Added 1 new A* page:This one was tough to scan! Even the 140 lb watercolor paper I'm using now rumpled up a little across the mostly wash-free middle (the character's body) with the top and bottom being all wet and washy, which ended up as a few faint, fuzzy dark bands across the scan (those areas being slightly elevated off the glass). I added extra weight on top of the scanner, which helped a little, but in the end I had to do some touching up with a spot Levels layer in Photoshop to get rid of the dark bands. Oh well at least I know how to do it now—it actually works pretty darn well.
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Two riddles to puzzle you over the weekend!
First, yet another trip to YouTube ends in an unexpected face research session for A*. Can you identify the performer and maybe even the music video these three screenshots come from?
  
I didn't follow or really know anything about this artist back in the day, but darned if she didn't have some A*-appropriate makeup going on here, and the lighting is just the kind to bring out facial features. Also she's really good at making entertaining expressions while singing. :D Speaking of which, as I was screenshotting this I realized one reason why I find looking at faces in music videos particularly helpful: 'cause most of the time when you're drawing a detailed mouth in a comic like A*, it's when the mouth is saying something, and in music videos you generally get a really good look at mouths operating at full steam!
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Second riddle! In two parts, actually.
When I thought I was all done painting today's page and was about to stick it in the scanner, I noticed I'd unwittingly modified a bit of Selenis' costume from the way it looked on previous pages—can you spot the difference?
And the second part of this second riddle! Can you find the *other* time I accidentally modified this same item of her costume—okay, it's her dress—in a different way?
Big-ish hint: this happened back in episode 13, and before it switched to hand-painted art. The answer is *not* that the little scarf thing around the back of her dress was missing after she left Andiran's hotel room—I did that on purpose (figure she tore it off because she was tired of it—and I was tired of drawing it :p).
I was initially annoyed with myself for this latest little visual continuity error, and I don't think it's a coincidence that these have started cropping up pretty much right after I ran out of thumbnails for each page, drawn in advance—I had them in all episodes prior to 13, and for 13 up through the last scene on the space station, but then I just found I didn't have the time to do an extra sketch (or often more) for each page. So I don't do them anymore!
It's sometimes scary sailing ahead without the thumbnails, and it definitely requires putting in a little more thought each day than I used to have to do—and if I was like a real pro I'd have them, ya know—but I also kind of like *not* having a guide to follow for each new page's final drawing. I've never been big on strict visual continuity, as you've probably noticed; in practice, faces and styles and so on change day by day based on how I feel about each page as I work on it—this happens pretty much entirely unconsciously and was another thing that irked me when I realized I was doing it, but, like these little unplanned visual prop changes that are coming in in the absence of thumbnails, I'm kinda learning to embrace it; I think in the end these free me up to evolve the comic visually to better final effect, and to focus more on making each page as good as it can be in its own right.
This latest inadvertent and unconscious costume change, for instance, neatly solves a part of her dress design that I now realize had been irritating me more and more since she left the hotel. The dress is going to stick around for a bit more in this episode, and if I was being a continuity stickler, I'd have to suffer through that irritating design all the way through—but I'm not, and my subconscious neatly came up with and implemented what is actually, for me, a nice bit of costume redesign. Does it make sense? Not really—although hey you could say she passed the two hours before her flight in altering her costume >_>—but it *does* make for a better image, and chances are you wouldn't have noticed the change anyway if I hadn't pointed it out (have you found it yet? :D).
So this is all well and good until I flub something major that actually introduces a hole in the plot. >_> ;) =o
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