Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 82

Some weeks ago when Seattle had an unexpected day of decent weather, I was considering my summer wardrobe and realizing that I was sorely in need of some less decrepit T-shirts with which to cover myself when going out in public. It's been...a while since I've done actual T-shirt shopping, and I was thinking "so how would this work? Would I just go to...a department store?" Clearly it was an unfamiliar, confusing, scary world upon whose brink I found myself, but then the fortunate thought came to me that I'm supposed to be making my own T-shirts anyway! So I made myself some A* T-shirts. They're in the A* T-shirt store so I suppose you could get them too if you want! These four new designs are available in men's and women's sizes, and you can pick your own cloth color if the default black shirt color isn't your thing--I went with white, myself:



Those first two are thanks to some fine images from NASA that have featured in A* news articles in the past: the first design is a NASA color-coded relief map of the Moon based on elevation data captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, and the second is a Hubble photo of Nebula NGC 6357 and its large Pismis 24 star cluster. The third is a page from earlier in this A* episode, and the fourth is this funky illustration of Selenis as the embodiment of winter that I drew a little while back.

So yes slapping an existing rectangular image on a blank T-shirt is my ultra-masterful design strategy! Subtle gradients and fine detail don't come out incredibly sharply in the T-shirt medium, as the prototypes of these shirts that I ordered for myself reveal, but that's not going to stop me from wearing them around this summer. :PP

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 83

A 500-meter asteroid is coming within "14 lunar distances of Earth" today, and that's big and close enough that in theory, Earth-based telescopes will be able to spot it.

Asteroid 2012 LZ1 was only just spotted this week, according to the news article! Makes you wonder what else we're missing out there, doesn't it? :o

Sweet! =o

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I speculated on our chances of death at the hands--or whatever they have--of swarms of robotic "quadrotors" back in March, but now there's a much creepier four-rotored flying machine to fear...because a Dutch artist made one out of his dead cat. :ooo I give you...Orvillecopter.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 84

I have a huge backlog of neat science stuff to cover, like finishing the Tycho's Remnant coverage like I said I would, doing a big series about non-rocketfuel spaceflight like I told someone else I would (starting with their nifty illustration of a space elevator), and even recent stuff like the prototype Space Shuttle Enterprise being shipped up the Hudson by barge over the weekend, or that black-hole-seeking satellite NASA just launched yesterday. HRM.

But I've also been itching to do some sketching--I ordered a huge box of these Faber-Castell "BIG BRUSH" India ink markers back when I thought I was going to do A* in pen, and they've just been burning a hole in my art supply closet of shame, for instance--AND tribulations I've been having with art in the past week or so--I felt like I was finally getting somewhere with the breezy yet sharp rendering of Thierry's face on page 82, but now I seem to be having trouble following that up...as I generally do when trying to duplicate my own previous drawing styles--got me to thinking. The best thing if you're trying to get better at realistic drawing of people is drawing from live models, of course, but if you're poor to hire models, or too antisocial to get friends to model for you, or too chicken to spy on people from the corner of a coffee shop or to set up a little portrait booth on a street corner or something, then you've got to come up with something else. Well it struck me that I could just practice drawing faces from photos, which is what a lot of artists do for their actual art anyway.

This is where I need a stack of trashy magazines or something, but I don't have that. I've got this ad for an invasive health club chain that came in the mail a while back and which I saved because their ridiculously tan model had some Selenic qualities (not the tan, though :P); after that I've got hmmm a book on the history of Italian fashion photography, which has a lot of people photos in it (although perhaps not the best variety as they're mostly you know slender 20-something models), and after that...uhh I guess I have some music CD jackets. After THAT, if I'm not sick of it yet, I might just have to go buy People magazine or something. ;P

Anyway so here's the first try (the gym model--there are three more photos of her in the brochure, so that might keep this blog busy through early next week...):



I realized after doing this one that some of the many distortions--the too-small nose and the too-large hair, for example--might have been due to my having my drawing surface at a nearly horizontal angle, which caused me to view it--and the photo I was working from--at an angle as I sat above them; in the past I've noticed that I sometimes overcompensate for that viewing angle by drawing the upper parts--the parts farther away from me--too large, since they seem smaller in the drawing from my angled point of view. I wonder if that's sort of neutralized if you're working from an image that is also at that same angle...well it doesn't seem like it was, since it happened here.

So anyway I spent some time wrestling my drawing table into a higher angle; I did have it at a higher angle for a while after getting it, although it was never *that* high, and I eventually gave that up because I was having trouble resting my arms firmly on the surface. I've discovered in the past week though that that arm resting problem was actually due to having my feet slightly elevated, which I guess had the effect of pushing me back in my seat, subtly making it difficult to lean my weight forward onto the drawing table in a meaningful way. Another ergonomic problem solved! Leaning forward onto an angled table is revealing a new crop of ergonomic challenges, of course. Never a dull moment! :P

Hm one other thing I have been noticing but not really doing anything meaningful about lately is that in reality, the primary facial features--eyes, nose, mouth--usually take up quite a tiny part of the face; they're sort of concentrated in the lower middle, really. I've been drawing those facial features too large, for the most part--I suppose out of a subconscious urge to make them more expressive, or maybe just because that's what I focus on when looking at a face. So maybe this type of exercise will help me get that under control a bit.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 85

I meant to have another sketch of another photo of that gym ad model done today, and I actually did not just one, but four! But they were all pretty bad. Actually the first three were downright apocalyptically awful, and then I lowered my drawing table back down to a more horizontal level like it was when I did yesterday's sketch, and then the fourth sketch magically came out better--it had all the major facial features complete in their approximate correct locations--and I thought I'd go with it, but looking at it now...it's still pretty ugly. :P So it goes in the bin! At least I've learned to keep my drawing table closer to the horizontal. :P Maybe I'll take another shot at sketching that photo next week.

I do though have this scintillating photo I took of working on today's A* page, having just masked off the non-video-screen part of the page so that I could spatter some white ink stars onto the screen part:



A friend gave me a pad of this tracing paper some weeks back, and I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but then I realized it makes delineating the shapes of ink spatter masks much easier! I just put the tracing paper over the page, draw where the edges of the mask(s) need to go to on top of the tracing paper with a marker, then cut it out with scissors, and voila. Way easier to see through and find the edges with than regular paper. :D

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I'm not sure why I drew those big eh curvy things on the top of the chair Selenis is sitting in in today's A* page, BUT earlier this evening a friend and I somehow ended up looking through the artwork for angel cards in that so-popular Magic: The Gathering trading card game--which I have never played; it seems highly technical! and expensive! :o--to verify our supposition that those heathen artists they get to do the card art tend to depict angels as unusually attractive young women. And upon researching the topic, this does indeed appear to be the case! >_> Man, that's a good Friday night right there. Anyway, I wonder if that subconsciously influenced the funky wingy design of this chair back. :P They *did* seem to add some majesty to the thing!

Awe hell. Someone is about to get an Ass-whuppin'!!!

;)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 86

Aside from fussing with the previous page a few times (I ended up blacking out the front of the chair, darkening the control panel behind her, and blacking out the white "halo" lines I'd left around parts of the chair, etc), over the weekend I was torn over a question of style/approach, so I did this little test sketch (pay no attention to the lack of white ink cleanup/highlights and the wonky proportions :P):



(There's a larger version in the gallery, but the version above is closer to the relative size it would get shrunk to if it was an A* page, sorta.)

The approach starts by sketching the layout in very light gray, the proceeding to fill things in from light grays to darker and darker grays and then black, in theory--whereas normally, I start with black, then fill in grays where needed. Here's that sketch in an earlier, light gray stage:



It was something I sort of stumbled into trying for five or six pages starting back with page 69; the most successful was probably page 73:



Contrast that with page 82, which I think is probably the most successful recent example of my usual black-first approach:



The light-to-dark one is certainly smoother, isn't it? In fact I was quite surprised at how nice all those overlapping light washes came out; I kind of thought they'd just leave ugly border lines everywhere. But they didn't, so I've been conflicted as to whether or not I should adopt that approach as my main working method--but I wasn't sure I could reproduce that level of finish, thus the weekend test sketch--which showed page 69 wasn't a fluke, I think.

I like both approaches--the subtle gradations and light sourcing of the light-to-dark method, and the sharp punch of the black-first approach. Ideally I guess I'd be able to combine them, and I don't think there's a reason *why* I can't do that...I've just got to get used to using the right one where appropriate, I guess. I started out today's page with a light layout sketch, but somehow it just wasn't coming off--I couldn't really feel the facial features like I wanted to--so I had to go to full black ink instead. Hum. The black ink approach *is* a lot more immediately satisfying, I have to say; all the little washes and blends of the light-to-dark can feel a bit tedious--and I discovered in this sketch that it doesn't work against a pure white background, because the white edges of the figure just read as part of the background, so the figure looks bizarrely skinny.

Anyway I'm sure I'll keep waffling and flailing around with this. :P

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A bunch of interesting space news ran across my screen today (I swear I don't go looking for this stuff!):

- According to this Time article, a geologist at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, appears to have come up with an explanation for the unearthly properties of dust brought back from the Moon by the Apollo missions some 40 years ago. Superfine and filled with minute orange and green glass beads produced in the intense melting and cooling of billions of years of asteroid impacts, moon dust is unusually chemically reactive (rather than inert as you might have expected), a very good insulator against heat, and floats when subjected to a static charge.

Apparently that's all due to nanoparticles! Examining miniscule glassy bubbles in the moon dust, the researcher found that instead of being filled with gas, they were filled with extremely tiny glass particles, some no larger than a molecule. Apparently, that tiny size can account for the unusual properties of the dust. Formed inside cooling bubbles from impacts and then smashed apart by subsequent impacts, these particles have thoroughly permeated the lunar soil.

- This space.com article reveals that two researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder have completed four years of painstakingly counting, cataloging, and mapping all the large craters photographed on Mars to date. Their total count? "More than 635,000 impact craters at least 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) wide."

- NASA just posted a super-high-definition photograph of the Earth, centered on the North Pole. The photograph is a composite, put together from photos taken over fifteen orbits of the Earth by the Suomi NPP satellite, which launched at the end of this past October:


image by NASA/GSFC/Suomi NPP (source)

NASA says:

Here's a Suomi composite of North America, taken in January:


image by NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring (source)

Notice that the Earth isn't quite as round when seen from near the equator as it is when seen from the pole--it widens out around the equator due to the centrifugal force generated by the Earth's rotation.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 87

Hm it seems I've never mentioned my Mac Raboy Flash Gordon book here before, so I guess there's no need to mention that I haven't mentioned it...I do need to finish reading it, anyway. :P Still I've had Gordon on the brain for a while, so imagine my surprise when, browsing through some online syndicated comic listings, I found that Flash Gordon Sunday comics are still running in a small number of papers. These are, however, reprints of the Jim Keefe 1996-2003 run, after which no new Flash Gordon comics have been published.

Keefe's work doesn't have the incredibly graceful artistry of the Raboy era ('48-'67), but a pretty good account of the history of the Flash Gordon strip made plain to me what I should have known long ago, which is that the original Flash Gordon artist and (at least) co-creator, Alex Raymond (b. 1909, d. 1956), did some quite amazing work.

After three years as a staff artist with King Features Syndicate, Raymond was asked, in 1933, to create a comic to compete with the wildly popular 1929 invention, Buck Rogers. Raymond's and a series of ghost writers' creation, Flash Gordon, launched at the beginning of 1934 and soon surpassed Buck in popularity; another Raymond strip, Jungle Jim--this time seeking to horn in on the popularity of the Tarzan strip--ran along the top of Gordon.

Raymond's Flash work soon became filled with large panels of sweeping shading lines, with--aside from a mastery of the human figure--exhibited a brilliant use of positive and negative spaces: just look at the curling line-packed shadows defining a vase of flowers in the second panel of this 1937 strip.

But Flash isn't even my favorite of Raymond's comic work. Raymond left the strip in 1944 to enlist in the U.S. Army; four of his five brothers had already enlisted. While in the military, he created official posters, greeting cards, and the like, including this painted cover for the Marine Corps bulletin:


image by Alex Raymond / U.S. Government (source)

Demobilized and back home in '46, Raymond found that the syndicate didn't want to oust the Flash artist who had moved into the strip when Raymond resigned his position, but they offered him the chance to create a new strip. The result--again aided by writers--was Rip Kirby, a modern private eye just returned from military service himself; unlike the old pre-war pulp PIs, Kirby did more thinking than fighting, had an assistant who was *not* a gorgeous blond, had a steady girlfriend, wore glasses, and aged as the strip progressed. To match this newly modern take on crime adventures, Raymond came up with a new, sleeker style consisting of thin, angular outlines and thick, solid black volumes--if this sounds familiar, it's because "The Raymond Style" was much copied! And unlike the Sunday Flash, Rip was a daily strip.

I love the sharpness and contrast of Raymond's Rip work, from his big, dramatic shadows in action scenes to the luscious massed blacks of contemporary fashions (I particularly like that one since you can see where he painted over with ink a few times--for instance, he painted the facial features of Rip in the last panel, then decided to shade in the whole face), it seems like he could do it all. Dig his loose, fuzzy borders around figures, his abstract hatched backgrounds, and his lovely pattern work in textures in this strip, the semi-abstract way in which he lets patterns and contrast define the outlines of figures in this panel--along with his seemingly effortless distillation of telling poses--and the way he let huge black areas and hatching patterns run into each other in this strip. And he could get really wild:



(Hopefully that one sample panel can fall under "fair use"; the Spanish-language series of strips that's from can be seen here.)

So yeah, Raymond was The Man. He probably used models to get his figures down from time to time (I wonder if he had a "Rip" model?), but that didn't stop him from verging off into highly expressive territory with his copious black ink.

Inspiring stuff! And it may have answered that stylistic dilemma that's been troubling me for a week or so. In fact, after looking at those Rip dailies of his, I had a thought of bringing you much more daily A* than I have been. Not sure I can pull it off... Maybe I'll give it a try tomorrow anyhow!

I don't think I'm the only one these day's who's getting into Raymond's work, either; not just one but TWO multi-volume compilations of his Flash Gordon work are on their way this year, according to Amazon, and a Rip Kirby one just finished covering his work on that series last year. Needless to say, a few sample volumes from some of these series may have found their way into my A* Amazon Wish List. >_> (What's kind of scary is that some of the earlier, now out-of-print volumes in the Kirby series are going for a minimum of hundreds of dollars a piece from Amazon sellers. :o)

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 16, Page 88
• A* Episode 16, Page 89

Hey, two pages! Yeah, so I was inspired by Alex Raymond's classic Rip Kirby comic strip, which I talked about yesterday, to see if I could get back to multiple pages a day. And maybe I can!

Originally of course I was doing like three to four pages a day--that was back when I was drawing them mostly in plain black and white, with an eye toward producing an animated episode (episodes 1 through 7 were animated--check 'em out in their YouTube playlist here), so they were pretty simple. Once I stopped doing them for animation I started making the comic images bigger and more detailed, which eventually slowed me down to one per day. The last time I resolved to go back to multiple pages per day was back in September--that lasted for a whole day. :P Shortly after that I started messing with doing stuff in actual ink rather than digitally, and that slowed me down and stuck me firmly back to one page a day.

Until now! If Raymond could do three beautiful Rip Kirby panels per day, dang it, can't I manage at least two A* panels? Of course he had decades of professional illustration experience and was probably just way better than me to boot, but eh...I can try, anyhow. The reasons for wanting to do multiple pages a day are mostly spelled out in that ^ resolution back in September--pacing, keeping it loose and expressive, and so on. I've been getting bogged down in futzing and fudging with a page all night, second guessing myself until I'm just obsessively altering some little detail back and forth, and that's just no fun. My favorite pages tend to be the breezier ones.

And I've kept thinking that I'd get faster at the drawing and just get up to being able to do multiple pages a day naturally, but I've found that doesn't happen--instead, I just find more ways to spend more time messing with the same image. Comic book artist Sean Murphy recently wrote an interesting article about a general slowdown in comic production over the decades--Why are we slower?--and it's a well thought-out, well-informed article by an industry pro that is well worth a read. That's been percolating in the back of my head since I read it over the weekend, and it does seem to me that one reason we draw slower is because we just aren't forced to draw faster; cameras and 3D rendering can now handle the illustration needs of the world, so there's no need for illustrators to be cranking out material for industry, marketing, etc etc. That's what pushed the old illustrators to hone their craft, get fast and sleek, and without that, well naturally we slow down and go more at our own pace.

So if I wanna get faster, I just gotta force myself to get more pages done, I think. No sitting around fussing over a page, or what the rest of the internet is doing, or how to network with other webcomic people; I've learned a lot doing that stuff, but now I feel ready just to buckle down and crank out pages.

... We'll see how long it lasts this time. ;) I'm already futzing even in this new mode--for instance, if you happened to log in just after midnight, you saw the original version of page 88:



That seemed just *too* sketchy and not heavy enough, though, so I added loads of black ink.

As I mentioned in September, Fridays will almost always be just one page still, since I hang with peeps most Friday evenings. There will also be plenty of days where I only manage one for some reason; for instance, yesterday as I test I tried doing the page (87) faster, and I thought I had it all wrapped up in good time but then I thought hm the vertical scale is off a bit, tried adjusting it, and then it just kept twisting and shrinking and...man that one really got away from me, I think maybe because I was kneeling at my drawing table instead of actually sitting, so my face was too close to the paper--I lose my view of the page as a whole when I do that, and things start to get wonky. Anyway so I had to redraw that one entirely from scratch--so that would have been a just-one-page day, if I'd been going for two.

Also as I mostly mentioned in September, I will post on A*'s Twitter, Google+, and Facebook pages as soon as each page goes up during the day, so follow me on one of those if you want to get 'em as soon as they're up; the RSS feed is only updated later, once I've got all the day's pages and news posted.

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What's that, you want some science? Well how about this cool photo of a "stained glass" meteorite from China that was shared with me on Google+? That's a slice of the Fukang meteorite, and boy aren't those olivine space crystals pretty when the sunlight hits 'em.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 16, Page 90
• A* Episode 16, Page 91

Hey lookit that, two days of two pages each, haven't done that in...I don't know how long. Maybe this pace is burning me out already though because MAN I had some art block on that second one--ended up filling four pages, front and back, with various attempts at it--finished off an ink bottle, used the last of my hand-cut paper, and may have just about killed my brush in the process, too. :P Just as well I ordered some more art supplies earlier today! (And a real paper trimmer, with one of them big swing-arm blades and everything! Dang that's gonna be sweet.)

Here are a couple of the more successful practice attempts:



I kinda liked the one on the left for the page, but it was just drawn in the blank area on the right side of a page whose center I had already ruined, so I couldn't use it. :P

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Hey here's something neat: a drawing I did is gonna be in a book! Then I can call myself a published artist. :D The authors of the modern romance webcomic "And To Be Loved" seem to like A*, and it happens that they're putting a book of their own comic together now, and their artist very politely asked me if I'd be willing to do a portrait of one of their characters as an extra for the book. I was procrastinating from some A* thing on a recent weekend and went ahead and made them a little ink wash painting--I picked their character whose hairstyle happens to be pretty much identical to Selenis' current 'do. ;). They've released a tiny and somewhat blurry sneak peak at a tiny part of it in a recent blog on their comic, specifically right here, but I guess to see the whole thing you'd have to buy their book. ;) BUT in exchange their artist did a really neat full-color portrait of Selenis, using a very interesting combination traditional/digital technique and...it hasn't been posted on their site yet. I'll let you know when it's there!