Yeah, that occurred to me, too--probably due to the prominent rear end (it was the devil's work resisting making a "full moon" joke =ppp). Also, some of my favorite Frazetta stuff is his earlier ink and watercolor work--tended to be much more crisp than his later oil paintings, for all their rich color.

According to the "history" section of the Wikipedia page for the John Carter movie, Burroughs was enthusiastic about the animated attempt in the '30's, but audiences didn't dig the test footage ("too outlandish" for the midwest, or something). The '80's Disney attempt was the one with the production value issue, probably; Wikipedia says that [director] "McTiernan noted visual effects were not advanced enough yet to recreate Burroughs' vision." I tend to think that that's a pretty weak excuse, though; even ancient movies have been perfectly wonderful in the effects department, it's really just a matter of using what you have effectively.

Heh and I read that for his watercolor work, Frazetta swore by a cheap old Disney watercolor set for the most vibrant colors. :D

Making feature movies is still for the high-rollers. To make movies you have to be a business man.
Even though the art is important, I think their attitude is that once they decide on the visual qualities of the creation its just a matter of hiring people who can keep to that path.
I know that when I read those paperback adventures I had a technicolor movie playing that would not be easily replaced, but it still comes down to the aesthetics and the chemistry, and what the viewers will allow. There must be millions of preconceived ideas about the Mars of John Carter. I suppose it wouldn't be impossible that somebody actually gets it right.
Frazetta had rugged moons in his illustrations a lot.
You have a tough subject (space) to do with black on white paper if keeping the paper untouched for the stars isn't possible, then maybe making them all by hand is the best method. I've used spray templates to do things like that before, but airbrushing is a mess, and you always have clean up.
How about a few small stamps of random patterns of stars? Press into the white ink or paint, stamp it in a few places for a star field. The individual "star" would have to be raised far enough from the attachment base so that ink or paint build-up wouldn't be a problem, but it seems that it would be easy to just have a base with a lot of holes that you could insert "stars" or move them around to have a few different star patterns easily. At least making lots of stars might be faster, but you would still have to add a few here and there with a brush to balance the picture.

Yeah, that's kind of how I've been doing it digitally--spattering stars with the airbrush tool in GIMP, then adding a few by hand with the radial gradient tool Photoshop to break it up.

Hm, maybe something like an old hairbrush, with stiff, loose brush hairs that I could just frisk around on the paper to create random-ish starry fields. Although those probably wouldn't hold ink well... Maybe like a regular 1" house painting brush and just cut away most of the hairs.

HMMM looking for other stuff... This page suggests using a toothbrush for spattering; seems to me that toothbrush bristles might be just right type of thing for that. At any rate I have a lot of toothbrushes so I can give that a shot. This page has a little star spray paint tutorial--does look messy, and I'd almost certainly have to cut little masks out of paper or something to protect non-starry areas. Huh hm hmmm... Well I'm going to the art supply store *again* this weekend so maybe I'll poke around and see if they have anything in the way of brushes or sprays that looks handy.

Really though it wasn't that bad just dotting down individual stars in that last test painting--there weren't many there but they didn't take long at all, so a reasonable amount across larger areas shouldn't be *that* bad--provided I use the right brush; you'll see I tried it with one on the next painting that was *not* the right brush for the job. :P I think I could also thicken things up a bit with a thin white ink wash in appropriate places, I'll have to experiment with that some time.

Huh and also just working with a dry synthetic brush like I did around the comet and spiral galaxy in this one



might be capable of making scuffed strokes that would suggest a thick star field.

Or ooh I think those cheap craft store brushes I got could work too: the "camel hair" one is stiff, loose, and bushy, and could maybe blot down a thick starry blob; and the 12-pack of tiny, very stiff "natural hair" brushes could do individual small stars well, probably--and I could take like all 12 of them in my hand at once (they're thin!) and just go to town like that. I've uh dozened my productivity!

Ah: "duodecupled." :D

You could take a bunch of new pencils- the unsharpend kind with the erasers and bundle them all together with some rubber-bands so you have a hundred or more (or less). The grouping is flexible, so you can press the erasers on something flat bringing them all to bear in the same plane, or on something not flat, bringing only a few to the same plane. Or you can just push them in and out with your hands to get a different arrangement every time! Pencils are really cheap. Before you bundle them, though, each eraser needs to be pointed so that its a tiny printing surface, depending on how large you want your star-points to be.
Presto ! The Advanced Dynamic Star Maker !

Heehee, you one-upped my idea all right. :D Might be a bit much to handle though; my painting area is "only" about 6.75" x 16", anyway. Certainly not lacking for things to try now!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 135

^ That will be the last A* page I draw on the computer--at least for a while; on Monday I switch to painting them with brush and ink!

This then is the last ink practice page:



As with the previous ink practice pages, I learned a lot from this one, some of the more easily enumerated items being:

- Don't use your nice flexible sable brush to dot on the stars--it bends too much and the dots squidge around (Glen^5 and I have been discussing some other possible star-painting methods on the forum)

- Double-check the proportions of the pencil sketch, *before* you start laying down ink--can't just cut and move things around afterwards like you can digitally (*cough* her right arm *cough*...EDIT: although now that I look at the scanned version, maybe it wasn't all that far off actually) ((Well, okay so I'm scanning them into the computer so technically I *could* move them around afterward in Photoshop...would prefer to avoid that, though)

- "Smooth" paper (used here) doesn't seem to load up with as much ink as rougher paper, so the blacks don't come out quite as black--they're a bit more washy and uneven (gotta head back to the art supply store again to get the rougher "medium" Bristol, and maybe a few other odds and ends--oh like more white ink to paint stars, and cover my boo-boos)

- I get a much cleaner scan when I really weigh down the heavy (100 lb) paper (ie stacking stuff on top of it, like more paper, books, and a nice plank of wood :p), since it has "cockled" up a bit from the ink wash and isn't quite perfectly flat when left to its own devices

This was meant as something of a "dress rehearsal" for the start of the actual painted comic run on Monday, so I used the 11" x 17" smooth, acid-free (etc) Bristol paper I got for that, cut a little template frame from one of the paper pack backing boards to draw out my page drawing area (16" x 6.75"; the final area used in the actual comic page will be slightly less than that, 15.93" x 6.67", which in the 1200 dpi I use for scanning works out to 19120 x 8000 pixels, exactly 20 times the size of the final comic image (956 x 400)) on it, which you can see marked around it in pencil, particularly at the top, and composed a drawing in that framework, although I turned it sideways for a vertical piece. So if we pretended this was going to be an actual comic page, cropped and rotated and sized and all it would look like this:



So we'll see how this goes! It'll still be a bit rough at first as I'm still learning the many ins and outs of this ink painting business, but I'm pretty excited about it as I think it looks about at least as good already as what I've been drawing digitally with the Lasso Tool in Photoshop, AND it's just pretty fun to be playing with paint brushes again, not really having done it since my oil painting college days fifteen (egad!) years ago.

In some ways it's faster than working digitally since I can't just futz with an image ad infinitum; so I hope to be able to get up to two pages painted a day, once I'm up to speed. I don't see that happening next week, both because I'll probably still be a bit slow with it, and because I'll have other things to get worked out on the site to support this change, like, well, making the comic display script support jpgs, for one. :o I'll probably just make it mostly image-format-agnostic--less efficient, but more future-proof. :P

And then I gotta get a shopping script going so you'll actually be able to buy one of the original paintings, should you see one you think would go particularly well with your decor. They'll be pretty affordable because I want them to find homes! :)

And this one here will be for sale too, since it's actually on the archival-quality paper, whereas the previous ones were just on my old (OLD) and already slightly yellowed college sketch pad. Oh yeah and since this one ended up having a pretty decent and very vertical image of Selenis, I can turn that into a skyscraper banner and refresh my ad campaigns--gotta start showing off the new look! :)

I hope you guys will like it--if you don't, PLEASE let me know! :o Again, it will be a bit rough at first as I'm still getting the ink wash thing down, but bear with me for a bit and I think not too long from now it'll be looking pretty darn decent.

As it happens, I think this is also a pretty good spot in the story for this switch, as the rest of this episode will be decidedly dark and inky. :o

Well its certainly not good to only have one method to rely on ! Creative challenges call for creative solutions- and when one doesn't work another one might.
An interesting note- that nearly always, thinking about things like this leads to breakthroughs on other projects closer to home. It might be like lifting weights (which I don't do) for exercise.
Anyway, there's probably a workable technique in there somewhere !
I can't imagine doing thousands of stars by hand one at a time, so good luck with that. =)

Ah, sea sponges! They sell the dried, puffy remains of the little creatures of the deep at the art supply store, and they've got all kinds of fascinating surface textures: webbed, knobby, pointy, etc; I'm thinking I can get some pretty neat star and nebula effects out of these. :D