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| Hope he does better than Miller | Jan 30, 2010 5:08 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:D-aw only two today! But it's the weekend! If you need something more to do, check out my other weekday comic, Sketchy, which lit up this week, and my Sunday comic, The Princess and the Giant. You could also scrutinize the large version of today's first comic, which is in the gallery (click this tiny one to hop there):
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| Chocolate Syrup and Mirrors | Jan 29, 2010 6:06 AM PST | url |
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Added 4 new A* comics:Kind of gross what with the blood today; I guess this is about as gory as A* has been, and I don't think it will ever be *worse* than this. At any rate I don't like to make a habit of it, but now and then a bit of a mess is necessary.
I added a couple banner versions of that recent super-wide panning scene to the icons page; there's this little one
and a slightly larger one. I'll probably use these to advertise A* once we move on to chapter 8; I wanted to get them made up now, though, because I needed to update the banners on A*'s various mirror sites, which were way out of date (remember that smiling proto-Selenis? ah youth). Anyway I don't mention them very often, and the links are always available on the about page, but it couldn't hurt to point out that A* comics go up on various other places on the web that you might also find handy for comic reading; personally I'd love you to read them here on the A* home page :D more than anything--and there's always extra news or art or other things here that don't make it onto the mirror sites--ooh and the strips always appear here at least a little while before they appear on the mirror sites--but if you want to venture elsewhere you'll also find A* comicsOoh hey you can also just read it by subscribing to the A* RSS feed. So, lots of options for keeping up with the comic, and I hope you will as we move into the final chapters of Vero's story; it's going to be a rough ride for Vero, but hopefully a fun one for the rest of us!
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| Wide drawings, diminutive hatches | Jan 28, 2010 3:03 AM PST | url |
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Added 5 new A* comics:In the animation, you'll see a hatch in the lower middle of that last comic swing open; doesn't really come across in the comic too well. Note to self: bigger hatches!
The back and forth panning exchange between Vero, the guard, and Selenis was a very wide drawing; the full width version is in the gallery, and you can click this tiny preview to get to it:
There's also a quarter-size 1050-pixel-wide version of it.
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| Bigger comics are...better? | Jan 27, 2010 4:36 AM PST | url |
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Added 5 new A* comics:Starting with episode 8, there are gonna be some changes since I won't have to worry about animating the art when I draw it. One thing that lets me do is think about increasing the size of the strips; would going from the current 717x300 to 956x400 be okay? It wouldn't be so great if your desktop is 800x600... Anyway let me know if you think that size would be a problem. Here's a mock-up of what that size increase would look like (click for the full sizes):
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| A* Episode 7, Dailies 87 - 92 | Jan 26, 2010 4:03 AM PST | url |
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Added 6 new A* comics:I added large versions of a few of today's comics to the gallery; click these tiny versions to get to them:
I see daily 88 there as the point where the story shifts into a somewhat darker mode. Gotta start getting serious, Vero's story's only got three and a quarter episodes left!
Oh yeah now I remember what it was I wanted to put here. In a cross-century coincidence, it just so happened that the last page of the book I read over breakfast today featured the same plot device that I was due to use in today's A* comics, namely that of using a body to rather conveniently block a door for the hero. Dig Prince Arthur getting through a door thanks to a body as he pursues the last of a batch of errant knaves:The other which was entred, laboured fast
To sperre the gate; but that same lumpe of clay,
Whose grudging ghost was thereout fled and past;
Right in the middest of the threshold lay,
That it the Posterne did from closing stay:
The whiles the Prince hard pressed in betweene,
And entraunce wonne. Streight th'other fled away,
And ran into the Hall, where he did weene
Himselfe to saue: but there he slew him at the skreene.
- Edmund Spenser, "The Faerie Queene" V.X.37 Vero = Prince Arthur? Huh well I dunno about that. Anyway, excelsior and all that!
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| A* movies ending, comics improving | Jan 23, 2010 2:15 AM PST | url |
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A's episode 7 will be the last episode to have an animated movie version; episodes 8 and beyond will come out as comics, but not as movies. The movies have been fun, but this change will help me make A* better: the art will improve, and you'll get more episodes, faster.
If you'd like to hear my overly long tale of the reasons for this change, and how it will make A* better, you can catch it on the forum!
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| Inaccurate drawings are fun | Jan 23, 2010 1:06 AM PST | url |
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Added 5 new A* comics:Fireworks! This is the first time we've seen one of those big Core Sys trooper rifles go off, and I should mention that although I drew it kind of like some sort of laser beam, it isn't a laser, because that would be silly. So it's some kind of more conventional projectile, just like the other hand-held weapons we've seen, like Selenis' pistol and, more recently, the pistol she stole from Captain Fizer. But it's more fun to draw gunshots all bright and beamy than otherwise. Come to think of it, lasers don't really look like lasers either, unless they're going through heavy gas or something.
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| Doors and Bombshells | Jan 22, 2010 4:23 AM PST | url |
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Added 5 new A* comics:And that's it for today!
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Added a new comic to the short list of comics I read:
Bombshell Fights For America
It's Marilyn Monroe vs Nixon in an alternate America, thanks to a dimensional travel device cooked up by Howard Hughes. Together with Lyndon Johnson, JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Dean Martin, they're embroiled in a battle for the future of the country. If that sounds cool, it's because it is. Each BFFA page is a brilliant collage of carefully chosen and processed vintage photos. If you thought photo comics were lame, that's because you haven't read this one yet. It's hard to beat the cool mood and pacing here, and the perfect and insightful ways in which some of the 1960s' most influential personalities are brought to life.
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| Cowboy Bebop is so mad right now | Jan 21, 2010 2:59 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* comics:Today was the *other* sequence I'd been dreading animating for this episode: an actual honest-to-goodness run sequence. Fortunately for me I happened to notice a pretty clever cheap 6-frame run sequence in eh I think it was episode 3 of Cowboy Bebop a while back; centered on the running character from the side, it went like this: 1) full right arm, left leg extension, 2) slight pull back, 3) right hand just forward of neutral, left leg just behind, 4) full left arm extension, right leg extension, 5) slight pull back, 6) left hand just forward of neutral, right leg just behind, loop.
It's got a nice spring to it, and I cheapened it even a bit more by using the same silhouette for the left as for the right. Here's a rough of it, minus maybe a little forward/back motion on Vero, and of course the foreground and background crowds will be zipping by:
Hm maybe I'll see if I can make it a little driftier, since he's in low gravity here.
Did anyone suspect he was wearing his good ol' imitation Metropole suit beneath his cloak this whole episode? :D
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| My lasso drawing article on TWCB | Jan 20, 2010 4:53 PM PST | url |
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I wrote an article on drawing with the Lasso Tool for a new webcomic authoring site called The Webcomic Builder. The article details the specific steps I use to create the drawings I make for A*, as a kind of tutorial in the weird ways of lasso drawing. So check it out to learn all my questionable secrets!
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| Space luge | Jan 20, 2010 5:00 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* comics:A rotating *&* zooming shot today; I'd been dreading that one since I first storyboarded it so it's nice to have it done! Eh you'll just have to trust me on the rotating and zooming part until the episode 7 movie is done. ;) Anyway to commemorate this victory, I put a big weird version of it in the gallery, which you can get to by clicking this tiny one:
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| X-ray photos of A* by Chandra | Jan 19, 2010 6:46 PM PST | url |
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In the past few months, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has produced some of the most detailed images yet of Sagittarius A*, the very real supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
(image by NASA)
I've included them in an article I posted on the A* forum. Looking good, A*!
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| Zooming, rotating, exploding, crowding | Jan 19, 2010 5:44 AM PST | url |
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Added 4 new A* comics:A zooming shot (grenades), a rotating shot (station), and two crowd shots all in one day, phew! It's like I'm trying to make this hard on myself or something. =P I did have fun drawing the little girl in the crowd, though--don't get to draw many kids in this comic. Also had some fun with the floating baby earlier in the episode (did you spot him?).
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| Throwin' stuff | Jan 16, 2010 6:03 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:Just two? Bah! Well thankfully I probably won't be tempted to rearrange major pieces of the web site this weekend like I did last weekend, and instead I'll get rested up and be back at full steam again next week. If you're around this weekend, don't forget to check out The Princess and the Giant, which will update Sunday as usual, and if you haven't been following my daily sketch comic, Sketchy (how clever eh), well you have some good nonsense to catch up on.
Update: Well Sixxth liked the look of this last drawing, which is more than enough excuse for me to throw a larger version up in the gallery; get to it through clicking this small version:
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| Space station spin-outs | Jan 15, 2010 6:31 AM PST | url |
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Added 5 new A* comics:So the last daily here may look kinda funny. Maybe it'll help if you see it in action:
Vero's moving from the non-spinning part of the station to the spinning part. The idea is that you hook onto the outer, slowest rotating ring, let that get you up to speed and give the effect of gravity through centrifugal force (or the tunnel wall gives it to the rider via centripetal force...I dunno physics gets confusing!), then you step onto the next, slightly faster one, then to the next, and then it's a pretty easy step into the concourse. The concourse is spinning at a little under 2 rpm, and with a 25 meter radius that gives it in effect about 0.1g of artificial gravity...or thereabouts. The approach tunnel sections are spinning at ~2 rpm, ~4 rpm, and ~6 rpm, respectively, but their radius is much smaller so the force is less.
I'm not 100% sure this would work but it sounds like it would! I've been on something similar with slidewalks of escalating speed: you step from regular floor onto a slow-moving belt, then from the slow one onto a faster one. Those are fun! Probably more fun that being spun around in loops. :P
The font used for the "Concourse 5" display lettering is a free font called "Neuropol."
And I thought the image of Selenis giving Vero the brush came out pretty well, so you'll find a large version in the gallery by clicking this tiny one:
In the animated version she'll flick her fingers up all disdainfully, heh.
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| Always have an escape plan | Jan 14, 2010 4:56 AM PST | url |
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Added 5 new A* comics:Another day, another el-largo piece of art added to the gallery--click this tiny version:
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Here's something I don't get you every day, though: a new -word- poem comic. Yep!
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| Forum update maybe too | Jan 13, 2010 4:21 AM PST | url |
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Added 4 new A* comics:I thought the minimalist blasting Selenis came out reasonably well, so there's a large alternate version in the gallery; click-um this small one to get to it:
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And I think I'm gonna give updating the forum software a shot now so if you find it not working it's because I'm messin' with it!
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| Float faster! | Jan 12, 2010 5:22 AM PST | url |
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Added 4 new A* comics:Those floating guards were kind of fun to draw, so I stuck a larger version of them in the gallery--click this tiny version to get to it:
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The Princess and the Giant won a spot in Al Bruno's One Lovely Blog award list. Okay so it's like a chain letter thing or something but hey, it's the first thing the Princess has won, so huzzah! Thanks, Al!
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| A* episode 5 in German | Jan 11, 2010 8:23 PM PST | url |
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Vitruv, SEPET, Starschwar and Neo87 have translated A* episode 5 into German. It's a lot of work to go through the movie, replace all the subtitles, then movify it all up again and host it on a web site, so thanks once again guys, I appreciate it and probably some German-speaking people do too!
That link above to the German version can be found permanently on my English A* episode 5 movie page.
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| Visors, Romans, and other projects | Jan 09, 2010 5:30 AM PST | url |
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Added 6 new A* comics:So, turns out things get a little abstract when the lights go all the way out. ;) But the visor shining when they come back on looks pretty palpable at least, right? With that I tried animating a "distorted" "reflection," here's a rough cut of that that hopefully makes things a little clearer:
Not really the first thing you want to have happening to you when the lights come on! (Bonus question: why'd they go off? And the camera? And the cameras at Mick's place, according to one of the troopers in episode 6? Hmm... Maybe a mysterious comic from the past few days holds a clue!) And I was having so much fun with the visor that I uploaded two high-res versions into the gallery; click these tiny ones to get to 'em:
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Hey my new, other daily comic, Sketchy, has been moving along like gangbusters in this its second week, so why not give that a look. If you haven't seen it before, well, it's a pretty ridiculous little sketch comic; for instance, in the first ten strips, our little hero has gone from impulsive spelunker to surprised Roman Emperor (omg spoilerzerz). Yep! Makes you want to read about it, don't it? And if that doesn't do it, then this sample strip of amazing ancient footwear surely will:
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Hm I *may* get ambitious and putter around the site this weekend on a couple projects: updating the forum to the latest version of phpBB, and finally getting ad spaces running.
So, if the forum's down at some point over the weekend, don't panic, I...probably have things under control. And if you see ads popping up, well, that's gonna be normal 'cause I gotta start filling in the money pit this cartooning thing is! Anyway they'll be non-animating and easy to block if you must--all from projectwonderful.com. And if you ever see one that's just really, really awful, let me know and I'll see about making sure it doesn't inflict itself on my hardy readers again.
Oh, one thing I already did was make the drop-down navigation menus over the daily comics a little more intuitive in how they list the episodes and dailies--they're no longer in reverse order, and now they center on the active entry in the list when you pop it open.
Thanks for reading and have a super weekend! (And as usual there will be a new Princess and the Giant comic over the weekend, yay! Plug plug plug.)
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| Hands off my ship, man | Jan 08, 2010 5:25 AM PST | url |
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Added 5 new A* comics:Man, kind of a psychedelic series of sequences today, huh? Whee!
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| BULLET TYME LOL | Jan 07, 2010 3:23 AM PST | url |
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Added 6 new A* comics:We get to a little action today and I realize that I'll probably have to use slow-mo "bullet time" type of stuff in the animated version so that you'll have time to catch things like Selenis landing on Fizer's face and grabbing his gun, or her zooming into the camera with a smile on her face afterwards. Here's a rough go at slowing down the camera smile zoom bit:
I also put a super-large version (4000x4000) of that fly-by in the brand new episode 7 gallery, which you can get to by clicking zis tiny version:
I had to draw it super-large to avoid pixelization as Selenis zooms toward the camera!
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Ooh I see my approval to sell ad space on A* and Princess and the Giant came through today, so I'll have to start getting those set up. Yes that means ads on these comics! Gotta at least try to make some dough at this crazy vocation, after all. ;) I'm going to try to arrange their placement tastefully, but they'll be pretty easy to block if you find them annoying.
Hm they'll probably go up on the Princess and the Giant first, since that'll be easier to set up.
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| Supermassive Warhol* | Jan 06, 2010 4:53 AM PST | url |
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Added 7 new A* comics:So...many...characters...
Hey, I did up some icon versions of the orange-sherbet Selenis
   
which are now on the icons page for safekeeping. And then when I was messing with the large original version
a little layer accident made it look sort of double-exposed, which I thought was cool, so I did up a large multi-exposure sorta Andy Warhol type of dealy and put it in the gallery; get to it by clicking this tiny version:
Fun fact: Warhol called his favorites of the bohemian actors/performers he gathered for his films "superstars"--people with fun names like Ultra Violet, Ingrid Superstar, Candy Darling, Paul America, oh and Edie Sedgwick, I suppose. So there's the "star"/"*" Warhol-A* connection! =P
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| #1 signed comic print sold | Jan 05, 2010 4:32 AM PST | url |
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Added 5 new A* comics:So that thing that looks like some kind of cosmic dentist's torture device in #18 there is a space station, and for the animated version I wanted to make it so that you can see the big tubular part is rotating (at just under 2 rotations per minute, in fact), while the branchy part with all the ships docked isn't, so I came up with this wacky way of simulating rotation involving hundreds of layers and uhh... Well anyway those three bright dashes on it will sort of rotate in a cylindrical pseudo-3D fashion, we'll hafta see how convincing that is.
I sold my first print! Yay! Each comic and art gallery piece has a "buy signed print" link next to it, so if you want me to take it to the printers, have them print it nice and glossy at 8.5x11 on nice heavy paper, sign it and ship it off to you (I do that part, not the printers), that's what you do. Anyway the print happens to be of the latest Princess and the Giant comic that I did over the weekend, which you can get to by clicking this bookmark-sized thing I made out of it for advertising purposes:
So that was exciting! Well, I'm going to go scribble off a Sketchy comic, then we'll be back with more A* tomorrow.
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Ooh I forgot, I was going to talk about what a wacky place the post office is. It's a wacky place! I got my Priority Mail envelope all addressed and stuff, then used this newfangled automated postage station they have to get the postage and Delivery Confirmation for it, rather than waiting in the long slow line for a clerk. That would have been great, except that it gave me a postage + label thing that didn't fit in the postage spot marked on the envelope, and, if stuck over the address part, would have left the envelope without a return address, because the printed label had only a "TO:" and no "FROM:" address part. Huh!
So being a newb at this I had to wait in line to ask a clerk. He slaps the label over my FROM:/TO: label, and I ask him if it doesn't need a return address by some magic, like maybe they read my mailing address off my credit card when I paid for the postage at the machine, or maybe I answered the questions wrong and it would have given me a label with a "FROM:" field if I'd answered them differently. He said no those labels just don't have a "FROM:" field and yes you should have one, so he fished out this special little roll of small blank labels--not available to customers in the self-help areas!--and had me fill it out, then he pasted it up I think where the postage spot was marked. So... Yeah. You'd think they'd have this "FROM:" deal down a little better. But now I've got the system and its quirks down!
The other funny thing was that while waiting in line, I noticed (you can't avoid it, they're clever that way) a hand-written sign saying that if you're a small business and want to get free delivery confirmation, shipping pick-ups from home/office and other things, then put your contact info in this little box they'd put next to the note, and a "manager" would call you and give you the inside info. Um... Well free delivery confirmation would be super, but I didn't want the post office calling me (scary!), and I figured if this was legit, it'd just be on their web site somewhere, right?
Nope! Not on the web site. There are programs and things you can download to print your own stamps and labels and save 14% on shipping and stuff, but nothing about free delivery confirmation. So it seems my local PO managers are running their own little side deals! Huh!
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| A* and Sketchy, too! | Jan 02, 2010 6:53 AM PST | url |
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Added 5 new A* comics:Hey A* is cruising along fast but so's my other daily comic--started just this week--Sketchy! Don't forget to check that one out too. :D Here's one from uhhh two days ago:
And have a sweet weekend!
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| 2010 Years! And some comix | Jan 01, 2010 1:54 AM PST | url |
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Ooh I'd better go update the copyright notices to "2010." =o
Added 6 new A* comics:
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