Those natural sponges can produce really astounding surfaces. There's a whole school of faux painters who can mimic practically any material's surface and then some.
The advantage you have is that you know what you want it to look like. This is not like learning how to draw all over again- its all there, you just have to get it on the paper.
That last inked picture of Selenis in free fall says that the transition has been made. Switching mediums in an already established format and method- without breaking stride!
Well, that proves it!
Congratulations.


EDIT: I just looked at that picture again and I actually like the irregular points in the background. There's lots of other things besides stars. It feels more "floaty" with large and small rocks and planetoids.

Thanks! I'm sure there's still plenty of stuff I'll find to screw up with it--all part of the fun and adventure. ;D

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 136

The final version of my "Girls in Space" guest art is now up on the "Girls in Space" webcomic site. "Girls in Space" is a lighthearted webcomic romp--with girls, in space--by James Spence, and you might just enjoy it.

Today's page is the first one done in ink wash rather than the ol' Photoshop "Lasso Tool." I feared it would be a disaster but I at least didn't spill ink everywhere, so that's a plus. I had it done hours ago but then I had to reprogram the comic display scripts to display .jpg files (heretofore all the comic images were all .png files), and--as usual with me and scripting--it took a while because I always overlook something. :P So I did break the front page one or two times there, but it's all sorted out now (or at least it will be if this news article posts correctly >_>), so huzzah!

Rather fortuitously, the little drawing table my very kind parents had gotten for me and this crazy painting venture (last time I painted was like 15 years ago with oil paints in college) arrived late last week, and I got it put together today just in time to start real painting work--although the assembly was a bit trickier than I had figured it would be, as the top came separate from the legs, and there were no screw holes or anything in the top to attach it to the legs--AND the manufacturer's measurements on where to make the holes were off by about a quarter inch. I mean why don't I just go and saw down some trees and do it all myself, manufacturer? Oh yeah AND some of their screws were defective; fortunately they included some extra ones, I suppose because they have a high defect rate. :P

Anyway I eventually got it set up and only gored myself with my pocket knife's awl punch about twice in the process--didn't even draw blood! Sweet. It's a "Berkeley" folding drawing table by Martin Universal Design (it came from here, although the legs ended up being white rather than black, hmm), and I chose it because it was the only one that went high enough for a standing drawing table--up to 53", whereas the others I could find only went up to like 46" or so max. The other rather handy thing about it for my work space is that it's relatively tiny for a drawing/drafting table (3"x2"), and fairly light, and can be folded up and moved for um like when I need to do something else in my little studio apartment. Here it was with the page drying on it--you'll notice other details of my apartment around it which you will not of course be at all interested in:



(That "Pink Pearl" eraser is just there to hold my ink bottle in place on the slightly sloped table top--I wouldn't actually try to erase something with one of those, bleh!)

(Oh yeah and I'm now using Strathmore's "Vellum"-surface Bristol board for the painting; the painting I showed Friday was on their "Smooth"-surfaced Bristol, but the ink kinda washed around it too much and couldn't pile up into the blackest of blacks like I really wanted; "Vellum" on the other hand is a bit rougher and gets the blackness down nicely! The packaging says it's for "dry media," but the ink seems to like it all the same, and the brush can bite into the surface better, giving some dry brush effects and so forth that I couldn't get on the other surface. It's very slightly less blindingly white than the "Smooth" is, lending everything a slightly darker tone, which I suppose is appropriate; it also means I can use my white ink for highlights, but not as easily for corrections, so hm well this will be interesting.)

The table seemed a bit rickety when I set it up but for the first page at least it has performed like a champ. Hopefully it and my puny apartment last for many more pages!

The next thing I gotta work on is getting some store stuff going so whoever is crazy enough to want to have one of these lovely paintings for themselves can buy one right through the site. Hopefully I can get that done in the next eh two or three days, so then I can get on to other things like maybe even eventually doing more than just one darn page a day. =P

-Her face is really excellent with those delicate washes.
( I think that's as critical as I can be: its a good job! )

If that great drawing table insists on being rickety you can always make a diagonal piece.

Thanks!

It actually wasn't rickety as I was working on it, so maybe it'll be fine. What did you mean by "diagonal piece"?

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 137

Well I took care of my largest commission yet (a double portrait!) today (that I can't show you :P), and then I spent way too much time formulating and playing with ink washes. I've got a little blackish rainbow of them now in five spice bottles...which I don't think have absolutely watertight lids. So I'm well on my way to having everything in my apartment slightly ink stained, which I think will be fun, or at least inevitable. And I had trouble deciding on how dark to go on this page with the washes, so eh well I think I learned a thing or two in the process; I wanted to try going lighter on the black lines, which I thought were a bit too heavy-handed in the page I did yesterday.

So I don't have much else to show you, but I did come across a couple interesting sciencey articles the other day sort of related to A* type of issues:

- Titanium treasure found on Moon talks about scientists having found--through study of Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, and through Hubble photos of their landing site--that certain ore deposits on the Moon have ten times the titanium content of similar ores on Earth. Titanium being somewhat valuable, this suggests a potential lunar industry.

- Paralyzed man moves robot arm with his mind tells us about a guy in a research study at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who, though physically paralyzed himself, has learned to control a robot arm to a certain extent by thinking about it; a chip planted on the surface of his brain reads the brain's activity and is apparently able to discern which parts of that activity are about moving the arm. This has of course been done for decades with primates of various sorts, but this implanted chip thing seems relatively non-invasive, so perhaps this represents something of a refinement.

The picture today is really sensational !

A diagonal piece is a brace to keep a basically rectilinear structure from wiggling. The steel tubing still flexes a bit with lateral forces- it may vibrate or oscillate just enough to be irritating if you're trying to be especially careful.
That kind of table might have a vibration mostly from side motions, so the diagonal would be placed either from left to right or right to left, top to bottom so the diagonal is the middle part of a Z or N. All you really need for a quick diagonal piece is a stick like a mop or broom-handle and some strong tape wrapped around 5 or 6 times tightly. A more permanent and better-looking solution would be steel tubing pounded flat on the ends and attached with small hose-clamps.

Oh gotcha! So far the table has been much more stable than I had thought it would be when I was adjusting it and getting it into place--I think I put a lot less force on it when working than I had thought I would. So no brace needed as yet!

Glad you like the page. :)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 138

Tried to get the brushwork a little livelier today, and to use the whiteness of the paper more effectively. Still feeling a bit clumsy at this new medium, so thanks for bearing with me--it will gradually get somewhat better.

~~~~~~~

I accidentally wrote an extra news post last week! An incredibly image-heavy one! I saved it up because I knew it would come in handy, and here it is:

~~~~~~~

One thing it's easy to forget in looking at space photos like the ones I posted a week ago of Centaurus A is that those things in the background that look like little stars (and they'd be much closer than the galaxy, since they'd be in our own Milky Way, just in the way--if you will--of the view of the galaxy from Earth) are often entire galaxies themselves. For instance, I was looking at this pretty picture of the Spindle Galaxy


image by NASA (source)

which is a lenticular galaxy seen edge-on from Earth (lots of dust in it!), and I noticed I could see some background galaxies around it, particularly in the upper-right corner. So I looked at the full-size version you can download from the source page, and...man! Lookit all the galaxies you can see just around that bright foreground star in that upper-right corner (I've rotated this 90 degrees counter-clockwise to fit it in the news column :p):


image by NASA (source)

They're really packed in there!

Of course, there's the famous Hubble Deep Field image from 1996, where the space telescope looked at a small area of the sky ("an area 2.5 arcminutes across, two parts in a million of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres") for ten days to get a really deep exposure of nearly 3000 galaxies packed into that tiny sliver of sky:


image by NASA (source)

And then it went even "deeper"--for fainter and fainter light, from farther and farther away--in 2003-2004 with the eleven-day-total exposure of "11.0 square arcminutes" ... "just one-seventieth the solid angle subtended by the full moon as viewed from Earth, smaller than a 1 mm-by-1 mm square of paper held 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky" known as the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field:


image by NASA (source)

Now let's zoom in on say about a 15% slice of the full resolution ultra-deep field:


image by NASA (source)

Ooh. Here's a diagram showing how far "back" the deep field images see:


image by NASA (source)

Lots of galaxies out there still. :)

Another hit !

-At first it looks like the perspective is a bit off in that box to the right, but the grain of the wood or reflections are causing an optical distortion.
-Good job with her hands. Just thinking that if you reserved a single color for special cases like this (maybe a deep red for the drapes) it might make it a lot easier.

Galaxies ! ! They're everywhere ! ! Boggles and boggles of 'em ! !