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Hello! I'm Ben Chamberlain, and I make this comic. : ) If you'd like to contact me, email me at smbhax@gmail.com, or contact me on Twitter (@smbhax) or any of the other networking sites in the link list above.

After concentrating in oil painting and digital artwork at the University of Chicago, I quit web design for game design and quit game design—where I had ended up as the sole remaining writer and designer on The Matrix Online, working with and continuing a story by Paul Chadwick—for A*, which began in 2009 as a digitally produced animated webcomic.

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Currently using: an H-grade Uni Mitsubishi Hi-Uni Pencil with a Pentel Hi-Polymer Ain Eraser - Dust Gathering (Large) on 300 lb hot press Arches Bright White Watercolor Paper, cut to A*'s 16" x 6.75" page size with an 18" Dahle Vantage Paper Trimmer. Colored with the Winsor & Newton Professional Watercolors Quinacridone Magenta and Ultramarine Blue (Green Shade), using a ½" Winsor & Newton Artists' One Stroke Watercolor Brush and a Raphaël 8404 size 4/0 brush; I sometimes use a W&N 1/8" brush for removing layers and an old size 4 Raphaël 8404 brush for watercolor/ink mixing, and to apply Deleter White 2 for highlights/corrections.

When I ink, I use an old size 0 8404 with Deleter Black 3; spatter effects like stars come from flicking a Speedball Hunt #22B nib dipped in Deleter White 2 across an old credit card, like this. I use a Rotring Tikky Graphic 0.3 mm and a Faber-Castell Pitt Big Brush pen for sketches in a 5"x7" Robert Bateman Cover Series sketchbook, and sometimes I doodle using a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen. Work happens on a 20"x26" Airlite Drawing Board and sometimes on a 24"x36" Berkeley Drafting Table. Art is scanned into Photoshop 4 (the ancient one) with a Mustek A3 2400S S-Series Flatbed Scanner.

Fonts used for the comic:

^{- robo-bird speech}

^{- computer speech}

^{- other speech}

^{- A* logo}

(The font names above link to where I got them. Euphorigenic is free for personal and most commercial uses. Personal use versions of Trebuchet and Georgia are included in recent versions of Windows. A personal use version of OCR A Extended came with Windows 98 and old versions of Microsoft Office and related software; OCR A is a standardized font and both free and paid implementations are available elsewhere.)

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