Science!

Added 2 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 5, Daily 47
• A* Episode 5, Daily 48

We're now into the first of Selenis' acrobatic shots in this episode; I'll have to draw her frame-by-frame in these because of all the flipping around she's doing, so they'll take a while, but hopefully they'll look pretty cool once animated. Daily 48 is in about the middle of this one-second shot where she's being towed into the distance by the grappling cable she's just embedded in the hull of Sal's ship. I don't have the other frames in this sequence shaded in yet, but we can see them animate in silhouette in a sort of "pencil test" of the character's movement:



That took a while! I think it was mostly because it's a complicated pose: in perspective, with the body twisted around halfway; plus, it has to feel like it's being pulled backwards and to the left by the right arm. In the storyboard of this shot that I showed a while back, I had first drawn her being pulled by the wrong arm; I redrew the arm quickly in the storyboard doodle so I wouldn't forget which was the correct arm when it came time to draw the final art, but the weighting of the pose was still on the wrong arm, and I knew I'd have to correct for that later--ie, today. For some reason it stumped me for a while, and I was thinking that maybe I had to change the whole pose up, maybe have her twisting around the other way or something, so I wasted time trying out two alternate poses before I finally came back to the original one and just redrew it so the weight was on the correct arm. Bah I am silly! But at least I got a nifty picture out of one of the alternate poses, which you can check out on deviantART.

Tomorrow I ought to get to the next sequence, which is her finishing her flip and landing neatly on the hull of Sal's ship. Moooore full character animation, eep!

Here's the roughly final version of the first acrobatic scene:

Test of the next one:

Added 1 new A* comic:

• A* Episode 5, Daily 49

Phew. Just gotta do the shading on the other frames in this second acrobatic shot, then it's back to less animation-intensive stuff for a while, so I can have more dailies for you.

Finalish version of the landing animation:

Wow, this one's really action packed.

Yeah, and it's only just getting started! (My internal numbering system has today as the end of "scene 2" out of 6 total scenes in this episode. O_o)

Added 1 new A* comic:

• A* Episode 5, Daily 50

Episode 5 hits Daily #50! Leaving the animation-intensive Selenis to her "cutting" and your imagination for a bit (and just a bit), tomorrow we'll go catch up with Vero in that lonely ring system around Gabbot's Claim.

I felt compelled to make something more with Selenis' head from Ep. 5 daily 50, and got to experimenting with drawing some fairly exotic space things like a nebula, a milky Milky Way, and a black hole. These all got crammed into a piece called Irresistible which until episode 5 is done can only be seen in high-res on deviantART (which is where that link goes). Here's a small preview version:

Added 8 new A* comics:

• A* Episode 5, Daily 51
• A* Episode 5, Daily 52
• A* Episode 5, Daily 53
• A* Episode 5, Daily 54
• A* Episode 5, Daily 55
• A* Episode 5, Daily 56
• A* Episode 5, Daily 57
• A* Episode 5, Daily 58

Hurrah for flashback sequences! Those are easy. :D >_>

Have a nice weekend everyone!