Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 15, Page 28

Hm, I tried doing the grays before the blacks on this page, which is the opposite of the way I've been doing it, and I'm not sure how well it worked. Doh well, here's a real sci-fi illustration: a piece by Virgil Finlay. I don't know what it means, but it is pretty boss. Not that I'm tempted to try dot shading like that any time soon, phew!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 15, Page 29

Here's a photo I took of the pencil stage of today's page:



And for the sake of comparison, one of the finished ink version:



~~~~~~~

I came across a slideshow of Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley, "the first clear view of the sub since it sank in 1864 off the South Carolina coast." A submarine in the Civil War? Why yes, in fact the Hunley was the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel, and the Wikipedia article certainly makes for some interesting reading. In its day, the Hunley looked something like this 1902 sepia wash done after a contemporary painting:


image by U.S. Naval Historical Center (source)

and was powered by its crew, like so:


image by U.S. Naval Historical Center (source)

If that looks a bit unsafe, it was: the Hunley sank three times, killing 21 out of 24 of her three eight-man crew members. The first sinking came as the ship prepared for a test dive in the summer of 1863, "when Lieutenant Payne accidentally stepped on the lever controlling the sub's diving planes while the boat was running. This caused Hunley to dive with her hatches still open, flooding the submarine"; the tragically accident-prone Payne and two other crew members escaped the sinking. And that was only a couple weeks after the Confederate army had seized the submarine from her civilian owners, after seeing it in a successful test run against a coal flatboat; the Confederacy never official conscripted the vessel, so it didn't get a "CSS" prefix.

The "H. L." that remained at the front of the ship's name, then, came from the first and middle name of its inventor, Horace Lawson Hunley--who unfortunately was a member of the crew lost in the Hunley's second sinking six weeks later, when it failed to resurface after a mock attack. At the time, the submarine attacked its prey by spearing their hull with a barbed keg of black powder mounted on a 22-foot spar projecting off the prow, as represented on this modern miniature model:


image by U.S. Naval Historical Center (source)

The sub would embed the keg in the enemy's hull, then back away, with a 150-foot rope attached to the keg pulling taught to trigger its detonation. After the accident that killed Hunley, the supervising Confederate general decreed that the Hunley would only attack while surfaced, so the spar was adjusted to angle downward and strike the enemy vessel below the waterline as the Hunley cruised along the surface, and it was in this configuration, four months later, in which it made its only attack against a live target: the USS Housatonic, a 205-foot steam-powered Union sloop-of-war engaged in blockading Charleston's harbor:


image by US Military (source)

The Hunley succeed in attaching its barb to the Housatonic, which duly detonated and sank. The Hunley, however, failed to return to port. Theories vary on what caused it to go down: one has a pistol shot from the Housatonic striking the detonator box on the Hunley as they fought the waves in making their getaway, causing a premature detonation when the Hunley was only 100 feet away from the keg, rather than the designated 150; but the submarine's pump had not been engaged, nor did it show evidence of explosive damage, so another, perhaps more likely theory has it that the crew simply ran out of air in the sealed vessel.

The wreck wasn't found until the 1970's, and was only raised in 2000; in the year prior, there was a TV movie about it, The Hunley, starring Armand Assante and Donald Sutherland--as Confederate and Union officers, respectively, to judge by the movie poster. I have not seen this production!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 15, Page 30

Here's a grainy photo of the initial pencils for today's page, now on the back side of the final version:



Not sure why I was drawing it from that boring straight-on side perspective, since I never had it that way in my head. And I can hardly ever bear to draw anything that way, especially action, even though it would make things...a lot easier. =P

The Canson "Illustration" paper I've been using this week has been good, I think--makes for much cleaner scans than the Arches watercolor paper, for one thing. And I went over the background here twice and it came out amazingly black and smooth--whenever I tried that with the Arches paper, it warped, big time. And anyway Arches is just a brand of Canson, or something, I dunno; those French are tricky with their papier! But they make it nice. Anyway I'll have to order more of this Illustration stuff; my local art store doesn't have it--it's new-ish or something--so I'll probably just order it from here like I did before--the 18"x24" pad, each of whose pages I can cut into three A* pages.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 15, Page 31

Just a couple Sundays ago I switched my other regularly updated comic, The Princess and the Giant, from computer-drawn to brush and ink like A*. I haven't pimped the Princess here much lately but I think I'll start since these will basically be far-out weekly fantasy illustrations, probably similar in visual style to A* a lot of the time. Anyway here's this past Sunday's:

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 15, Page 32

Updates on some previous space stories!

When I last talked about the twin GRAIL satellites, at the end of December, they were getting ready to get down to business making a gravity map of the Moon. They were also sadly lacking cool names, just having the names "A" and "B," like cats in Dr. Seuss or something. Well NASA held a contest among schoolchildren across the country, and the winning classroom in Montana duly renamed the probes "Ebb" and "Flow." A little too clever for my taste (darn these smart kids these days), but I'm neither a student nor Stephen Colbert and thus have no say in such matters.

~~~~~~~

And back in mid-November I mentioned that an ambitious Russian probe, Phobos-Grunt, intended to scoop up some dirt from the Martian moon Phobos and bring it back to Earth, malfunctioned after launch and got stuck in Earth orbit. It wasn't a stable orbit, and on Sunday Phobos-Grunt re-entered the atmosphere, burning up and scattering pieces across the southern part of the Pacific Ocean. The probe "was one of the heaviest and most toxic space junk ever to crash to Earth," but its flameout was claimed to pose "minimal" risk; only about 200 pounds of material from the 14.9 ton probe--11 tons of that being highly flammable rocket fuel--were supposed to survive to hit Earth's surface; the aluminum fuel tanks were predicted to burst and explode at about 100 km up.

The article says that the chief of the Russian Federal Space Agency, aka Roscosmos, acknowledged the probe wasn't really ready, and they'd rushed it to try to hit the narrow launch window for Mars. Their previous attempt at this, 1996's Mars-96, was built by the same company and also malfunctioned and crashed after launch; that one scattered 200 grams of plutonium over the Andes; Phobos-Grunt, on the other hand, only had a tiny bit of the slightly radioactive metal cobalt-57, and was thus much less dramatic.

There are some other interesting notes in that article:
- "about 100 metric tons of space junk fall on Earth every year" (that seems like a lot :o), and much bigger things have come down in the past without causing major damage, for instance the 85 ton Skylab space station in 1979, and the 143 ton Mir space station in 2001
- "The worst ever radiation spill from a derelict space vehicle came in January 1978 when the nuclear-powered Cosmos 954 satellite crashed over northwestern Canada. The Soviets claimed the craft completely burned up on re-entry, but a massive recovery effort by Canadian authorities recovered a dozen fragments, most of which were radioactive."

According to Wikipedia (my ad blocker seems to be blocking their 24-hour self-imposed blackout, neat! Don't tell Jimmy >_>), that recovery effort was called Operation Morning Light, and was a joint Canadian-American operation. Their eight-month recovery operation turned up 12 large pieces of the Russian satellite:


image by US Federal Government (source)


Neat! And that is probably why we don't have many nuclear-powered Earth satellites anymore...that we know of. >_>

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 15, Page 33

I accidentally discovered ink spatter today! See I've been working with a wetter brush lately, and eh sort of dropped it. But it looked kind of neat so then I tried doing more on purpose, which mostly worked, although mostly over the rest of my drawing table. Oh well, that must be why they make 'em so easy to wipe down!

We're sorta snowed in here in Seattle, which isn't hard since we have lots of hills and like two snow plows and no real idea what snow is. It's keeping me from wasting a couple hours each day pretending to work out at the gym, but if it keeps up I may have to slush my way over to the supermarket for supplies tomorrow, which will amount to about the same amount of exercise. :P In theory though it will help me catch up on sleep, which I have been needing to do for about five weeks. I think I'm starting to get a handle on this ink business though, so that should be helping too.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 15, Page 34

Here's the pencil stage:



And then I went and inked it! Kinda wish I coulda kept the pilot's expression in the pencils, but he needed to be looking up, so nyah. (Also I thought the thick short parallel shading strokes on the faces had a sort of John Romita Jr. look to 'em, which I thought was keen.) But anyway before the inking I was going to walk to the snowy mile or so to the supermarket, 'cause we're still snowed in here in Seattle--as you can see here, certain things like math did not work out as the meteorologists had somehow figured:



...

So yeah it didn't melt and I was finally all bundled up and ready for the arctic journey to resupply, and I open the front door and a package falls on me! That's funny, I think, I didn't order anything... Well it was Klaus Jansen's The DC Comics Guide to Inking Comics from A*'s Amazon Wish List! Some really thoughtful and generous reader had ordered it for me! Gosh! Thanks! <3 <3

I haven't followed Jansen's inking work recently, but I really liked the work he did inking Frank Miller's pencils back in the Daredevil and "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" days. And he talks about working on B:TDKR with Miller a bit in this, which is quite interesting. But it's also filled with great illustrations by the two of them and other comic professionals (particularly lots of classic inked stuff by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano, who produced a lot of the fantastic-looking DC stuff I wasn't buying back in the 80's-ish) showing the various aspects and techniques of comic book inking; not only that, but it's filled with really practical tips on working with ink; just to give one example, he mentions that part of the inker's job is to erase not only the pencils on the front of the page, but also any that might be on the back, because you don't want it rubbing off onto another page when they are stacked. And a few hours after I read that I realized...oh yeah I stack mine just like that. I'd better take care of those unused back pencils! So I did that. Whew! Thanks, Klaus! So it's a very helpful book for my A* work, and super thanks again to the reader who fulfilled that book wish of mine! :D

And then I went and successfully lived to bring groceries back home through the snow. I took some pictures too so later we Seattlites will remember what snow in the city looks like. Here's looking down my street (that'd be my "graphite" gray 2001 Camry posing boldly on the far right)



and here's a shot of some striking street lighting (we got these new bright white econo-bulb street lights put in in the past year, but only south of me--immediately north you go back to the old amber ones, which normally I like more but I gotta admit the white ones make for some nice snow shots) on a Bug curled up rather picturesquely beneath a tidy round snow blanket:



So that was fun! Then I came back and drew stuff and messed up my pencils as usual and made today's page! I'm going to be glad when we're done with this pilot guy because I can't seem to decide on a non-goofy way to draw him for some reason, dar. And we'll be done with him soon, mwah-hah-haaaa!

Oh! Erm I mean um... Yep.

Hi, Gual here, just arriving!

Man, I want to see the snow for real!

Oh hey, thanks for dropping in! :)

Snow is pretty neat to look at, that's for sure! (Not so great to travel through--thank goodness I work from home with A*. =) I bet you'll get to see it someday, even if it takes a massive disruption in global weather patterns!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 15, Page 35

Pencils!



I think I actually *improved* on the pencils with the ink today, so yay, progress or luck, I'll take it. :D And it's nice not to try drawing heads in weird perspectives now and then, I mean who do I think I am anyway, Neal Adams or something? Sheesh!

Have not been succeeding on the catching up on sleep thing though so I will go try some of that. Thanks everyone for reading and I hope you'll stop by again next week for more A* adventures in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace~~!