discovery of what are thought to be, more or less, a couple primordial gas clouds—clouds of hydrogen and deuterium, without any of the heavier stuff that would have formed later in stars; such clouds are thought to date from perhaps 2 billion years after the Big Bang. The article is a bit low on detail and thus not all that convincing I guess, but still an interesting perspective; it also mentions a sorta related study that has concluded that the early stars—the first generation of stars that formed from such pure primordial clouds—were smaller than scientists had thought: maybe ten times the size of the Sun, rather than hundreds of times.
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