Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 100

Hm you know I guess Wednesday's probably gonna be another super-late single-pager as well. Dar! My two best update days have had their legs taken out this week. Ah well, we march on slightly slower than normal, but ever onward nonetheless. :P

This page looks a little "designy"; before the final version of page 100 you see here--well not HERE, but through the link above--I drew a different one based on my original storyboard, and spent a lot of time on it but got less and less satisfied. See if you can see why:



For one thing: boooooooring! And too much like page 97, except with a much less interesting camera angle. Bad storyboard, bad! So that's how I wasted time today, woo!

~~~~~~~~~

Here's the new page of my weekend comic, The Princess and the Giant! Well not HERE here: you click this banner thing below to get there!



Why didn't you click it?? =p G'wan!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 101
• A* Episode 10, Page 102

Finally caught up on my icon making over the weekend--I know you couldn't wait! =P

without 103, you dont even realize she is already pointing her weapon at vero in 102... simple and effective, shamon!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 103
• A* Episode 10, Page 104

Man lookit me, I thought I was only gonna fit in a single page today and I did two! Woo, doubled my productivity!

Speaking of which, I still have other stuff I haven't shown you from my super-productive weekend. I do this little poem-comic thing called -word-, and I uploaded three new pages to it over the weekend, starting with this one (click this to hop over there and then you can go forward to the rest):



I was pretty happy I found that font for this one. :)

Total win, or total win?

Hm tough choice but I'm glad you like it! :D

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 105
• A* Episode 10, Page 106
• A* Episode 10, Page 107

Man, three pages! I was on a roll today, woo.

~~~~~~~~

There was an interesting Time article yesterday about China having made a breakthrough in cryptology, specifically--according to them--being able to send supposedly unbreakable secret messages over heretofore unmatched distances using a technique called quantum teleportation.

Unfortunately, that's a significant misnomer. You might think at first it's some sort of super-long-range quantum tunneling, but nope, nothing like that at all. It's pretty neat in its own right, though. So basically, if an electromagnetic reaction ends up emitting, for instance, two photons from a single particle, the properties of those photons--energy level and spin, at least, I think--are interdependent, or "entangled." If you have a bunch of those in sequence, you can send one half of the pairs along a laser beam or whatever to your buddies far away. Now, the wacky part is that when the people at one location measure one photon from one of these pairs, that "fixes" its properties--which before that had a range of values due to quantum uncertainty--AND its corresponding photon far away--up to ten miles away, if China's claim is for real--will get fixed, too: it *has* to match the other, in order for conservation of energy to be preserved.

At least, I think that's how it goes, if my skimming of the Wikipedia article wasn't too far off. Pretty amazing to think about. There's a lot more to it after that, because somehow they will still be somewhat different, but if the people at the first site then tell the people at the second site how exactly they altered their photon from the pair, or something, then the people at the second site can perform an operation on *their* photon that will allow them to deduce the value of the first photon. Since nobody else has one of these photons, nobody else can figure out what the value is. So this could be used to send quantum-coded messages to submarines or whatever via laser beams. Or something like that.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 108

Another fabulous Friday! And what's this, more name dropping? Eeee move along, move along.

A preliminary version--at the point where I was redrawing Vero's head--had things looking a little bleak for our irradiated hero:



Oops, that ain't right! Also notice I had the shading backwards on his helmet. :P

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Hm what else can I distract you with? Well there's a wacky thread in the A* forum where we ramble about our own theories of the universe, and in it I embedded a nifty video from the University of Nottingham answering questions about a lot of nutty physics and astronomy topics, including, at the beginning, a nice quick layman's description of "string theory." Also I'm in the credits at the end (under my YouTube username, smbhax) for having sent them in some questions of my own, but I dunno if they're gonna use them or not!

[embed]V6ZPpC_lyYw?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0x000000&color2=0x000000[/embed]

These "Sixty Symbols" videos are made by BBC man Brady Haran, and he makes a bunch of other series of videos with Nottingham scholars and scientists, including a series with a video for each element in the Periodic Table and a series with a video for every book in the bible--their historical background and so forth. Hours of good YouTubing to be had!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 109
• A* Episode 10, Page 110

Starting with today's pages, I'm doing an additional round of touch-ups to the Photoshop Lasso tool-drawn images with GIMP's "Ink" tool. GIMP is a freeware, open source image manipulation program, very Photoshop like but not really approaching PS's level of polish, as you might expect, what with it being free and all, but I really like its unique--as far as I've seen--"Ink" tool.

I came across it this weekend while for some reason--inexplicable things tend to happen when I have to take some caffeine to overcome having shorted myself on sleep :p--investigating various drawing tools. I've even put a section of the festivities together into A* gallery format for you; here's Selenis doodled in four different programs:



(That's in the A* episode 10 gallery, here, and here's a bonus one of the preliminary round.)

Going clockwise from the upper left corner there, that's everyone's favorite galactic core bounty hunter sketched with Photoshop CS2's Paintbrush tool, GIMP's Ink tool, Alchemy's Shapes/Outline mode, and Photoshop 4's Lasso tool.

CS2 was the best painting program I had, and as you can see--hm well you can see it better in this close-up--its Paintbrush tool is a little fuzzy, and doesn't have the most dynamic line width control imaginable. So that's why I went looking for something better, and made a pleasant discovery with GIMP.

The clever thing about GIMP's Ink tool is that it can scale line width by movement speed as well as by stylus pressure, so when you go to draw a row of short quick shading lines, for instance, they'll come out nice and skinny just like you want, and then if you slow down, the line will sort of pool out into a fatter thing. This takes a little getting used to when you go in to do some detail work, but overall it's quite intuitive for my dashing style, and way more fun than the standard Paintbrush approach.

I've mentioned Alchemy before, but it's worth mentioning again as it is now in open beta, and you can download it for free, without having to register with their forum or anything. Its Outline Lasso-style drawing mode actually came from a suggestion I sent their programmer :), and is very fun to mess with, because you just move the pointer in any old shape you want, and it fills it in for you as soon as you release the drawing button, so you can build up crazy drawings--such as the Selenis doodle in the lower-right of the above image--very very quickly.

A couple things stop me from using it for production work, though. For one thing, the smoothing it uses alters lines considerably, and prevents drawing small details; I couldn't get the face any more detailed than what you see there, for instance, and that's scaled down by 50%. You can't scale your view in Alchemy, so there's no way to go in for higher detail unless you disable the smoothing option, but then you really start getting a lot of unsightly jagged polygonal lines. The second reason I won't be using Alchemy for actual A* pages is that it has an intentionally limited tool set: no Undo, for instance, and you can't set a canvas size, use layers, etc. But it's fun to doodle with now and then.

Photoshop 4's Lasso tool (lower-left doodle above) is what I've been using for A* all along; it's a weird way to draw, but you can get shapes with it that you simply can't get with any other type of drawing tool--that funky wash from her wrist jet, for instance. So I'm not going to give up drawing with it any time soon, but I do get frustrated sometimes when trying to draw certain things with it: small dots such as stars, for instance, or long slender lines; it's much easier to do stuff like that with a more traditional brushy drawing tool, so that was part of the reason why I went hunting for one.

So now I basically draw the page in Photoshop 4 as usual, then load it into GIMP and throw some ink around on it. I'm going light on that for now; who knows what I'll get up to once I get used to it. Here's the pre-Ink version of today's page 109 (top) compared with the Ink-ed final version (bottom):




You can see that among other things I used the Ink tool to dot the buttons on the control panel, redo Vero's spittle (ew), add highlights to characters' space suits, the pistol, and Selenis' wrist jet, add a long wall line in the background, make Selenis' waving hair a bit bushier, and to touch up parts of her outline. So tiny stuff, but useful, I hope.

For more pure Ink tool doodles, you can check out my other daily comic, Sketchy; starting with Sketchy's page 187, I'm drawing that comic entirely with the Ink tool.

First of all, I love the detail. It adds so much depth.

Also, thanks for explaining your methods.