Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 44

My work will be shown at the delicious chocolate/coffee/tea shop Chocolat Vitale in Seattle's Phinney neighborhood in May and June.



May is a group show, with the opening on Friday, May the 11th, from 6-9 pm. I'll have two framed prints of my digital work in the show; it sounds like they'll have a lot of artists, so the opening should be quite a party!

Then the following month I have the place all to myself, and will try to fill it up with both digital and traditional work. This solo show opens on Friday, June 8th, from 6-9 pm.

Stop by and say hi, check out my art and their chocolate (man, it's good).

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An elephant on Mars? When pigs fly! But some clever analysts monitoring photos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Oribiter found a lava flow with a definite pachydermal appearance, at least from orbit:


image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona (source)

This Yahoo! blog thing where I found the image link says the lava flow is no more than 100 million years old, which is pretty recent in planetary terms. Lava flow and elephants graze no more on the red planet, but at least we have this natural formation to hatch conspiracy theories about now.

(That blog article mistakenly calls the "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter" the "Mars Reconnaissance Rover." :P)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 45

In looking up something for that "elephant" on Mars photo by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter yesterday, I came across a couple more recent cool MRO photos! So here they are:


image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona (source)

^ Those are sand dunes in "enhanced color," which...well I'm not sure what it means, but it sure is pretty. The dunes are in an impact crater, and the image shows an area about 1 km wide.


image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona (source)

^ A Martian dust devil! This image is about 600 meters across; the dust devil was estimated to have been 30 meters in diameter and 800 meters high. The background surface here looks almost like a tiling texture, doesn't it? Ooh caught you, NASA! Juuuust kidding. :P

Gonna do my big ink comparison testing this weekend! This should be interesting. Detailed ink blots next week!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 46

I'm using a new black ink now! But eh it's late so tales and images of this weekend's furious ink-testing will have to wait for another update; for now I present you with the majesty that is the sketch I did for this week's drawing topic at the letsdrawblanks.blogspot.com sketch blog--can you guess the topic? :o

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 47

Oy! It seems to be taking me forever to draw the new male characters in this dive. I should bring Vero back, he was easy to draw. :P I gotta wrap things up and get some sleep, so here's just an early stage of today's page:



Hm... I think I kept the door frames and bits of hair. Everything else got redrawn, probably a few times! It's like two to four paintings in one! >_>

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Also, thanks to those dedicated readers who've been supporting A* at TWC. You got A* moved forward a page in their listing which has helped more people find it! So thank you, I really do appreciate it. :)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 48

I've got to be up tomorrow, so it's another late/early morning of cut-rate bloggetry! Here's a photo of an early version of today's page:



Hm, I probably overdid the hatching and feathering by the end, but this new ink I'm using has this fascinating property of holding the brush firmly together in a strong tip, which makes such details a lot easier to do! Must be whatever binding agent makes it more waterproof than the sumi ink I was using before. Anyway I will probably have this increased lining urge worked out of my system in a week or so, at which point we'll hopefully get back to art that's a little less cluttered. :P

Oh hey and that's the old board I've been using as a drawing board for the past few weeks, just holding it in my lap, usually propped up on one crossed knee. Works pretty well! It's 3/4" thick and I know you can go buy nice thin and light drawing boards, but this one just so happens to fit my pages pretty much perfectly, so I have become attached to it. Also I'm the one who cut it to this peculiar size--that was a while back, to serve as a bit of elevation for when I stand at my stand-up computer "desk" (which is really just an old bookshelf); but I've got others that are currently providing plenty of height in a little wooden platform I constructed for that purpose, so this one was free to get ink on it; I suppose eventually it'll be pretty black around the edges.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 49

As I mentioned at the beginning of the week, I'm using a new black ink for A* now! This is the one I am using, but I warn you, it is in disguise, and is not what it appears:



What ink is it? It's one of these thirteen participants in my weekend waterproof black pigment ink testing extravaganza:



Did you notice the typo in the ink name on one of the labels? ;)

Here was the round 1 report card:



These noble Q-tips were harmed in the making of it:



I'll break it down in detail in the next part of this inky round-up! Oh the excitement, children! Plus: a dark horse late entry???

Ready? Then head on to part two!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 50

I got two people who linked to me to thank in one day, I think that's probably a record or something. :D Anyway a nice internet person said some nice things about A* in a post on other comics to read on the Freakangels webcomic forum. Thanks for the link! And then the author of the science fiction webcomic The Big Crunch (comedy, some mature themes) wrote some nice things about A* in a blog post. Yay, thanks! The Big Crunch is *also* set in the vicinity of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy--what are the odds??

~~~~~


image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington (source)

^ That is a nifty couple of maps being constructed out of photos of Mercury taken by the MESSENGER probe; this image was posted by NASA in October, with this caption:


Oh the colors, children!

~~~~~~

This is A* though and we don't do colors; in fact, that photo I posted yesterday of my mystery black A* ink sitting on top of a black and white ink painting was just tooooo colorful for my liking, so here's an artsy pure black and white take on it that I decided to make for some reason:



The identity of A*'s mystery ink will be revealed next week! Assuming I'm able to get all the results of my big ink round-up written up and posted in timely fashion, that is. In any case, when they ask you what your favorite Photoshop filter is, you tell them it's the black-and-white-creating Threshold filter, by gum!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 51

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Part 2 of the Supermassive Black Ink round-up! For part one, go here.

In part one I showed a photo of the inks tested, and the "report card" of blot tests, three with each ink, applied to Canson Illustration paper with a clean Q-tip: a) one of the pure ink, b) a second of the pure ink, gone over with i) a water-dipped Q-tip, ii) a Mars Plastic eraser, and iii) Deleter White 2 ink, and c) a diluted wash of the ink. For (a) I was mostly looking at darkness and shine, for (b) how well the ink resisted damage, and for (c) how close to pure gray (ie non-yellow) the ink appeared in a wash.

Here's a scan of the (a) row that shows the darkness of the inks a little more clearly, although with a certain amount of lightening of some of the inks due to their reflective surfaces:



An oversaturated photo of the (c) row, to show the relative yellowness of the washes:



Now, if we take samples of each black from that scan of the (a) row, blur them to make it easier to see their overall value, and then raise the contrast to make it easier to compare them, we get a relative scale of their values (lightness to darkness). But some of those patches were actually kind of uneven, mostly due to uneven reflection from the surface. If instead of adjusting their value relative to each other, we adjust it relative to the paper next to them, we get another relative scale, this time of their gloss (high gloss to matte):



That's the meat of it, but below you'll find individual descriptions of the ink from their test session. For the most part these weren't selected very scientifically, but were just ones I found in local art supply stores, or that I saw getting particularly interesting mention online when I was searching for waterproof black pigment inks:


Yasutomo Waterproof Sumi

I used one 12 ounce bottle of this ink, with maybe one ounce remaining, for all of the inked A* pages through episode 16, page 45; episode 13, page 136 was the first page I did off the computer, so that was a total of eh I think 139 pages all done with that one bottle, not to mention all the other ink drawings and paintings I did over that 6 month+ span that started back on October 11th. And I should add that probably on most occasions I wasted about half of what I poured out to use, because I didn't want to pour back the unused portion, as it would have been at least partially diluted by the washes I'd been doing with it. Considering that their 12 ounce bottles go for about $12, or $1/ounce, that's a nearly unbeatable value, especially when you consider that all but one of the other inks cost at *least* $3/ounce.

This stuff is easy to handle and doesn't smell bad (there's a faint smell like old beets or something if you smell it close up). It is somewhat yellowy in washes, though, rather glossy, which can make scanning it tricky, and it is not very black or waterproof, at least in comparison with most of the other inks. I was particularly having trouble with it making a gray muddle when I tried putting Deleter White 2 ink over it.

I still think it's a fine ink, particularly for the cost, but I was getting to the point where I needed something that was a little cleaner--hence this ink test!


Higgins Black Magic

This seems to be the most common black comic ink in the US, as far as I've heard anyway. It's maybe a hair darker than the Yasutomo Sumi, but very matte, which means it's a dull surface that is easy to scan into digital form because there's very little reflection back from the scanner's internal light source. At $3 for a 1 ounce bottle it's pretty cheap relative to the other inks, aside from the Sumi and Speedball. It smells faintly of some sort of chemicals. It isn't the darkest ink out there, it washes a bit yellow, and was one of the slowest-drying of the inks I tested, but it's a reasonably solid performer. The trademark inkwell-shaped plastic bottle is handy for resisting being tipped over, and comes with a small eyedropper descending from the inside of the cap, although it's a kind of small and not easily used eyedropper.

Higgins is made by Chartpak, which also makes the Rapidograph and Koh-I-Noor inks described below.


Speedball Super Black

This was the first ink I tried in my initial tests to see if I could do A* by hand, and it is not coincidentally the cheapest, going in big 32 ounce bottles for a mere $13. It is about as dark as Higgins, nearly as matte, quite waterproof, and from the mentions I've seen appears to be the second most commonly used comic ink in the States. It smells a little more strongly than Higgins and is quite fluid.

It is, however, incredibly yellow when diluted in a wash--really icky looking. I dropped it after a few test drawings.


Rapidograph Ultradraw

These Rapidograph and Koh-I-Noor inks go for about $4 for a 3/4 ounce bottle, although the bottles do come with a handy pointed spout, presumably for easy insertion into the ink chambers of Rapidograph technical pens. They are also incredibly fluid, and all but the Ulniversal were so fluid that, when I put a Q-tip end soaked in them into a glass jar of water, the ink immediately shot high up the sides of the glass, even to places that didn't look wet--rather a startling phenomenon!

In fact the distinctions between them--which seem to involve similarly worded recommended uses on paper or film--were largely lost on me. None of them are very black--they were the lightest inks in the test. Ultradraw may be the glossiest of them, and smelled faintly turpentiney.


Rapidograph Ulniversal

That is not a typo--or rather, the "Ulniversal" typo was on the label: check the photo of the bottle in part 1; it's supposed to say "Universal," of course. Reassuring quality control!

Like the other Rapidograph/Koh-I-Noor inks, Ulniversal isn't very black; it was perhaps the yellowest and most waterproof of them, although the least fluid (but still more fluid than most of the other inks). It smelled like glue.


Rapidograph Rapidraw

Didn't stand out much from the other Rapidograph/Koh-I-Noor inks, but may have been the glossiest. Smelled of faintly perfumey chemicals.


Koh-I-Noor Acetate Ink

Couldn't find a good link for this one--I just found it, along with the Rapidograph inks, in the University of Washington Bookstore's large art supply section. Smelled of icky chemicals and was probably the lightest of these four.


Pro Art India Ink

Along with hm another brand name I can't remember now, both of which give a P.O. box in Beaverton, Oregon as their address, Pro Art is quietly (it appears they used to have a web presence, but no more) supplying most of the art supplies I've found in non-specialty stores (such as Fred Meyer) in Seattle. This ink isn't particularly easy to find online, but at about $3 for 2 ounces, it's pretty cheap. I wanted to try it out after reading Veronica Fish's interesting ink review. And it is indeed an interesting ink, although perhaps for the wrong reasons.

You will notice in the chart above that it is both the second-darkest, and by far the most reflective; it dries with a very uneven, oily sheen that I think must help give it its very dark tone, at least in spots. It comes with a big, very sloppy eyedropper on the bottom of the cap, and smells of somewhat strong chocolatey chemicals. :p

The real nightmare begins when you try to use it: it separates very easily; in fact, the first Q-tip-full I got of it was nearly completely watery. Perhaps for a similar reason it rinses off the brush fairly easily, and dries very slowly. It would be very difficult to try painting evenly black areas with this ink.

On the plus side, this was one of the most waterproof of the inks I tested.


Dr. Ph. Martin's Bombay Black

An extremely smooth matte ink that is quite affordable at about $3 per ounce. It isn't the darkest, but is nicely waterproof, and should scan very cleanly. Has a sharp but not really bad chemical smell.


Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Matte

Basically a stronger version of the Bombay Black, Black Star Matte dries to an unbeatably smooth black matte surface. It is pretty expensive at about $10 per ounce, but that can come down to more like $6 per ounce if you buy a big 32 ounce bottle. The one ounce glass bottles this and the Bombay Black come in are very nice, though, and have a very usable snub-nose eyedropper on the underside of the cap.

If all I was concerned about was how my ink drawings reproduce when scanned in grayscale, I'd pretty definitely be using this ink. This was also a sentimental favorite for A* due to the "Black Star" name. :)


Kuretake Manga Ink

I was rather rooting for this ink as at just over $8 for a two-ounce bottle, it is surprisingly affordable for an imported ink. It is nice and black, and quite waterproof, with a thick feel and a slightly sweet chemical smell, but was also one of the glossiest of the inks I tried, which means it could come out unevenly when scanned.


Deleter Black 3

At about $5.50 per ounce directly from the manufacturer in Japan, this is reasonably affordable for an imported ink, although their shipping is pretty steep, so you'd kind of want to order a lot at once (for smaller amounts, the math might work out better if you order it through jetpens.com). I was made aware of this ink via an art supplies post in the Galaxion webcomic's blog.

One of the blacker of the tested inks, and fairly reflective, where this one stand out is in its wash: whereas all the other inks come out with a discernible yellowish tint in a wash, Deleter Black 3 washes almost a pure neutral gray; this doesn't matter for images scanned in and posted online, of course, since those are easy to desaturate digitally, but I also want A*'s original art to look nice in person, since I hope to sell it, and this is a nice-looking ink, although in the test it does appear to have been the second-least-waterproof. Has a strong turpentiney smell.


Deleter Black 4

A very black, highly waterproof, reasonably matte ink, this one looked promising in the test results, although it wasn't as nicely neutral gray as Deleter Black 3, and was significantly more expensive, at nearly $8 per ounce. Has a faint vegetably smell.

One annoying thing about these Deleter Black inks is that they come in these totally cylindrical, wide-mouthed, cheap plastic jars, and when you unscrew the lid, more often than not the ink has formed a big bubble right across the jar mouth--and when it pops, as it must, little drops of ink scatter around. Ugh. Really bad packaging!

~~~~~~~

And there was a late arrival that didn't get into the main test battery because I didn't find out about it until afterwards, but it sounded so potentially stupendous that I just had to try it out:


Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Hicarb

"Hicarb" is supposed to stand for "high carbon content," and this ink is supposed to be the darkest of Ph. Martin's line. Expensive like the Black Star Matte. Claims to contain no varnish or shellac, which are generally used to give these inks their waterproof properties, but it has *something* in there aside from just carbon, as there's a fairly chemical smell about it. Here's its test sheet:



Pretty positive test as it came out dark and fairly smooth, although the waterproof aspect seemed a little iffy, and it wasn't significantly less yellow than most of the others.

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One ink I have messed with that I did not include in the tests is Platinum Carbon Black, because, while admirably liquid and waterproof, it isn't really very black at all--more of a dark gray. As an imported ink it's a bit pricey at about $12 per ounce.

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Well at the end of all that I decided on four finalists on which to conduct a more comprehensive test: painting an actual picture! The ones I chose, based on their relatively standout performances on the test battery's report card, were Black Star Matte, Kuretake Manga Ink, Deleter 3, and Deleter 4. And then I threw in Black Star Hicarb as well once it arrived.

So, in the next and final installment of these ink tests: the paintings, and A*'s new black ink revealed! =ooooooh~~

Continue on to part 3!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 52

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Okay, let's finish up the Supermassive Black Ink Round-up! A*'s new ink will be revealed, and then we'll probably never have to talk about ink again. :P Well...at least not for a while, most likely.

This is part 3 of the round-up; for part 2, go here. At the end of that last part, I said I'd narrowed the field down to four finalists, plus the late-comer dark horse: Kuretake Manga Ink, Deleter Black 4, Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Matte, Deleter Black 3, and Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Hicarb. I don't know why they're in that order exactly but that's the order in which I painted quick test paintings with them, so here we go:


Kuretake Manga Ink



This one looks a bit blotchy in the wash on the cheek, but that was really just due to me blotting it clumsily--not the ink's fault. The washes did have a bit of a spongy edge bleed to them, rather like I tended to get with light washes using sumi ink, which I'd used for most of the A* pages up to this point--the paper is a factor here, as I hadn't had this problem with the sumi ink until I switched from Arches Watercolor paper to Canson Illustration paper, which has an invisible clay coating on its surface designed to stop bleeding--but in the case of washes it seems to backfire a bit, at least with certain inks--the Yasutomo Sumi and this Kuretake Manga inks being two of them.

It came out nice and black, but if you look closely, you'll see a pattern of short parallel ridges in the black in the lower left hand corner: that's the paper's scarcely perceptible texture, reflecting in the scanner's light. This ink is highly reflective! Probably too much so. You can see it in the photo I took, too:



The washes also come out a bit yellow, as expected. But overall, the ink handled well and was pleasant to work with.


Deleter Black 4



What a shocker this one was! Aside from this painting suffering from horrible draftsmanship, which was my fault, the ink itself seemed to separate into watery and oily constituents: you can see the wateriness in the way the eyelashes came out lighter than the rest--they were the first bit I tried painting--and the oiliness in whatever the heck happened to the jawline. Yeegh.

It was also more yellow than the Kuretake, and even the Deleter White 2 I put on over the shoulder in the lower right corner started to change a bit from its usual slightly bluishness (when over black ink) to more of a yellow tone; you can't really see it in this photo but just pretend:



I was really surprised at how awful this ink was to work with.


Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Matte



This one, although not that dark in person (not that you can really tell here since this photo had its contrast raised as I usually do with photos, but hey),



had delightful super-smooth, non-reflective blacks that scanned very well--just look how nice and smooth those large black areas came out in the scan!

It did wash rather yellow, though, and the washes seemed to form hard edges rather more quickly than I'd expected, making it difficult to build a gradient effect. This may have just been clumsiness on my part, however.


Deleter Black 3



Deleter Black 3 is kind of middle of the road among these finalist inks in terms of darkness and gloss, but that balance seems to work pretty well for my scanning process.

Although this ink looked like the least waterproof of the new inks I tested in the first round of testing, second only to the sumi I had been using, I didn't have a problem with it muddling the Deleter White 2 I applied to some parts of the painting--I *did* tend to have that problem with the sumi ink. So its poor performance in the ink blot test may just have been a fluke, I dunno.

The really nice thing about this one, and I suppose you probably can't see it in the photo but you could try,



is how smooth the washes came out: no bristle marks or internal edges or other artifacts like I often get with other inks, and the outer edges didn't have that spongy bleeding I was talking about seeing with the sumi and Kuretake Manga inks. And best of all, there is very little yellow in it--maybe none at all, but I don't have one of those fancy full-spectrum lights to get a really neutral reading on it--all my lights are yellow, bah. :P

In any case, it looks really good in person, and scans pretty well too.


Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Hicarb



Another shocker! I had high hopes for this one based on the blot test (see Round-up part 2), where it looked pretty darn dark coming thickly off the Q-tip, but when I actually tried painting it on with a brush, it came out really, really gray. I dried my brush and re-dipped a few times to see if I'd just had some water on the brush or something, but no, gray it was, and only started getting a bit darker if I sort of layered it up a bit. It was also a bit yellow, although that was expected after the blot test. It is decently matte, but just so wishy-washy in the black department as to be entirely unserviceable. Rather bizarre. I keep thinking this must have been a fluke but I dunno, I gave it a few retries and no go. Here's the photo:




~~~~~~~

We can use Photoshop to get a bit more quantitative about comparing these finalists. For instance, I took a photo of the first four of them in an otherwise dark room with my camera's flash--which is probably the most neutral light source I have



--to get a color comparison; the piece above them was the last page done with the Yasutomo Sumi ink. And...okay so you can't really see much color difference in this photo. Granted, even the yellowest of these inks is still pretty gray--still, even a little yellow will tend to stand out when you have something framed up on a wall, as I found out in my last art show. ;_; Anyway, we can see their relative yellowness by using Photoshop to crank up the saturation:



The blue parts are mostly from where I was testing Deleter White 2 over the black inks. Anyway, as you can see, the Deleter Black 3 stands out somewhat as having the lowest yellow levels.

To analyze the quality of their blackness, we can compare their histograms:



These show the amount of each image occurring across the range of values, from pure black on the left to pure white on the right. Since these were scanned in and my scanner doesn't reproduce pure black, even the blackest blacks come out a bit gray in the histograms of the original scans, so don't worry about that--what we're really looking for here is a nice, steep left slope on the left end of the histogram: the steeper that slope, the purer the black.

The Kuretake Manga ink, for instance, has a pretty narrow black peak, which is good; Deleter Black 4, on the other hand, has a very wide black peak, which means its black values were scattered lighter and darker, which is not so good. The unsurpassed smoothness of Black Star Matte shows in its very steep left slope--top marks there. Deleter Black 3, as we've seen elsewhere, was kind of an average performer in the histogram as well, and Hicarb...well, it didn't really form a black peak at all.

~~~~~~~

That was it for my tests! Which ink is in the mystery A* ink bottle, then?



That's a Black Star Matte bottle, with its label strategically blacked out with a Sharpie marker. But inside it is...Deleter Black 3! Yep. A good all-around performer, and by far the best-looking of the inks, when seen in person. It comes in crummy plastic jars, but swap one of the nice Dr. Ph. Martin jars in, and you're in business. (I noticed Dr. Ph. Martin even sells empty ink bottles, but with say Bombay Black going for just 20 cents more in the same type of jar, you might as well get that and just empty it into something else.)

So Deleter Black 3 it is! Next: less talking about ink, more talking about other stuff!

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• A* Episode 16, Page 53

image by X-ray: NASA/CXC/Curtin University/R. Soria et al., Optical: NASA/STScI/ Middlebury College/F. Winkler et al. (source)

^ That's a section of galaxy M83 in a composite image of Chandra X-ray and optical data. The large, deep pink spot at the top middle is a new ultraluminous X-ray source, or "ULX"; these are objects that give off more gamma ray radiation than typical binary systems, or "as much energy in X-rays as a million suns radiate at all wavelengths." In the case of the most powerful ULXs, the suggestion is that one of the binary partners is a very large black hole, on the order of 40 to 100 solar masses; the largest known stellar mass black hole in our galaxy, by comparison, is more like 15 solar masses.

But there are a few even more unusual things about this particular ULX. One is its high variability: "the source had increased in X-ray brightness by at least 3,000 times [between 2000 and 2010] and has since become the brightest X-ray source in M83," says NASA. The other is the age of its stellar companion, which is thought to be a red giant, about 500 million years old; in a binary system, the two bodies are usually about the same age, having formed from the same source, so the implication is that this black hole is about 500 million years old. Other ULXs before this one had hot, bright young blue stars for companions, so this is the first time astronomers have seen evidence for a large stellar mass black hole this old.

This suggests that there could be many more old black holes drifting around, which I suppose most astronomers would predict--given that very large stars almost invariably form black holes at the end of their relatively brief lives, in theory--but they're usually darned hard to spot, so they got a bit lucky that they were looking when this one started eating some material and sending out X-rays (and that its jet was pointing directly at us, of course). I tend to think that once a good way of detecting the quiet black holes is hit upon, we'll find that there are oodles and oodles of them, young and old, pretty much everywhere stars have been.