Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 16, Page 92
• A* Episode 16, Page 93

Did you know there's an asteroid mining company? It's still pretty much speculative I guess (they like to say there are 1,500 or so asteroids as easy to get to as the Moon, so I guess their plan is supposed to be to mine near-Earth asteroids), but it's backed by some of the biggest big-wigs from Google, with some brains from NASA people, so I dunno if I'd be against Planetary Resources one day cornering certain heavy metal markets with lucrative space hauls. :P

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NASA just announced that a detailed study of Shackleton crater, a 12 mile deep and 2 mile wide crater at the Moon's south pole, has revealed the presence of more ice than previously seen on the Moon--they think that ice may make up as much as 22 percent of the crater's surface. They didn't say what kind of ice, though, and a Yahoo blogger seems to have assumed they meant water ice and went off on what a find this is for the possibility of colonization and so forth. Well, they didn't indicate ingredients; their study with the cameras on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter just showed unusually bright areas, which are assumed to be ice of some kind.

Here's a simulated overview of the crater, constructed with laser-measured altitude data from the LRO:



Here's a neat simulation they made showing how little light gets into the crater--this time-lapse rendering covers the month of June:



Here's the pretty altitude map they constructed from the LRO's laser altimeter data:


image by NASA/Zuber, M.T. et al., Nature, 2012 (source)

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NASA also just announced that they upgraded their Pleiades supercomputer to make it 14% faster--it can now calculate at a sustained 1.24 petaflops. They talk about what a big deal that is, and, granted, that's pretty fast considering that the fastest PC GPU (which are more single-purpose, so clock way more FLOPS ("floating-point operations per second") than say your computer's main CPU) is still only in the single-digit teraflop range, ie 1000 times slower (and less flexible) than Pleiades, which is this huge system weighing in with more than 100,000 processors


image by Marco Librero, NASA Ames Research Center (source)

at NASA Ames Research Center near Mountain View, California, but the fact is that Pleiades isn't even among the top 10 fastest supercomputers--hm although it's *just* shy of the number 10 spot by .03 Pflops. Four of the top 10 are using IBM's Blue Gene/Q architecture; the new number one, IBM Sequoia at the government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has just been fully deployed this month, and has clocked an impressive 16.324 Pflops already, nearly 6 Pflops faster than the Fujitsu-engineered "K Computer" in Japan. Third spot is the Blue Gene/Q-powered "Mira" at the US's Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago; Wikipedia doesn't have a picture of that, but maybe it looks something like this older Blue Gene/P model, deployed there in 2007:


image by Argonne National Laboratory (source)

And the other top-10 at a US National Laboratory is the sixth-place Jaguar, mustering just under 2 Pflops, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and interestingly enough it's a Cray machine--I always remember "Cray supercomputer" being talked about as the big thing in ultimate computer power when I was a kid. It isn't the ultimate these days, but it does look pretty racy:


image by US Government (source)

(And not to be confused with the mostly unsuccessful Atari Jaguar video game console from the early '90's--64 bits! "Do the math!" :o)

All of the top 10 are running Linux, which I guess is probably no surprise to people who know fancy computers.

(I have my PS3(s), when on and idle (mostly in winter, since this helps heat my apartment and is too hot to do in summer :P), participating in Stanford's Folding@home distributed computing project, running protein folding simulations, (supposedly :p) for disease research; Folding@home was "the first computing project of any kind to cross the 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 native petaFLOPS milestone," and is currently running at about 5.6 Pflops, thanks to thousands of networked private PCs and computer consoles participating in the project.)

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 16, Page 94
• A* Episode 16, Page 95

So what I did *this* past weekend instead of working on the A* subscription mode thing is worry a lot about how I've been shading the comic--I haven't really liked the gray washes I've been doing lately; they've been coming out particularly messy. On Friday with the first page (92) I tried starting with light gray, as I had done in a burst semi-recently (culminating reasonably successfully with page 73), but it came out light and then I didn't want to try messing with it more because it was already pretty messy, and, ehh. Here's a quick Photoshop simulation of maybe how I should have shaded it:



Then on the second page on Friday (93) I was tired of washes and my brush was beat up anyway so I just did a lot of dry brush instead, which sorta worked in a way I guess.

Then at some point I happened to watch this Toronto Comic Con 1974 interview with Vaughn Bode, who I guess was kind of an "underground" artist back when they still made that distinction. He's...well, he's a little full of himself and his stuff, but I dunno maybe that was just the times. He's coloring with markers, though, and that got me thinking that for all my recent marker phase, I never thought to try shading with a gray marker.

So I ran out and got the little "cold greys" pack of Faber-Castell's "big brush" markers, which comes with their three "cold" grays and a black marker, which I didn't really need since I have like 80 of them but the store didn't have the lighter "cold" gray separately so oh well. Rather bizarrely, the light gray one is so light that I can barely even see it on the paper I'm using--like, I think it maybe actually be lighter than the paper. :o Not very useful. The middle gray seemed okay. The dark one is this ugly greenish shade, bleh. So one marker out of four, ah well... I went and tried shading some sketches with it:







It worked fairly well, and I think it would definitely make a good portable sketching pair along with the Pentel Pocket Brush brush pen (which is what I used for the black ink in the last two sketches there). It does have some drawbacks though. For one thing, it's kind of a pebbly gray, as you can see, and that's I think from the surface of the paper getting roughed up a bit by the marker. That would be sort of all right, but while you can get a darker tone by making a second pass with the marker, as I did in places in the first and second sketches, if you try a third marker layer, the paper surface really starts to get chewed up to the point where you can see it looking rough if you tilt the paper against the light. AND when doing that you may notice that the black India ink you covered with marker is now all shiny, which probably won't scan as well as it would have otherwise. Plus the tip isn't very precise and I don't feel I can take the time with it to follow lines carefully, because the marker dries really fast, and if you don't watch out it'll dry in spots before you can quite finish them up, and then when you do go back to catch the last spots, the marker will start layering with the already dry marker lines and then you'll get darker patches where you now have two marker layers--so it's hard to make a really smooth tone, even aside from the pebbling problem.

Another thing I tried was dry brush with various brushes, since I came across a comic recently in which the author uses dry brush (with the Pentel brush pens) very effectively for small areas of shading, and since it had been sort of successful for me on Friday's page 93.

Oh yeah, another factor in these considerations for me is that one drawback of using ink wash for shading is that it doesn't cover white ink very well, in fact when you try it it usually turns out downright ugly, like on the goon's shirt back on page 55. Ugh! I need white ink to cover mistakes though, especially since I'm working directly in ink now rather than doing layouts in pencil first, so a lot of the time I end up with areas I'd like to shade with a wash, but can't because there's white ink there and the wash over it would just look really uneven and ugly.

The gray marker, on the other hand, actually covers the white ink very well; it isn't quite seamless, but it is a lot smoother over it than the ink wash is, and I wouldn't be nearly as hesitant with the drawing in general if I knew I was able to shade over white ink that well. And dry brush works *very* seamlessly over white ink...but then, dry brush is kind of all seams, if you think about it, and it gets pretty unattractive over large areas--also, it can be tricky to handle, and shade fairly unevenly--at least in the tests with various brushes that I tried.

Before I tried the dry brush stuff though I actually tried something else, something I've done before, which is using ink wash, but from pre-mixed jars of specific shades of gray. The unpredictability of on-the-fly mixed ink wash has been particularly troublesome for me since I started working with this new, much darker ink (that started on page 46); the ink looks especially dark before it dries, if you try laying down what as far as you can tell should be a medium gray wash, it will probably look pitch black at first, and I generally panic at that point and try rubbing it away. It's tricky to work with in a controlled way and I thought I'd have the hang of it by now but I don't seem to.

So the pre-mixed washes started sounding attractive again. I last used them on episode 13, page 157, and that page and the one before it are still some of my most successful ink wash shading attempts, I think. I stopped using it back then because I thought it was becoming too much of a crutch, and had too much of a paint-by-numbers look (and it really was paint-by-numbers, since I had numbered the five jars of light to dark washes I'd mixed); I thought I'd do better to force myself to get good at mixing the correct shade of wash on the fly. I eventually did get okay at that, but, especially since switching *away* from proper watercolor paper (I started using watercolor paper on episode 14, page 3, and stopped with episode 15, page 25, because watercolor paper is kind of a pain to work with in most other ways--it's fuzzy and not very white, and is particularly prone to warping), it's been hard to lay down any sort of largish area with an even tone of gray, and that's starting to bug me.

So I mixed up five gray washes, trying to find a nice range of tones. Here are the test patches I made as I tried to find a good set of ink-to-water proportions (I did this kind of in a dumb, ink-wasting way, but ah well...hopefully those jars of ink I just ordered will get here soon :o):



And here are the jars, labelled with their proportion of ink to water:



Spicy!

So that will probably work a little better--I used them in today's pages--but I also just want to stop relying on grays so much anyhow. I finally got to reading a bit of compilation book of Mac Raboy Flash Gordon comic strips I found at a used book store a year or so ago (it's this one), and I couldn't help noticing that he rarely uses grays (once in a long while they throw in some Zip-A-Tone on a strip, but I guess for the most part they didn't want to go to the bother--it *did* make me wish I had some Zip-A-Tone sheets to play with, though, and I even fleetingly considered ordering some from that Japanese joint, Deleter, who kind of specializes in them, but I can only guess they wouldn't hold up super well if you wanted your original to be, like, a permanent art piece; maybe they would, I dunno).

So for the most part, Raboy's Flash strips are these gorgeously bold black and white compositions with nearly peerless line work--but the compositions are also often quite abstract, as he had a lot of panels in which to establish locations anyway, and also constantly had to draw his way around the large caption letters. Like eh well like this:



Now in the actual Sunday paper comic page they'd be colored, of course, and Raboy certainly composed his black and whites with color in mind, but still, they do show that black and white can get along pretty well on their own without help from a lot of gray. And if I don't need to put washes everywhere, then that means I can be much more liberal with using white ink where I need to cover black ink, and just in general be a lot more loose and carefree with what I try doing in black ink. So even though I've got my little pre-mixed grays for somewhat more attractive washes now, I want to see if I can keep the use of gray to a relative minimum without the black and white being *too* harsh on the eyes. I'm fairly pleased with how the last page (95) came out in that regard. I did screw it up in one way, though: I'd intended to do a light, marbled wash across the floor, but accidentally put black ink down there next to Thierry's arm--so I had to cover that up with white ink, and then couldn't do a wash there. That's the trouble with wash! So the more I can teach myself to lay things out so I don't need it, the better, I think.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 96

An astute reader pointed out to me on Twitter that Thierry was echoing Han Solo in Star Wars yesterday. Specifically:
Han to Greedo: "I don't have it with me."
and
Han to Luke: "Got some old debts I gotta pay off with this stuff."

Although I think Thierry will be lucky if he proves to be half the charming scoundrel Han was. ;)

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Today's (single) page took me forever. I keep trying to do this pose and I'm not sure why because I have a really hard time with it! Blargle-argle.

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NASA's large Mars Science Laboratory rover, aka Curiosity, will land on Mars on August 5th--if it survives a surprisingly elaborate landing maneuver; apparently it isn't easy to land something that big and heavy intact, so those bright boys doing the science have got a complex routine involving multiple jettisonings and jettings, which they spell out for us in this impressively over-dramatized video:



Here's a handy scale comparison: the following photo has two regular-size adult humans, surrounded by a "flight spare" for the first Martian rover, the 1997 Sojourner, in the foreground, a working copy of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on Mars in 2004, on the left, and a test rover about the size of Curiosity on the right:


image by NASA (source)

Here's Curiosity itself, being assembled in 2010:


image by NASA/JPL-Caltech (source)

The tread pattern in those wheels, newly installed above, isn't just for traction in the treacherous Martian soil! Nope! If the Martians can read Morse code, they might get a clue as to who made the thingy what left such strange tracks:


image by NASA/JPL (source)

"JPL" standing for NASA's "Jet Propulsion Laboratory," naturally. So if things go according to plan in 39 days or so, Mars will start having "JPL JPL JPL..." stamped across it. ... For science!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 16, Page 97
• A* Episode 16, Page 98

Here's a nice photo of the far side of the Moon, taken by the Apollo 16 mission in 1972--notice how the far side (don't call it the "dark side," it isn't any darker than the side facing us really!)--is rougher, with way more cratering going on; that side was less shielded by Earth from incoming asteroids!


image by NASA (source)

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I think I've managed to get my drawing surface too close to my face again--when this happens I can't see the whole canvas well enough, and things come out cartoonish and warped until I finally get up and travel all around my apartment trying to paint the thing at the correct distance to fix it, even holding it reversed in the bathroom mirror or whatnot. Madness. I'll try to remember to lower my drawing table tomorrow. :P

Here's what it looked like eh about the second or third time I thought I had it done before scanning it in and seeing tons of stuff wrong with it once it was zoomed down on the computer screen (flipping images horizontally helps too, like looking at them in the mirror):



EDIT: Ugh, that one I uploaded was still awful! Reworked again (with my drawing table now in a highly inclined position so I can actually look at the thing straight...still gotta figure out how to make this not kill my back though :P). Here's the initially uploaded awful version:

Although strictly speaking this is true, I believe it is misleading. The gravity lock of the moon with the earth causes it to rotate about its axis at the same rate as it rotates about the earth (really the center of gravity of the two bodies which is inside of the earth). Since that face is always out it is subject to impacts from any direction. Bereft of atmosphere the scars on the moon last, since nothing but gravity or new impacts can change the scars. I think it is more accurate to say the moon has shielded the earth.
Hey but more importantly then this difference of how to look at this, I enjoy your work and look forward to new pages each day. Curtis

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 16, Page 99
• A* Episode 16, Page 100

I got a paper trimmer! Whee! Since I'm doing two pages a lot of days, it was getting to be kind of a drain to have to cut my A*-sized pieces of paper out each day to work on, so I got one of them big swinging guillotine blade paper cutter things like the teacher got to use in grade school, you know like a machete hinged to a cutting board. Sweeeeet. I hadn't got one originally because a cursory look showed them to be surprisingly expensive, like in the several hundreds of dollars for some reason. But fortunately I just found the Dahle Vantage Paper Trimmer, which is not super-expensive, had really good user reviews, and comes in an 18" size that is just the width of the paper I need to cut for A*! Here it is looking dangerous, even after cutting out nine pages in a flash:



(Mind you, it's only on the ancient brown shag carpet for show--you're supposed to have it on a flat, level surface when cutting with it, etc.)

It was a little puzzling to get the blade open at first--turns out it has a simple locking mechanism to hold it in place so you don't accidentally cut off body parts when carting it around: just pull it sideways a half inch or so, then raise. It says this on the back of the instructional sheet pinned under the adjustable measuring stopper thing, but it took me a minute to find/extract that. :P

So I cut my 18"x24" sheets of Canson Illustration Paper three times to get three 18"x7.5" pieces--but I still need to slice an inch off one end of each one to get them down to the 17" length that my scanner accommodates. The Trimmer, though, is only about 14 cutting and measuring inches wide, so I can't measure 17" with it to slice them down to the final size, and jamming 1" in from the blade side doesn't really work because of the nifty automatic holder / safety thingy there (and it would probably be pretty dangerous anyway so I'm glad I'm not tempted to do it!), and because it's just hard to hold 1" of paper in place with 17" draped off the side. BUT! I found that the little adjustable measuring thingy, which I have to remove anyway to lay the sheets across the trimmer, is *exactly* 9.5 inches long, so if I lay it lengthwise along the track at the top of the trimmer, with one end on the 7.5" ruler mark, I then have a nice 17" measure to cut by. It would be nice if the board was 3" wider, and if the measuring thingy was a little more sturdy-feeling, but ah well.

The trimmer can't cut six of these pieces of 150 lb paper at once, at least not without getting a little jammed at the very end (I tried :P), but it can do three at once, so that's pretty all right I guess. Way faster and neater than cutting with scissors! :) I'm so enraptured with it I went and cut out three more pages just for fun, wooo.

Oh, I just meant in regards to one side of the Moon having been hit less than the other, some of that difference would have been due to Earth facing the less impacted side.

In the larger picture, I suppose they've shielded each other to a certain extent. Although this makes me wonder if the Moon faces more incoming asteroids being paired with the much more gravitationally attractive Earth than it would on its own, or if on the whole it gets less because Earth partially shields it and maybe pulls away some of the asteroids that would otherwise have been pointing directly at the Moon?

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 16, Page 101

Saw a news bit today about China successfully landing their first female astronaut (and a couple guy astronauts :p) after a visit in space to their orbiting space module, planned to be the start of an honest-to-goodness Chinese space station--and you know, with the ISS nearing retirement age, currently we're looking at a not so distant time where China's going to have the sole manned space station! And to think they became the third nation (behind the US and Russia) to achieve manned space flight only as recently as 2003! (I *think* that's the date I saw--don't quote me on that :P) Go China!

What particularly grabbed my attention about the news item was the footage of their capsule landing with a splash of sand in a deserty grassland in China's vast Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (which contains part of the Gobi Desert: home, according to local legend, of the Mongolian Death Worm--never seen by science (HMMMM) but so deadly, the locals have it, that merely to touch it means INSTANT DEATH... Oh and it is 2 to 5 feet long, they say, and can spray deadly acidic venom, or shoot electricity or something--good story! :P). Looked like a bumpy landing! And the newscast pointed out that the US is the only nation that lands its spacecraft in water.

Here's some pretty good footage of the landing:



If you're quick on the pause button, you'll see a very quick retro-rocket fire just before touchdown! That must be to cushion the landing a bit. Here are some frames of it firing:



Pretty slick! Although then the capsule touched down and rolled around a bit, which must not have been too much fun for the occupants (who had to be carried out because their legs were too weak to stand on, since they didn't use 'em while weightless in space for 13 days). Kinda neat to see how charred parts of the capsule are too (around 1:00 for instance), I guess that's probably from atmospheric friction in re-entry.

Hm another news item I saw while looking for a good video said that the female astronaut was something of a last-minute addition, to get more attention, since apparently the Chinese public hasn't been too excited about the Chinese space program so far. Well... I guess it worked!

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For some time now--maybe years?--I've been in the habit of drawing people starting with the eyes. This kind of lets you make sure you're maximizing the impact of the eyes, which I like, BUT I've been noticing that it sometimes leads me to make the composition a little too head-heavy--like, favoring funky perspectives where the head is closer to the camera and proportionately bigger than usual. That's great once in a while but I don't want to do it all the time and I kind of have been, so maybe next week I'll get brave enough to try drawing the "normal" way, which is to sort of sketch out the whole figure first and then put the eyes in it later. :P I tend to default to that when I don't have to draw a face--like on page 95--and wouldn't you know it, the figures there aren't all crazy bobbleheaded perspectivey, because I wasn't so preoccupied with the eyes. So yeah I'll have to see if I can do that and still get some decent eye action.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 16, Page 102
• A* Episode 16, Page 103

Whew well it's late so let's see what I can scrounge up in a hurry from my dusty yet ever-accumulating "news" bin... Aha, some links saved for a rainy day:

• Emerald Winter is a sorta manga-style fantasy adventure webcomic, done in ink wash, kinda like A*, only a little more properly. Actually from the comment on the latest page it sounds like they're doing their inks maybe in pen, scanning them, printing them out, then doing ink wash on the print out... Hm although some of the earlier pages are actually textured like watercolor paper, so I dunno if they've changed their process or if that's just a Photoshopped texture or what. So many ways to slice ink wash, I guess!
• Roger's Rocketships > Docking Bays is a pretty darn big encyclopedia-type thing of sci-fi rocket ships, largely from old movies and magazines. For instance, it's got Wernher von Braun's Moon Passenger Ship, with the impressive illustration I think from the series of articles von Braun wrote for Collier's magazine in 1952 (according to his Wikipedia page); while his ideas for large-scale space flight to and colonization of the Moon sound a little out there by today's standards, von Braun wasn't just any sci-fi schlub, but rather the emancipated German rocket scientist who became the "father" of the U.S. space program--so it's neat to see a drawing of one of his huge proposed Moon ships--along with lots of other crazy stuff from other classic (if usually less scientific) sources.

Hm need picture... Ah! I've shown this one before, but here it is bigger and bolder: von Braun, circa 1969, next to the five F-1 engines of the first stage of perhaps his most famous creation, the Saturn V rocket--which actually *would* take men to the Moon ("to date, the Saturn V is the only launch vehicle to transport human beings beyond low Earth orbit").


image by NASA (source)

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 16, Page 104
• A* Episode 16, Page 105

The big news of the moment is, as the BBC puts it, "Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC." There's a photo of Peter Higgs in that article! He was present at the announcement, such is the excitement of probably finding something *similar* to this massive mystery particle that's supposed to be the thing that gives mass to everything, and which CERN's huge particle accelerator in the middle of Europe, the Large Hadron Collider, was more or less built to find--because to isolate the traces of the decay of a huge, incredibly unstable particle, you need to create a very powerful (remember, energy = mass, as Einstein told us) event in very controlled conditions. A juicy quote from the article:

Now, if you're like me and wondering, for instance, how something 133 times heavier than an atom of hydrogen could give hydrogen its mass, the BBC's Higgs Boson Q&A is well worth a read as it does a much better job than I possibly could of describing these highly unintuitive quantum things.

As someone who has taken the opportunity to doubt the existence of the Higgs boson at every turn, let me be the first to say "well I'll be darned." Mind you, they aren't sure this *is* the Higgs boson that would so neatly tie together some of the loose ends of the much beloved Standard Model of our understanding of the universe (minus gravity and a few other things maybe), but it is probably something, and something of a similar energy level to what was predicted for Higgs. But I do join (apparently) scientists in hoping that it isn't exactly the thing predicted by the Model, because that would be boring, and might not get us very far, since while it might confirm some things, it wouldn't necessarily point to something beyond the current theory, which we've been stuck with for eh hm decades? without really earth-shatteringly significant progress.

So! Higgs or not, hopefully it will be something that will lead us to new levels of understanding this nutty universe of ours.

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And in other senses-shattering news, we have reached the end of episode 16! Episode 17 *probably* starts tomorrow--if I survive fireworks. Aaand if I get the first actual dialogue lines written. >_>