Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 157

I think I've figured out a couple useful techniques in this whole ink wash thing in the past few days:
- Drop straight water on very dark ink or wash and let it run a bit for a very organic kind of gradient effect
- Use black lines only selectively, in areas where you need a really sharp contrast, and it will leave the forms open to light and give a much more natural, less cartoony look

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Google just enabled fan page thingies on their Google+ social networking site, so I had to go ahead and make pages on G+ for my various comic series, including A*. If you use Google+, click on these button thingies to go to the pages, then add them to one of your circles to get updates from my comics right in your G+ stream!



Unless you look like some kind of insane spambot, I'm pretty good about circling back, so yes I'm saying you can probably get some easy follows out of me. >_> And if you need a sixth, there's always my personal G+, too!

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For some reason I figured I'd take a photo of today's page midway through--this is after the pure ink (plus some straight water on that ink in parts) phase, before hitting it with my prepared washes of varying degrees of gray:



And the final version from sort of the same perspective, for comparison:



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This recent Reuters article says that NASA's got their new Mars rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, in Florida in preparation for its November 25th lift-off for the red planet aboard an Atlas 5 rocket. After landing on Mars in August of next year, the MSL's rover, Curiosity, which is five times the size of its predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity, will truck around the 154-km-wide Gale Crater--which has an unusually large 5 km high central peak--for a year or so, examining the environment in a quest to determine whether or not Mars was ever suitable to hosting microbial life. Unlike the earlier rovers, Curiosity has an internal, plutonium-decay power source, the Boeing-built Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, so it can't go dead if buried in dust like the solar-powered Spirit. The MMRTG has a power output over four times greater (2.5 kilowatt hours/day) than the solar panels of the earlier rovers.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 158

I blame this page on Walt Simonson, because after ripping through the extensive art galleries on his Facebook page this evening, I sat down to draw this page, and the pencil drawing came out kind of Walt Simonsony--with a certain scribblinear zest, I mean. And I thought "man, drawing like Walt Simonson is fast and easy, this page is gonna be a breeze!" O fool! Because at least half the trick of drawing like Walt Simonson must be in inking like Walt Simonson, and I wasn't even clever (or stupid?) enough to try that; I just set about inking it my own way, and of course ran into well-deserved difficulties.

I mean jeez! Just look how he arcs these crazy stylish lines across with a brush pen here:



Phew. Anyway, I got turned on to his art way back in the days of his legendary run on Marvel's "Thor," and the particularly inspiring thing about his Facebook galleries is that he's posted a lot of his old stuff--like, just outta high school stuff, or even earlier--and some of it is actually fairly non-fantastic. So you mean a Walt Simonson isn't born fully styled and mature from the head of Zeus? Well maybe, but apparently just practicing a lot helps, too. So that's encouraging and should give the rest of us some hope.

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NASA just announced that they have developed an ultra-black material made of carbon nanotubes, which they describe as "tiny hollow tubes made of pure carbon about 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair." In this material, the tubes stand on end "like a shag rug"--as you can see around the rim of the cutaway section here


image by Stephanie Getty, NASA Goddard (source)

--and incoming light bounces down their sides, getting trapped and absorbed before it can escape. This allows the material to absorb about 99% of incoming light; even the best black paints, by comparison, only absorb about 90% of the light hitting them, and inside a telescope, where image quality depends greatly on minimizing excess light bouncing around, this nanotube material, in replacing the black paint with which telescope insides are usually coated, could significantly enhance the telescope's image refining ability.

The material is also lighter and better at radiating heat away than other black coatings used in spaceflight, and thus could prove useful in a variety of space applications.

Keen! And now if NASA would develop it into a nice ultra-black ink for oh say artists trying to paint things like black holes, that would be super, too. :D

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 159

After resisting the urge for years, I caved in today and put grotesquely large, colorful social networking buttons on the site, just above this news article. ^^ Yep! I've been having more and more fun of late chatting with people on A*'s Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and deviantART pages lately, and now I want...more! Yarm! So click the big colorful buttons which in theory you will not be able to resist, and come join me and the people who were perceptive enough to notice the tiny, black and white buttons that have been there for a while under the comics--or maybe they even saw the text (what's that?) links on the "about" page! Anyway now there are buttons we can't avoid looking at, grrrrrreat. Click click!

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The new drawing paper came today and holy wow! It is amazing. It is Bienfang Raritan drawing paper, and compared to the Strathmore Bristol I'd been using, it is light as a feather, white as snow, toothy as a chihuahua, and crisp as fresh potato chips. Working on Bristol, with its hard, absorbent surface for the past number of weeks, I'd started to think I'd already worn out my brush, and/or that I'd never be anything but a very clumsy inker, as I just couldn't seem to get much done in the way of precision work. But today with the Raritan I found myself diving into details, joyfully painting little tiny things with the single longest bristle of my brush. The bristles move friskily across this paper's surface, even if there's just one of them carrying the load, and, well...it's good! :D Painting on this stuff is much more fun than on the Bristol, the results are much more crisp and vibrant (whiter whites, and blacker, more even blacks), and golly if I don't just <3 it to death! Yes I am marrying Raritan this weekend in a small private ceremony. >_>

Okay maybe John Q LAW won't allow that, but anyway I did manage to do an extra bonus drawing for you today--my practice with the new pad of paper:



(There's a smaller version in the episode 13 gallery here if you want to zoom out a bit.)

I also tried one of my sea sponges for the first time, rather soaking it in white ink to see if I could squeeze out some interesting star effect. It kinda worked! Very Kirby Krackle-ish, in fact, although that wasn't quite what I'd intended--methinks I need a lighter touch with the delicate sponge! Still it looks kind of neat, I suppose, and I'll have to try some more in the future.

Also I'm thinking I may ditch that big plate collar thingy on Selenis' space suit, it kind of just gets in the way. :P

Oh but the paper! As I was saying it's very white, as I think you can see--none of the slightly yellow tinge the "vellum" Bristol had, and far whiter than my 15-year-old+ pad of Raritan I've had since my art college days--I guess that thing really *did* yellow quite a bit in the intervening decade and a half. =o Fortunately the manufacturers seem to have kept the good--the strong, lively surface--and fixed the bad, as the modern Raritan is now acid-free, which means it shouldn't yellow in our lifetimes (ah, mortality!). It doesn't come in 11x17" size like the Bristol did, which also happens to be what fits in my scanner, so the pages I'm painting on are now HAND CUT--well at least on or three two sides :p--from larger 18x24" sheets; I get two pages out of one sheet, how's that for economy? :)

And speaking of the manufacturers, it appears that Bienfang changed owners since 15 years ago, as the new pad has the "Speedball" logo on it; their site (that link above) doesn't say exactly when they acquired Bienfang, but anyway some time in the past 15 years, I guess. Speedball seem to be best known for their black India ink, and their dip pens: back in 1915 it was when Seattle (:D) sign letterer Ross F. George took his new pen design to the C. Howard Hunt Pen Company in Camden, New Jersey, and the soon-to-be-famed "Speedball" pen was born. Speedball became independent from the parent Hunt company in 1997.

The excitement! And according to their site, "Sebastian Bienfang founded the Bienfang Paper Company in a loft in New York City" in 1926, importing fine papers for the American market. I wonder if the "Raritan" came from somewhere in particular, originally. Awesome paper country, I guess!

Yay!
I thought about pushing more hints re pen, ink, washes etc. but decided that it would be far better if you just found your own path.
That thing about the organic washes and not emphasizing the edges but building the interior form was totally on target. Once you really figured that out it became part of how you do it.
I guess you must like your new paper then?
But you cannot marry paper! They have laws about that sort of thing you know.
You need to just go steady for a while and leave it at that.
(OK, maybe some heavy petting, but that's it!)
On a related note, trying to compare your work to anybody elses or trying to copy their style will also give you trouble. That guy does it that way because that's how he's learned to do it after trial and error and the method is etched deeply. You can't copy that. But you're already doing what's better: to visualize what you want and then do it, through whatever improvisational means it takes. That's how you develop an impressive style: through hard work and application. (Also called paying dues, school of hard knocks, etc.)
See that light?
Its the end of the tunnel!

Heehee heavy petting :D

I've noticed that in something like writing I'm kind of a sea sponge myself; I'll unconsciously adopt some of the vocabulary or style of whatever book I'm currently reading. I think I do that same sort of thing in visual art, too! In the end I think it helps but day to day it can make for some weird stuff. =P Gotta make sure I feed myself on high quality material, too. ;)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 160

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.

... And thus the dark deed is done.

But am I the only one who thinks Selenis may be pondering - now... where her life would be if she had made, perhaps... a different choice?

I would think at some point every 'villain', {and I use that term here for simplicity... Hero doesn't 'feel' like the correct term... in Selenis' case} even those with coldest of hearts wonder at some point if all the terrible things they have done... are worth what they have gained?

We know when we have done wrong... the most vile people can slowly kill that voice in the back of their minds, the insane can completely remove it... but Selenis is neither - not insane or completely morally corrupt {she has not... as yet, come to enjoy the killing - not seeking purely for joy, people to kill}. She knows she has just murdered a innocent man... not a wanted criminal, not a vicious corporate shark... an innocent man, whose only crime was being good at his technological inventiveness and his professional management skills. Murdered by her hand... for the cause of, likely, some other corporation looking to make more money by the corporate elimination of a capable rival's assets.

Considering her 'War with Mar'... its kind of ironic that she would serve the cause of another corporate entity that is obviously no better than the techniques 'Mar' used.

... but perhaps I'm putting too much thought into it.

It was a mark, and Selenis cashed it in.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 161

Here's a silly thing I did of a whimsical "Space Pirate Selenis" over the weekend:



She *is* kind of a space pirate, of course (which is to say, she does sometimes engage in piracy, in space), but normally she wouldn't dress or pose like that. But maybe she would if she hung out on Twitter, because that's where this came from.

There's a smaller version in the gallery that may be handier for whatever you might need one for.

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Speaking of space pirates, I came across a webcomic called Pirates of Mars that has some really nice art--a sort of casual elegance in the black lines and subtly gradated electronic grays of which I am oh so jealous. It seems to update somewhat sporadically but hopefully it'll keep the installments coming.

And in their blog I noticed that there's a trailer for Disney's upcoming "John Carter of Mars," an adaptation of one or more of the classic pulp science fiction books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It, eh... Well, it's early yet, and I bet they'll have a more coherent and interesting one closer to the movie's release.

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I got a new brush today! Which is kind of why I went a little crazy with the little black lines in today's page. But it's such a nice brush! It's a Winsor & Newton Series 7, size 3, and I'm replacing the Da Vinci Maestro size 3 I'd been using, because it was getting a little wacky--forming two points rather than one, for instance. It probably wasn't the Maestro's fault, as I didn't really know how to take care of it when I first started using it, and (at the recommendation of a clerk at the art supply store, and Doug TenNapel) I was bathing and pomading it in this snake-oil-looking stuff





which was fun, but probably more chemical treatment than the sable bristles really needed--from now on I'll stick with warm water and gentle hand soap. So hopefully the W&N will stay nice and pointy yet silky soft as it was today for a good long while. It's sort of the classic cartoonist's brush--although twice as expensive as the Maestro, and no better according to the store clerks and various internet sources--and it does seem nicer and better at carrying ink than the Maestro was, even at the beginning.

I see the problem: Made in New Jersey !

The Garden State!