Same here... I like nicer {personality-wise} girls!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 99

I'm frustrated with my grays at the moment. Two days ago when I had to do a second try at a page with little time to spare, the result was a black and white page with no grays that, when I look back at it now, has a mystery and power that most of my ink wash gray pages don't have, or only in diluted form, at any rate. Once I got into inking in the blacks on today's page I got to thinking that I'd just do it all black and white, and I almost did. It looked like this:



But, looking at that photo on my computer screen, it just seemed too flat to me--the spaces between the screens and the wall, and the screens and the foreground figure, weren't worked out well enough. So I thought I'd better put grays in after all, even though they'd mix with some of the non-waterproof white I'd used for patching up the black edges of the screen, and bits of the console operator's shirt. That did happen, and whisking the resulting gray mess away with a paper towel resulted in some kind of interesting "blast" effects in the gray areas.

Still though I think I use gray as a crutch too often; and I think that if I'd planned to use only black and white in the image from the outset, I'd have been able to work out those spacial relationships without needing to resort to gray. So maybe I'll try going straight black and white for a while and just see how I do.

One thing that frustrates me with the grays is that I've been unable to find a black pigment ink that can lay down consistently smooth tones on paper--you just tend to get seams and rivulets and other marks and uneven areas; I keep telling myself not to leave big wide areas that need grays where that kind of problem could show up, but somehow I can't seem to avoid leaving myself open to it, and then it just annoys me all the more.

That spurred me into a little art supply experiment some weeks back: it occurred to me that non-waterproof inks might spread and mix more smoothly than the waterproof inks I've been using, so I got some and tested them out in little circular gradient washes. Here's the result:



That black mess in the upper left corner is an ink spill--that epic ink spill that splashed clear across my room that I showed some weeks came while I was swapping these inks around for this test. :P Anyway the Deleter 3 circle in that top left corner is the waterproof ink I use for A* now. The other circles are all non-waterproof inks, aaaaaand...they aren't really a whole lot smoother than the waterproof one--and most are a lot yellower, too. So much for that idea.

The bluish ones at the left and right sides of the bottom row are what I'm pretty sure are black dye-based inks I had sitting around: ink from a Pilot Parallel Pen on the left, and from a Pentel Color Brush on the right. They spread a little more smoothly than the pigment inks--the Pentel Color Brush ink particularly--but not super-duper smoothly. And anyway apparently dye-based inks are a no-no for artwork you really want to last, although I'm not really sure why. Those two at least are also comparatively rather expensive.

So I don't know of an ink solution for this choppy grays thing. It does happen less with Arches watercolor paper, I think, but that paper isn't ideal in other ways--even the "bright white" version is still distinctly off-white, for one, so you lose some contrast against black ink, and you gain sometimes unwanted contrast against white ink; also, there's all this stretching and pre-soaking you're supposed to do or it'll rumple up and be hard to scan; I suppose I could try to find some of the super-thick 300 lb variety, but that is a) very expensive and b) harder to cut and harder to manipulate freely on an inclined drawing table, I'm guessing.

There are halftone screens you can apply over black and white drawings, old-school print style, but those are quite expensive these days, and I'm not sure how well the adhesive on them lasts--and it'd mean a lot of time spent cutting them into the desired shapes, anyway. :P

Of course you can simulate halftone screens on the computer these days. I've found myself experimenting with that a few times; frustration with yesterday's rather dull grays (and drawing in general :p) had me at it yet again; I found an interesting way of doing it in Photoshop, which was basically

a) copy the scanned 1200 dpi grayscale art
b) switch it to Bitmap mode with a 72 dpi, 30-degree, size 1 halftone screen
c) switch that back to Grayscale mode and accept the scale default or whatever that is
d) scale it to the comic's final screen size
e) lay that in over the grayscale comic as a Soft Light layer

So with yesterday's comic that looked like this--from the regular grayscale, to the shrunk bitmapped layer, to the Soft Light combination of the two:



Sort of a half-halftone if you will, because the dots are applied in a semi-transparent way over the grays they came from, which are beneath them. I like that result a little better than just regular dots darkening over black and white artwork, which produces a harsher result like so:



Mind you, there are all sorts of ways to generate completely artificial halftones and apply them very neatly. But for that matter you can also generate perfectly smooth gray layers and apply them extremely neatly, kind of like I used to do when I was working digitally. So I could just do that, but I would much prefer a solution in which the actual piece of artwork looks more or less like the final version you see on screen, and doesn't rely on computerized effects for its finish.

So these are some of the thoughts with which I've been occupying myself. I've got a new fairly decent watercolor kit I want to start playing with, too; maybe I'll manage to whip up a colorized sketch of some sort this weekend. But I might also just take the weekend off, since I haven't done that in a while! In the meantime, anyway, I'll try to make myself stick to straight black and white and see what happens with that.

Hmm another possibility is that I just need to learn the patience and diligence required to lay washes down smoothly; large gray areas came out reasonably smoothly on page 81 and page 95; or at least, I think it did on 95... I went back in and broke it up with darker grays and whites afterward, so I guess I can't be sure now how smooth it was. The background grays on page 81 were the result of a lot of very light washes layered over each other...which is a slow process and can't really get very very very dark. Also it probably helped that the areas were mostly nice big wide open ones; they did get a bit messy in the jagged parts around the central figures.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 100

Page 100! Always nice to reach that in an episode. And maybe this will turn out to be another milestone of sorts in the strip for me as well; after becoming thoroughly disgusted with my use of gray ink washes yesterday, I vowed to try going straight black and white--no gray tones. I tried it today and it came out better than I could have expected--the second time, at least.

In the first, which is so awful I won't show it--although if you buy the original art for today's page you'll get to see it, because it's on the back :P--I spent a lot of time coming up with what seemed a nice detailed sketch of Selenis' face seen from slightly below, in nifty dramatic perspective, and sketching in the shapes of the shadows I wanted her mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows, and cheekbones casting across the rest of her face.

That looked fine in a pencil sketch, but when I went to ink it, and started turning those sketched shapes into big solid black blobs, it just didn't hold up--in fact it turned into this horrid black morass. I suppose it probably has to do with trying to retrace my lines--I can't do it. Or I can, but when that's all I'm doing, there's no inspiration in it and it only results in an ugly, dead thing.

In this second attempt, I didn't try to fill in the sketched lines, or to maintain strict fidelity to their strokes; instead I...well I guess I just did whatever happens when I don't try to do that. It's more instinctive, more gestural.

Anyway it kind of worked, I think. Possibly the mouth is slightly too low, and maybe I should've got the hair closer in on the face, but, you know, details. Reflecting upon it, and then looking back over the pages from the past few episodes, I noticed that just about all of what I think are the most successful among them seem to have employed that same sort of...loose massing of heavy sketched lines, or something. And reviewing them all in a group like this, I realized they all share something else, too. See if you can pick out what it is:

16:14

16:69

16:82

16:95

16:102

17:6

17:7

17:8

17:22

17:66

17:94


Did you notice? Aside from the quick, massy lines, they also all pretty much feature a head in close-up, or close-to-close-up. I suppose almost all of my pages do, anyway, but I wonder if that's serving as a trigger for being able to get into this mode somehow--like, that kind of heavy stroke just happens to seem to my subconscious art brain to be the thing to use for heads at this viewing distance. For instance, I had a streak of it going on pages 6, 7, and 8 of this episode, but then there was a scene change and a series of longer-distance shots, and I lost it--and then I went to using a large brush exclusively for a while and that was its own distraction for a time.

But maybe I'm gradually getting onto something here. And maybe stripping things down to black and white will help me find out how to make it work. It happened, in fact, the other time I went straight black and white, which was page 17:22, in the list above.

There are other nice things about working in plain black and white for a change: it's easier to scan and clean up, leaves me free to use white ink whenever I want instead of constantly having to worry about mucking up an area I needed clear for a gray wash later, and it allows for greater abstraction. Like, I liked doing grayscale instead of color because you can bring together objects that would normally be separated by their colors; well, with black and white, you can bring to together just about anything you want! So it takes a little figuring, maybe--we'll see what happens when I need to do a scene with a deep background. But it's also fun and freeing to play around with, and I'm getting excited about where this might take things.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 101

I'm kind of having a blast with this strict black and white business so far. :)

On the other hand, here's a proper scan of a sketch I did a little while back with cheap watercolors thrown over my usual black ink:



It's in the episode 17 gallery, but it isn't for sale because, well, you can see what a mess that 99 cent watercolor kit I got made--chalky residue all over the ink and so forth, yuck! I've got a halfway decent little set of watercolors now, hoping to get to play with them a little this weekend.

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For the second time in a week, the International Space Station...didn't have to move after all to avoid space debris, after it had been reported that it might need to execute a dodge maneuver. And I think this is the last space debris story I'll report until something catastrophic actually has a high likelihood of actually transpiring. :P

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This episode's robot bee a little farfetched, you may have been thinking? Well, U.K. project "Green Brain" is reportedly already going to scan bee brains and model them with an eye toward building bee-level-intelligence robots. Booyah. Just don't give them venom, maybe.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 102

Over the weekend I tried out the interesting looking colors in my new little travel watercolor kit, on top of an ink sketch of the character Stella who we met early on in episode 16:



Normally I don't think I'd color anything in such a Christmassy riot of hues, but I wanted to get a look at as many of the colors in the kit as possible, and I have to say I wasn't all that impressed by them. Also I shouldn't have put the yellows in, that's just ick. But I definitely learned a lot about those watercolors, so mission accomplished I suppose. :P It is in the episode 17 gallery, and if you want to have it on your wall to scare the children, you can buy it right here.

I did the thick background stars by dotting on the black ink around them with a dried sea sponge. Here's the ink sketch masked off with a transparent overlay to protect the non-sky parts from the sponging:



Then I hit it with the inked-up sponge:



And here's what it looked like with the mask removed:



And then I assaulted it with the colors. I don't even intend to color things in a modeling-the-three-dimensional-form sort of way, only I kind of forgot that when I was doing this. Alas! Then the colors got muddy in spots because I was sloppy with them, and I needed some white ink highlights to kind of punch things up. So far I'm happier with the cheap gouache kit I used in a couple previous color experiments, but these transparent watercolors *do* cover up less of the black ink they happen to get over, which is a plus.

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A privately owned SpaceX unmanned Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo module just blasted off for the International Space Station, marking "the first-ever cargo delivery trip to the International Space Station by a robotic, American-made spacecraft," and the first private space station cargo mission. A dozen of these SpaceX cargo flights have been scheduled, and with them the U.S. once again--after the cancellation of the Space Shuttle program--has a means of getting supplies to the station, instead of having to sit by the sidelines while the world's other spacefaring nations do all the heavy lifting. And the SpaceX missions can also return a load of cargo back to Earth, splashing down in the ocean, whereas the unmanned cargo missions from other nations don't bring stuff back, and just burn up in the atmosphere.

Apparently one of the Falcon 9's nine engines went out during its climb, but the other eight engines compensated for the loss and got the rocket to its designated orbit, as they're designed to do.

Uhm... just curious... on the current page - what's the shape in the air next to Selenis' head supposed to be? Not clear if its a background of the room or something standing next to her that she has not noticed.

Oh it's just some confusing abstract background element I for some reason decided should be there.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 103

Jeepies, inking today's page went smoother than anything else I've ever tried to ink, I think. Why, if I could stay in this zone consistently, I could...draw more stuff! (EDIT: Spoke too soon! She was cross-eyed and it took me two tries to sorta straighten her right eyeball out. :P)

It does remind me of like a sorta generic Mary Worth newspaper strip style, but eh...hm. Well, it probably won't last.

Here are the pencils before I starting putting ink on them--I took a photo because they came out fairly nice and I wanted to preserve them before probably ruining them with ink:



Notice I'd been thinking I'd do more shading of the face! But when you're just black and white--rather than ink washy like I've done up until the past few days--you gotta be a little more discriminating on what you do and do not shade, so I thought I'd err on the lighter side for the face today, for a change.

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More space debris news! But this is a big-un! A European Space Agency satellite that unexpectedly shut off in April could doom us all--well, okay, anyway it poses "an unusually large danger to a heavily populated corridor in polar orbit at 780 kilometers in altitude." That's because the ESA operators of the 26-meter, 8000 kg Envisat satellite didn't follow international guidelines, which say that you're not supposed to cruise your satellite around once it reaches the point where it has just enough fuel to move to a lower orbit; instead, they continued to operate it at its high orbit past that fuel point, meaning that it could no longer move to a lower orbit which would then decay and burn it up more or less safely in the atmosphere. And then its unexpected shutoff made things even worse, because it meant they couldn't "passivate" it, ie get rid of fuel remnants, live batteries, and other power sources that could cause additional damage. Now legal beagles are arguing over whether or not the ESA could be held liable if Envisat, which went into space in 2002, damages another craft during the 100-some years it will be drifting through that rather crowded space lane; this could potentially develop into the first case of legal space negligence!

~~~~~~~~~

Analysts and operators of the Curiosity rover on Mars just figured out that a mysterious "bright object" seen in the Martian soil next to the rover as it scooped up a soil sample on Sunday is a piece of the rover itself--exactly what piece and how it fell off remains a mystery. You can see it here as a little irregular silver thing in the dirt near the bottom center:


image by NASA (source)

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The Nobel Prize in physics just went to an American and a French scientist, who both specialize and quantum optics, and separately developed methods to measure and control isolated quantum particles. For instance, the American scientist, David Wineland, was able to prove experimentally the theory that quantum particles can be in two places at once--something which had been thought unprovable, but he found a way "to hit an atom with laser light, which according to quantum theory had a 50 percent chance of moving it, and observe the atom at two different locations, 80 billionths of a meter apart."

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 104

You may recall that a year ago, at the bottom of a really long news article, I talked about the "Radium Girls," who were factory workers who painted the glowing marks on wrist watches in the 20's--the paint achieving its glow on account of it containing the radioactive element radium, which is not something you want around you or on your skin or in your mouth, which is where the workers were encouraged to put it, using their lips to keep their brush points sharp. Well although in some quarters it was known that radiation wasn't happy fun times, radium was in use in various consumer products as late as the 60's, and a new Atlantic article entitled We Used to Put Radium in Coffee tells us about some of the other things it was put in, like chocolate, toy "radiumscopes," toothpaste, and cosmetics. Yes, thousands (millions?) put some "zip" in their day with doses of "invigorating" radium--though we can *hope* that most of those products were fakes that had no actual radium in them! :o

~~~~~

Detail from the pencils for today's page--I take these photos when the pencils come out pretty good and I suspect I may screw them up with ink :P--although I seemed to manage all right today:

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 105

A 56 foot / 17 meter asteroid will pass within 59,000 miles / 95,000 kilometers of the Earth today (Friday, I mean), according to this article, which mentions that that distance is about a quarter of the distance from Earth to the Moon. There will be live web broadcasts and so forth if you're into that kind of thing. This asteroid was only just discovered on October 4th! And another, even bigger asteroid already went by this week, although farther out: "On Sunday (Oct. 7), an even larger space rock — the 100-foot-wide (32-meter) asteroid 2012 TV —passed Earth at a range of 158,000 miles (255,000 km), or about 0.7 times the distance from Earth to the moon. The moon is on average about 238,000 miles (383,000 km) from Earth."

~~~~~~~~

A batch of asteroids originating from Mars landed in the Moroccan desert last July; they're called the "Tissint" asteroids after the village near their landing spot. According to this new article, scientists examining one have found its primarily basalt and olivine (an olive-green crystal) structure surprisingly shows that it contains materials from both the surface and interior of Mars; one conjecture is that "the rock's cracks and fissures were infiltrated by fluids washing down from the Red Planet's surface."

The asteroid also contains black glass, and, sealed inside that glass, bubbles containing small amounts of the Martian atmosphere; that means that those bubbles survived the cataclysmic event that blew them into space, the hot plunge through Earth's atmosphere and the landing in the Moroccan desert, and the ~700,000 years of drifting through space in between; that age was calculated by measuring the asteroid's content of certain isotopes of helium, neon and argon, which are presumed to have been created by cosmic ray collisions in interplanetary space.

3/4ths of all known Martian asteroids have been dated to 700,000 years in space, in fact, suggesting they were all created in some energetic event on Mars at that time.