Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 69
• A* Episode 17, Page 70

Got a lot of non-art A* stuff done over the weekend. For one thing, you can now follow A* right from the comfort of your Tumblr dashboard, because A* is on Tumblr! Or click this embiggified version of the button I squished into the social networking bar below the comic and ads:



I'm already have a lot of fun exploring and reblogging some great art posted by a few folks I've found to follow there so far. It's just nonstop stuff to stick in your eyeballs. 8o

I also worked out how to communicate with PayPal's "Instant Payment Notification" system/protocol. I needed to figure that out as the first stage of selling my original A* art through the site, because since there's only one of each, I need to be able to have PayPal tell my site when one sells, so my site can take down the For Sale sign on it. I was a little worried about it because PayPal's back end stuff is sometimes kind of kludgy, and always poorly documented, but it turns out they actually have a (poorly documented) test site for having their system bounce simulated IPN messages off your script, so that was a huge help.

And once I figured that out, I was able to make buying A* e-books and subscriptions a little snazzier: now when you buy an e-book, in addition to PayPal taking you--or sort of maybe trying to take you--to the download page in your browser, my site will automatically send you an email with the download page link in it, just in case; and when you buy a subscription, instead of having to wait a bit for me to activate it manually, it is now activated automatically! So that's fun.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 71
• A* Episode 17, Page 72

A*'s 1000th news post! Gosh! To think it all started with a very short post back on March 18th, 2009. And here we are, 999 posts later!

NASA celebrated this supermassive milestone (*cough*) by announcing the discovery of millions of supermassive black holes (the article also mentions the A* comic's namesake, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy!) in a new all-sky survey by their Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer ("WISE"). Light gets stretched out into the long infrared wavelengths as it travels across the universe, AND lower-energy light--infrared light--goes through gas and dust more easily than higher energy light, because it vibrates less and is thus less likely to hit something as it moves along, or something like that. AND energy escaping from a black hole tends to be shifted to infrared as well due to...hm well I forget, something to do with the gravity, obviously. So WISE is a good tool for seeing things that might be very far away, obscured by gas and dust, and maybe black-holey--like say the supermassive black holes sitting at the center of galaxies. More specifically, these supermassive black holes are quasars, which means they're actively sucking down material, and in the process creating an energy buildup around themselves, which can be seen from far off by instruments like WISE.

This image shows the overview of WISE's survey, and a zoomed-in view of just one tiny section, showing just how many supermassive black holes, for instance, it found in that one section--"an area about three times larger than the moon":


image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA (source)

WISE found about three times as many quasars (or, properly speaking, quasar candidates) as a previous survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This even-more-zoomed-in view shows how the additional quasars WISE spotted were sometimes messy, dust-obscured objects, whereas the smaller subset the visible-light SDSS was able to see (blue-green circles) were quasars that weren't obscured:


image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/STScI (source)

WISE also found about "1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever found"; called by the rather awful name "hot DOGs" ("Dust-Obscured Galaxies" :P), these rare objects are emitting twice as much energy as normal quasars--more than 100 trillion times the energy emitted by the Sun. They are thought to be creating stars very rapidly, and there are some theories that they're an important, heretofore unknown step in the galactic evolution, and might even indicate that in galactic formation, the central supermassive black hole forms first, then powers star growth around itself with its intense gravitational vortex. Go, supermassive black holes!

~~~~~~~~~~~

Another big milestone for me today: I caved in and have gone back the crutch of doing a layout of an A* page in pencil before starting in with ink. I stopped using pencil layouts around page 29 of episode 16, and I've had a lot of fun working only in ink, and it definitely made me learn a lot about ink handling and just how to create images out of whole cloth, as it were--I think it's helped my brush control and planning immensely--but I've also come to realize that there are things that I just won't be able to do *without* pencils--cool things like a white figure outlined in gray, as I did with Selenis' feet behind her flashlight beam in today's page 71. It's also very hard to do complex poses and angles when you can't lay them out in pencil first. So gradually I started to feel like I was getting to the point where not using pencil was holding the art back more than it was helping, and it was time to bite the lead and pick up the ol' mechanical pencil and eraser and get back to filling my old shag carpet with eraser shavings.

A test sketch I did earlier in the day pretty much cinched it: just a quick, very loose 0.5 mm pencil layout, then inked in with a Pentel Pocket Brush brush pen, and finally a bit of graphite shading added with a 2 mm lead holder. It resulted in a very nice, airy look that I realized I've been missing in the all-ink pages; working only in ink, it's hard to skip and leave gaps in your structures, so things tend--at least for me--to feel a bit too heavy and solid all the time.

I even thought maybe I could start doing shading with pencils, you know do a sort of hip multimedia approach :P, but it turned out that the pencils didn't scan very well--kind of all speckly. You can't see it too much at the size at which the A* comics appear (relative to this tiny little test sketch):



but at subscriber HD size the graphite speckliness starts to become apparent



and at larger sizes it's pretty bad--this is about 300 dpi (I scan at 1200 dpi):



which is a shame because it looks pretty good in person! But maybe it's just as well, since the pencil might smear at some point. I'll just have to stick to ink wash shading, which is fine. Anyway the ink part of the test worked well, and was of a quality I haven't been able to get working just in ink, so at that point I knew I needed to dig my old pencil out.

Thinking about that, though, reminded me that the thick handle on these big brushes I've been using lately has completely banished any of the wrist stiffness I used to get from drawing all day, and I wouldn't want to go back to my old mechanical pencil and have that problem come back. It's an old plastic one--so old any brand name it used to have has long since rubbed off, but I think maybe it's a Pentel, since it advances the lead with a nifty side button, and googling that resulted almost exclusively in Pentel models showing up, although they don't look quite like mine--which is one that I think I've had since high school, and maybe even since middle school, which would make it 20-25 years old. =o

And still going strong! But not as far as the wrist thing goes, and it seems like the like triangular grip things they used to make to stick around pencils and pens for an easier grip aren't very easy to find anymore, so I got to looking into what else I could do. As far as mechanical pencils with thick grips go, there's Paper Mate's "PhD" line, which I've seen in my local stores, but...well, I haven't used Paper Mate stuff since the old "erasable" blue pens back...uh 25 years ago, and those left kind of a bad taste in my youthful mouth. ;P And then I found out that there are things called "drafting" pencils, which are like mechanical pencils, only with longer tubes at the tip--for drawing along thick rulers, if necessary, and I think also for better visibility of what you're drawing, or at least that's a side benefit--and generally of much higher quality construction. And as it turns out, one of drafting pencils held in the very highest regard is the Japanese Platinum Pro-Use II 05 Drafting Pencil, which has a thick grip section! Sweet. So I impulsively ordered one of those and am anxiously awaiting it. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of coverage of it on the internet--an exciting mystery! You can bet I'll go on way too long about it once I get my mitts on it.

And if it turns out not to fit my silly little hands and wrist well, I guess it'll just join all the many pens I've tried in my embarrassingly large cupboard of art supply shame. :P I can't afford a drafting pencil addiction, though, so I guess I don't need to worry about getting quite as carried away on the pencil front. Not as much as this guy, anyway--now that's an impressive mechanical pencil collection! ==ooo

Oh yeah and here are the pencils and beginnings of inking of page 71; I'm still a bit rusty getting back into this pencil process, but I think you can definitely expect the art to pick up in terms of precision and clarity over what I was able to do with the fun and expressive but sometimes messy ink-only approach:



But I certainly don't regret trying the ink-only route; like I said, it taught me a lot, and if I can remember to keep that sense of freedom and inky expression, just guided a bit by light and loose pencil layouts, I think the art will be on a pretty good course.

~~~~~~~~

Oh yeah, I also spent way too much time this morning posting some of my favorite art by other people, and some of my own more successful efforts, on my new A* Tumblr. Some you may have seen before but some you almost certainly haven't!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 73
• A* Episode 17, Page 74

Starting to get back into the swing of this pencils-before-ink thing, I think. Had to dig up my ancient X-Acto knife to cut the masks for protecting foreground objects when I spray stars on the backgrounds with white ink--I'd been using just regular scissors for that up to this point, but today's had little enclosed spots in them and so forth that weren't really scissor-accessible. The X-Acto has probably been sitting in my drawer for over a decade and actually has rust on the blade. Hm. Should probably get a new one. Still it cut through the transparencies I'm using for the masks pretty well--didn't do so good on the waxed tracing paper, which sometimes would try to pull and tear; I like the transparencies much better for making masks though since they're way easier than tracing paper to see through...when tracing! Their only down side I suppose is that the marker will smudge off them (even though I was using a waterproof Kuretake Disposable Brush Pen) and get all over my hands as I'm cutting the mask, but I don't mind that if you don't.



I smeared the spattered stars with my finger to get a sort of exaggerated motion effect; need practice at that though 'cause you'll see some of them are going slightly different directions. In theory it works well, though!

~~~~~~~~~

Australians implant 'world first' bionic eye (warning: auto-playing video with sound) was the eye-catching title of an AFP article I spotted today; apparently it only gives the woman who got it a "little flash" of light as a hint of what she's looking at, but that seems like a good place to start.

~~~~~~~~~

The Twitter account of Pentel of America--the pen company--retweeted the Pentel Pocket Brush sketch I posted yesterday. :o Thanks, @PentelofAmerica! Your brush pens are pretty fun to sketch with.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 75

There's a drawing I did back when I was working digitally that is still one of the best things I've drawn, I think--and this was way back in episode 12, page 22:



Just how I managed to create the realistic but hard shading of the face and the overall graceful proportions of the figure have remained something of a mystery to me. It's certainly something I'd like to be able to do more, but it's been something I haven't really managed to replicate, either digitally or traditionally.

Fortunately I stored previous working versions of my digital stuff, so I could dig up the original Photoshop file and make this process animation out of it:



It started with my usual (back then) quick thumbnail sketch with the Brush tool, then went--or tried to go--into doing the final art with the Lasso tool. You'll see though that there are three false Lasso starts on this one, then I finally gave up and just traced the thumbnail sketch with the Lasso, and then started refining that--because the original sketch had a life and angle and lighting to it that I just wasn't able to recapture. Hmph. So I'm not sure how much looking at this helps me, except that it tells me that I should start from something loose and energetic that really captures something true about the scene I'm trying to create.

In fact I had some trouble along those lines in today's page. My initial pencil sketch was--I thought--pretty good; I stayed loose, didn't get too detailed, but the proportions and so forth were there and there was something interesting about it. So I dutifully started inking it in...and then got bogged down in trying to reproduce the pencils. This is the very thing that led me to giving up penciling for a long time! Argh. Well I struggled with it for a while but parts started going all pear-shaped and eventually half the face had been obliterated and repainted--only I wanted to do a trick with ink wash shading over the face, so this wouldn't work at all because you can't do ink wash over white ink. So I had to give it up and start over--here's where I left that first try:



There are some aspects of it I like, like the eye on the left, some of the hair, the ship...and the mouth was interesting, but I think maybe the smile was too ambivalent. And there was the question of was she going owl on us and twisting her neck around a little more than should be possible to look over her shoulder. Anyway none of that mattered because I couldn't shade the face so it had to go. Flip the page over and try again.

The second try--the one that became the final page 75--got a little weird. But I got the main parts down, which is the important thing, I guess. It's supposed to hint at what we'll see in the next panel, and you can probably guess what it is anyway! But the struggle with this page got me thinking, and I think I should keep in mind that I'm not really an inker, I'm more of a painter. I have to work briskly and with that original inspiration--the image I see in my head--or else I lose it and I'm just trying to follow pencil lines and the whole thing ends up looking dead, at best (or probably incomprehensible because I'm trying to keep the pencils loose to avoid that very line-following temptation...but I forgot about that in today's first attempt).

Well that's more than enough from me on art process for one week. Another brush is past worn out, so I think I'll go to the art supply store tomorrow and play with things--like ooh their extensive mechanical pencil collection! And a fresh X-Acto knife. Oh and I should see if they sell transparent sheets I can use for tracing masks to shield from star spraying. But whee art supply shopping! That'll get my mind off these process conundrums for a bit.

Hm it could also tell me not to rely on gray, because even though that drawing from episode 12 is a case of back-lighting, there's actually very little gray in it--the shading is more implied than actual, and where it is actual, it's mostly straight black. That has impact, and for working traditionally it makes things much easier because I don't have to worry about how icky ink wash looks over white ink. So I kinda got myself in a (for me) tricky situation with this idea of specific gray shading over the face of today's page to make a kind of white highlight/reflection in the middle, because that left me very little room for error (and correction) across most of the face, and that can lead to fatal hesitation. Generally the pages I end up liking most have a minimal amount of gray. I keep telling myself to remember this! But some other part of my brain keeps hatching plans for grays. Gah!

And overdoing hatching and feathering! Need to get down to big solid black areas more--easy to do with the ol' digital Lasso tool, more time-consuming with a brush--unless I really load it up with ink, which I should also probably do more of. Although for that you need a good brush tip (otherwise the pressure of the ink load behind it will spread the tip out into a multi-headed muddle), and I should really stop trying to make these big cheap brushes I'm using now go for as long as I do...although this one was a real trooper up until a few days ago.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 76
• A* Episode 17, Page 77

Boy, black paint applied with big horsehair bristles over wettish non-waterproof white ink (that's the Dr. Ph. Martin's Bleed Proof White that I've only been using for stars lately) produces some pretty cool nebular dust cloud effects! Gonna hafta practice that more.

When I was at the art supply store getting some replacement brushes and a new X-Acto knife and other fun stuff over the weekend I picked up what I thought was a cheap six-color watercolor kit by Pelikan (ah, like this) turned out to be a cheap gouache (aka "opaque" watercolors) kit by Pelikan with very nebulous labeling. Gouache is kinda like thicker, slightly creamy watercolor, I suppose; since it's thicker you can get brighter colors kind of but it will also cover up black ink somewhat, which isn't what I wanted because I was looking for something I could throw as a splash of color over an inked piece, that would just color the non-inked areas. So anyway as you can see in this little test I did, the yellow gouache for instance covers the black ink of her hair a bit where it overlaps:



Pretty bright, at least! One other problem with that set is the red is more of an orange, and looking through the single pans you can buy separately (which is nice and I wish more watercolor pan sets did that), I'm not convinced they really have a good red in there. Also the colors lost a lot of saturation when I tried mixing them, so I guess if I was going to use these for something I'd have to bump up to a larger set so I wouldn't have to do as much color mixing to get other colors.

I went back to find a *transparent* watercolor set, but apparently these are like over twice as expensive. :| As a last attempt I popped into the art aisle of the local anything store, and didn't see much there, BUT in the back-to-school aisle, what did I find but a 99 cent kit of 16 watercolor pans. The brand name ("Debbie Lynn" or something) did not fill one with confidence, but hey, even if it was junk, as was likely, I'd only be out 99 cents. So I tried it:



Man, the chalky residue! Ew. Also pretty weak/dull colors.

So I'm not sure what I accomplished but I guess I learned a couple very basic things about what not to do. :P I think I probably mostly just muddled up two fairly decent ink sketches; oh yeah, here's what the first one looked like before smearing cheap gouache all over it:


And a pretty nearly matched photo with the color on, for comparison:


Hum. Well some people who know more than me have pointed me to an actual quality transparent watercolor set that isn't too expensive, so maybe I'll pick one of those up the next time I order supplies from the place that carries it.

Am I thinking of doing color in A*? Well...I guess it's a possibility. I don't think I'd want to do full color, ever, because man, who wants to spend all their time mixing flesh tones? :P And I don't want to dilute the stark power of black and white. But it might be fun to keep you guys on your toes by being able to pop some non-representational color in now and then for effect, like for instance the red Mar back when I was working digitally.

~~~~~

That second sketch, the one with the unfortunate green face, was all wrong at first and I despaired of using it for anything, until the next day I realized the problem was just that the eye was a bit too high, and I could fix it by drawing a lower eye and just covering the original one in deep shadow of the eye socket. This worked dandy, and in fact reminded me that I should do deep eye socket shadows more.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 78

Only got the one page done today. Been working on a couple new/modified drawing tools, but I need some more time with them before I can say anything definitive about them, so perhaps I'll plague you with that information in another day or two.

It is *not* Selenis with a sudden haircut / bleach job in today's page... I just can't seem to want to draw a different facial type. :P After having to draw the more elderly bioarchivist earlier in this episode for what seemed like a LOT of pages in that conversation, I swore a bitter oath that I wouldn't draw any more non-beautiful women...and apparently I have a very narrow definition of facial beauty, blargh. Or what's more likely, a very narrow variety of "beautiful" faces that I think I can actually draw. But I'm hardly the first artist to get stuck on a facial type--there was Frazetta and his moon-faced girls, for instance, and innumerable comic book artists over the decades, etc. Not that I shouldn't try to bust out of this rut. But I like the rut. HM.

I *did* draw her lower lip and chin *slightly* more recessed than I would have drawn Selenis'...but I was fooling myself if I thought that was a meaningful difference. :"P

Anyway anyway I do have another bunch of drawings--oh those familiar faces though...--that I did over the weekend. Speaking of Frazetta, I'd just been going through a whole bunch of Frazetta material, and I'd had the urge to do some free sketching all weekend, so I sat down and did some, which was fun--although I think the Frazetta stuff had an influence on some of the subjects my hand decided to draw:



Couldn't quite fit that knee in my scanner. :p Close-up of the two rather more successful figures:



That was pencil (poorly erased in some spots I see, but I was working on a sheet of old Strathmore Bristol I have laying around, rather than my usual Canson Illustrator paper, and the spongier bristol is definitely harder to erase from, urgh), inked with a Rotring Tikky Graphic 0.3 mm marker, and then sorta shaded with Faber-Castell "big brush" artist series "cold grey IV 233" marker. I'd thought I was going to use a different inking marker--maybe a Kuretake Disposable, or a Copic Multiliner--but the Tikky turned out to be the only one whose ink flow could keep up when doing rapid sketching. I was pretty hard on the Tikky in my Supermassive Black Pen Round-Up back in May, and it's true that it is too "wet" for slow, fine detail work, or feathering, but darned if it isn't the only micro-tip art marker I know of that'll maintain a real solid line when working quickly.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 79

I borrowed the name "Hadley" from the name of the lunar landing site for Apollo 15. It appears to have been an interesting mission!


image by NASA/David Scott (source)

The crew, for instance, got up to not just one but *two* unauthorized deals. For one, a German stamp dealer paid each of the three astronauts a tidy sum for agreeing to have one of the crew carry "unauthorized commemorative postal covers" inside his space suit, in addition to the officially NASA-authorized ones for the U.S. Postal Service. For the other, one of the astronauts "told mission control he was doing some clean up activities around the rover so they wouldn't know what he was doing" while he planted an unauthorized plaque--made by a Belgian sculptor who later tried to sell replicas (although the "deal" he'd made with the astronauts had said he wouldn't)--on the lunar surface, bearing the names of 14 dead American and Soviet astronauts and cosmonauts:


image by NASA (source)

The ~3" figure in front of the plaque is known as the "Fallen Astronaut," and was meant to represent the deceased spacemen.

Another surprise event surprised even the crew, when during their first sleep period after the lander reached the Moon, Houston Mission Control detected a slow, steady oxygen leak--turned out to be "an open valve on the urine transfer device."

Also, they conducted an experiment to show that Galileo was correct: two objects should fall at the same speed regardless of their mass. The Moon, not having an atmosphere to provide air resistance, is a pretty good place to test that, so one astronaut dropped a hammer from one hand and a feather from the other at the same time, and wouldn't you know it, they hit the ground at the same time as well! You can watch the video of that here. (I wonder if he did a test run first juuuust to make sure there were no surprises. ;)

~~~~~~~~~~

Only one page again today; I've somehow found myself in the middle of three separate art supply experiments. Dug out the ol' small sable brush as part of one, to do the smallish figure in today's page--the big synthetic/horsehair brush I've been using for most of this episode is fun, but sometimes I do get a bit frustrated when trying to do detail with it. Here's another thing related to these experiments:



I'll be pretty surprised if anyone can guess what that is! ... Uh. It actually looks worse than it is.

First thing tomorrow, I'll probably be destroying an old sable brush in an experiment involving a caulking gun. ... Yeahhh I'd say the brush has a low chance of survival. :p

~~~~~~

Ohh yeah and I came across a webcomic with very nice sketchy art, called Shiver Bureau. Looks like another superhero comic book pro has crossed over into webcomics--I expect just about all of 'em'll do that at some point, just you wait.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 80

More art materials experimentation today. May not have killed a brush; and I ended up using a bottle of Elmers "Wood Glue MAX" rather than a caulking gun, anyway, because apparently everything that goes in a caulking gun is toxic, and I'm trying to cut back. May have some conclusive result with that one that I can show you buy tomorrow.

Meanwhile, in space, some news happened!

- At the International Space Station, astronauts on a long spacewalk finally got a replacement "electrical switching unit" into place by jury-rigging an emergency cleaning solution--a gummed-up bolt socket was preventing the unit from fitting in place--out of a toothbrush attached to the end of a pole. And THAT'S why you should always remember to take your toothbrush with you when you go on a trip.

- At the edge of our solar system, Voyager 1...still has not found the edge of the solar system. Eight years ago there was excitement when it entered the "heliosheath," which is the area in the outer solar system where the solar wind "begins to slow due to pushback from interstellar plasma." Two years ago, it entered a region where the solar wind "dropped to zero"; this was a bit of a surprise, but scientists thought maybe it was due to hit the edge of the solar system at any time. And one year ago, it entered an unexpected "frothy" zone in the Sun's magnetic field--but scientists still thought at any time it would hit the edge of the solar system. Well, now, almost 17 light-hours (18.2 billion kilometers) from Earth, it *still* hasn't entered the area of interstellar medium that science says should exist outside the influence of our star. So scientists have had to revise their ideas of where the edge is, and a new paper says that the boundary may be another four billion kilometers (seven years of Voyager 1 travel time) farther out. So our idea of the size of the solar system is getting bigger all the time!