The conversation wasn't going anywhere anyway... ;D

Zombie Mick says: "Happy Halloween!" Poor guy.

Vampire Vero is currently winning the Pick Vero's Best Halloween Mask poll, which will run through the weekend on the forum.

Added 2 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 70
• A* Episode 6, Daily 71

There are super-big renditions of art from both of today's daily comics in the gallery (click these small ones for the big ones):

Selenis (for that is indeed her) emerges from the shadows for her requisite dramatic entrance:



There's also a big version of today's first daily comic in the gallery; click this tiny one to get to the big one:



Added 2 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 72
• A* Episode 6, Daily 73

Vero will start to return to polysyllables--or at least multiple monosyllables--soon, I promise! =p

Added 2 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 74
• A* Episode 6, Daily 75

Check out all the glorious detail in Selenis' buzz cut--which I spent way too long drawing today...was kinda fun though :o--in the large version, accessible in the gallery via this slightly smaller version:

Interesting drawing stories about today's dailies! First, the comics:

Added 4 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 76
• A* Episode 6, Daily 77
• A* Episode 6, Daily 78
• A* Episode 6, Daily 79

All right, well, these stories are probably only interesting to me, who does the drawing, but hey, this is what you get when you let the artist write the news!

I've put larger versions of today's first and last dailies in the gallery, accessible by clicking these somewhat smaller versions:





If the first looks familiar to you somehow, you might be remembering it from the storyboard version I posted at the beginning of the chapter; that was the first real version of Selenis' unhelmeted face and head that I drew, and I spent a long time on that storyboard, trying to nail down a look. So today when it came time to do the final art, I figured I'd like to keep that look as closely as possible, so I used the storyboard sketch as a direct guide in starting the lasso-drawn version; I wasn't sure how well lassoing over normal brush drawing would work, but it worked pretty well, I think, and it's got a slightly different look to it that I kind of like. So I'll have to think about how to take advantage of that lasso-guided-by-brush idea more in the future, although the down side is that it can end up taking twice as long to get the final drawing! D:

I also used the storyboard of the second view of Selenis as a guide for the final version of that shot, since I'd sketched up a tricky perspective that was hard to recapture exactly otherwise; I let the lasso run much more wild this time, though, so while it took advantage of the layout strength of the original brush storyboard, the final surface definitely looks all shiny and lassoey. So that worked pretty well too, in a slightly different way. Fascinating, isn't it? :D :p

Finally, when I was drawing today's middle scene, I forgot that in the animation, Vero will have moved to his right in his preceding shot (daily 75), so now instead of facing each other perpendicular to the lighting from the front archway, they're directly in line with it. Well, I drew the lighting coming from the wrong angle before I remembered that, and then had to go and redo it. Here you can see the lighting angle change from the original version (coming from the top) to the redrawn version (coming from the right)--click the pic if it isn't animating for you:



Poor Mick had to lay there playing dead in a pool of his own blood while the lighting was re-rigged to the correct angle--that kind of thing is tough on an actor! Well, that's why they get the big bucks, I guess.

Oh yeah, and that drawing ended up being unusual for A* because I ended up using the gradient across the floor as a secondary layer of shading on the characters, sort of punching out highlights, especially on Selenis who's standing in the darkest part of the gradient. That seemed to work decently, although I wouldn't be able to use that sort of shortcut in a scene where the characters are moving around.

Added Selenis' "Rosie the Riveter" pose to the gallery:



Added 3 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 80
• A* Episode 6, Daily 81
• A* Episode 6, Daily 82

A week of me fighting a bizarre urge to draw Selenis with a king-size head mercifully comes to a close!

Added 3 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 83
• A* Episode 6, Daily 84
• A* Episode 6, Daily 85

Okay so you may be wondering about the head thing. In fact maybe you saw it, but I've been stealth editing the big heads away slowly and steadily: her dome is about down to a respectably non-enormous size in dailies 74 and 82 and the corresponding art gallery entries now. If you did see it: cherish the horrid memories of Alien(s) and peanut-shaped Selenis heads! Hopefully I don't keep doing it anymore, it's a real pain to keep trying to fix. I think it's probably due to me never having tried to draw a woman with a crew-cut before, not to mention at bizarre foreshortened angles: where does the short hair end, and the skull begin? Did I leave enough millimeters for hair above the scalp? If I go back in there and carve out some individual hairs, is it going to shrink her head? Is this scale right? Am I just secretly attracted to girls with Cerebro-scale brains? Maaan the existential questions come thick and fast in this scenario.

While I'm on the subject, lest you thought drawing A* went smoothly even when not having the swelled head problem (*cough*), I present you with another horrifying rendition of the woman:



This was my process of trying to draw her today: I wanted the face toward the viewer, head angled slightly down, eyes glaring out straight ahead. Very often my first attempt fails to capture the look I want, but usually when that happens, I realize it right away. This time, I fought against the goofy expression, too-plain facial layout and too-level angle (top row, left)--not to mention a bizarre stoned vampire look--for a while, and things got worse and worse (top row, right). Egads!

What you have to do in a situation like that is just junk the thing and start over. So I started again (bottom row, left), and this time it went--for me--fairly smoothly, although you'll see that it took me a while and a lot of futzing to settle on the amount of shadow I wanted around the eyes (bottom row, right).

That's all I have to torture you with for now other than these last two gallery entries for the week (and the usual early-Sunday-morning Princess and the Giant update), so have a nice weekend! (Click these for the full-size gallery versions:)





Oh wait here's a brain-puzzler for you that had me pouring over bizarre cosmological phenomena and summaries of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity on Wikipedia this week: How fast is gravity?

(Answer: apparently nobody knows yet! Scientists are assuming it's the speed of light, but haven't had a way to test that theory. What if it's slower than light, even just in certain situations? Massive implications for cosmology! Maybe we aren't headed toward an infinitely expanding universe after all! Maybe all estimates of billions-of-light-years distances are significantly off-target! Maybe we could explain why planes flying by towers and stars at the edges of galaxies move faster than expected, and why the Voyager spacecraft are moving slower than expected as they try to escape the Sun's gravity into interstellar space!

Bonus questions:
- What is gravity? A property of matter? A geometric curvature of spacetime? A force? A particle? A wave?
- Ditto for magnetism! (This one's a *little* easier.)

Gravity is what stick my body in bed each morning when i need to wake up and go work........ :)

So you'd be raring to go to work every day in zero grav? ;)

Did I ever mention where Vero's last name came from? Hm I think I asked people to guess and that didn't work. Try thinking science, not pirates! Hm.

Added 3 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 86
• A* Episode 6, Daily 87
• A* Episode 6, Daily 88

I discovered the foolishness of giving in to the urge to spend a really long time on a single drawing--as I did on Friday--that will have to have other drawings animated from it: those other drawings take a long time to make, too! And to get the Selenis grimaces in I had to draw three lip positions instead of just two for each of them. Note to self: keep is simple--Mondays are frightening enough already. :P

Here's a view of the mouth positions (grimacing/talking/closed), and some eyebrow positions for one of them:



The funky cocked eyebrow I'd drawn initially was bugging me at one point late Friday night, so I tried a couple more straightforward positions, but they weren't as interesting, so I kept it cocked. Aw yeah. I probably won't use those extra eyebrow positions in the final animation, but it's possible I'll find a way to work them in somehow.

Is vero a Constant man?