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  Mugs and MechtaMar 31, 2010 1:14 AM PDT | url
 
Added 3 new A* pages:Niels had teeth in the storyboards, but when it came time to draw his grinning mug in detail some pages back, I realized he should probably be all gums, given his current condition. So there we are!
 
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I'd successfully avoided the Wikipedia "research" bug for a few weeks, but it got me good last night, and I've condensed the fun-filled nuggets I found about the Soviet "Luna" space program into this photo and factoid-laden forum post. It was the high times of the early space race back then, in 1959, as the first of Luna's 49 missions got off to a typical start: Luna 1 missed its target--the Moon--entirely, and drifted into orbit around the Sun. But those were the days when the Soviet propaganda machine was in its silver-lined prime, and they turned defeat into victory by declaring the strayed probe a new planet; I give you the proud Soviet planet, "Mechta" (actually this is a photo of Luna 2, which successfully hit the Moon, but it looked mostly like Luna 1, with the addition of a few antennae; Luna 1--excuse me, planet Mechta--was--er, is--a slim 361 kilograms):
 
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Hail mighty Mechta, metal planet, communist conqueror of the Sun! So yes there are other amusing old space stories and awesome Soviet probe designs in the aforelinked article on the forum.
 
 
 
 
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  Don't mess with this gangMar 30, 2010 1:58 AM PDT | url
 
Added 3 new A* pages:I've been drawing scary dudes lately! There's Niels here, and then I drew a whole pack of gang of highly suspicious characters in this weekend's Princess and the Giant.
 
Aaaand speaking of comics I did this weekend, I also did a new -word- poem comic thingy. I keep saying I'd like to do those on a weekly basis, but then I just keep running out of time what with all the other comics I keep doing. We'll see how long it takes me to get the next one done.
 
 
 
 
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  Glossy A* art printsMar 29, 2010 5:16 PM PDT | url
 
It was an exciting day for me today as I printed and shipped off the first A* art prints. The print shop showed me some glossy heavy card stock I hadn't known about before, and the black in the art printed out super liquid saturated, like a nice glossy black and white photograph; they look nice! :D
 
These historic first A* prints were of this page and this page; it's super-easy to order a print of any page or art gallery piece on the site: just click the "buy as hand-signed print" link next to the artwork you like, fill out the simple order form, and I'll get it printed it up all nice and shiny, sign it, and ship it off to you. Oh and I should note that I use my source files, which are twice the resolution of what you see on the web site, and I print the artwork without the subtitle, so you don't have to worry about a nice nebula picture, say, having Vero's distracting ellipsoidal rambling forever attached to it. (Although if you really want the subtitle, you can note that on the order form and I'll include it!)
 
 
 
 
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  Crazy time with the brushes and soundsMar 27, 2010 2:44 AM PDT | url
 
Added 3 new A* pages:There's the second brush drawing from storyboards, and then I lay some haphazardly placed computer noise on you. Talk about wacky time!
 
Have a shiny weekend, you crazy diamonds.
 
 
 
 
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  That's...Mar 26, 2010 2:57 AM PDT | url
 
Added 4 new A* pages:...three sentences in a row that Vero hasn't completed. I think he'll do a little better in his next panel.
 
Page 63 looks a bit different than the others because it's pretty much the storyboard drawing for that shot that I did weeks ago, only cleaned, tidied, and tucked up. I started trying to redo the image with my usual final lasso tool work, but just couldn't seem to recapture the bold brushy impact I was lucky enough to get in the original sketch, so I just went with that instead of trying to get lightning to strike twice. Hm... I have another pretty nice storyboard sketch I might tidy up for one of tomorrow's panels, too; mostly though they're all messy and stuff, so probably only one more after that would be usable for this episode. Not too often, then, but a little art style switcharoo like that every now and then is kind of fun, right? Also awfully convenient. :D Har maybe eventually I'll get so good at storyboard sketches that each one will be a masterpiece in its own right and I'll get an entire episode done in just a few days! Prrrrobably not, though.
 
 
 
 
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  Making a hash of thingsMar 25, 2010 1:08 AM PDT | url
 
Added 4 new A* pages:Here's an alternate version of page 60; I was thinking maybe the gradient glow from the light, even though hand-painted, might look a little too generic Gaussian-blur-ish, so I tried doing a glow sort of cut-out style:
 
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But it seemed a little too harsh/distracting for this particular shot.
 
 
 
 
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  Gray words and linesMar 24, 2010 12:17 AM PDT | url
 
Added 4 new A* pages:Italics alone didn't quite seem enough to set off Niels' lines from Vero's, so I made them gray, too. Hopefully that helps show who's talking here! And I'm using a regular brush tool for those lines or wires or whatever you see in the last two panels, because the lasso tool really isn't cut out (har!) for drawing long thin lines. Hopefully the different look for them isn't too jarring, and hey this lets me get a sorta funky semi-transparent look for them.
 
 
 
 
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  What the haps were todayMar 23, 2010 12:43 AM PDT | url
 
Added 4 new A* pages:Something neat happened today as the Princess from my Sunday comic, The Princess and the Giant, got a guest appearance on Nothing Happened Today as what appears to be an exotic bar reveler. So *that's* how she chillaxes after her hazardous weekend adventures! Anyway even aside from the Princess partying, "Nothing Happened Today" is a fine and amusing webcomic that you should check out.
 
 
 
 
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  'Tis Sleepy Time!Mar 20, 2010 3:34 AM PDT | url
 
Added 3 new A* pages:Heyyy. Have a nice weekend, don't forget to maybe check out some of my other comics, like The Princess and the Giant, which will update on Sunday, and my small daily Sketchy, now up to 60+ silly comics!
 
 
 
 
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  Rocket and lasso mayhemMar 19, 2010 1:36 AM PDT | url
 
Added 3 new A* pages:Hey I was wasting time reading more interesting stuff about the Rooskie space program, particularly the few deadly mishaps they've had; I didn't bother to note the addresses of these so I'm just kind of paraphrasing from what I can remember of the Wikipedia articles and probably have most of it wrong, but here goes:
 
- One Russian dude, coming down for landing in his space ship, had the main parachute fail to deploy correctly. He then deployed the backup chute, but it got tangled with the main, screwed-up chute, putting them both out of action, and his ship hit the ground at 90 mph or so, killing him. When they checked the chutes on another craft that had been due to launch earlier but had been delayed, they found those chutes would have had the same problem--so fortunately they were able to fix those, at least. This would have been ehh in the late '50s or sometime in the '60s I guess, as would the next one as far as I can recall.
 
- The only people to die in space (as opposed to in the upper atmosphere or further down) were three Russian cosmonauts who suffocated when a hatch got pulled off their ship after it fired its thrusters to put them on a re-entry course: it was supposed to separate from some other module, I think, but this hatch thing pulled away with it, leaving a hole that let their ship's atmosphere leak out very rapidly. The ship went through its landing procedure, and although ground control had not heard from the cosmonauts since shortly after the re-entry firing, they didn't really find out what had happened until the recovery team opened the landed ship and found the three dead in their seats.
 
- (This one was a bit later.) There was a lot of pressure to get a heavy rocket launch vehicle working that could compete with the huge American rocket at the time--one that could launch a crew directly to the Moon, for instance--and during a hurried round of testing, with the managing General or whatever he was of the Russian rocketry program at the launch platform directing efforts, a technician triggered one stage of the huge rocket's thrusters, which had mistakenly been left charged, and they fired into the rocket's other fuel tanks, igniting a massive fireball and explosion that destroyed the platform and killed over 100 people, including the bigwig in charge. American surveillance photos showed the destroyed platform, and hints acquired by European news agencies strongly suggested that a cataclysmic accident had occurred, but the Soviets staunchly denied a rocket accident--they gave out that the main guy and anybody else had died in a plane crash--right up until Glasnost allowed them to disclose it finally, in '89 or '90.
 
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I draw A* using the lasso tool, which is a little unusual, so I like to keep track of other people who draw with it:
 
deviantART user squazilla has been doing some cool lasso drawings lately, like this one: check out that pose, the clothing and facial detail, and those shades of gray! Nice.
 
Also, on her page I noticed another artist commenting about using the lasso; that was maxprodanov, who did this piece with the polygonal lasso tool.
 
Nedroid does the coloring for the popular webcomic "The Adventures of Dr. McNinja" these days, and a while back put up a coloring tutorial where he gives a detailed description of his coloring technique, which involves using the lasso tool to isolate areas to be colored. That's more of a traditional use of the lasso tool and not exactly lasso drawing per se, but hey I'll take what I can get.
 
 
 
 
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  Parting is such sweet redrawingMar 18, 2010 2:26 AM PDT | url
 
Added 3 new A* pages:My self-appointed business manager, aka my dad, wanted a print he could shop around of the image I used as an icon for the episode 7 trailer, but that drawing was kind of low res and scribbly, so I redrew it today at a higher resolution for printing purposes. I've put this fancy version in the episode 7 gallery, and you can get to it by clicking this sorta tiny version:
 
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  A* Episode 8, Pages 35 - 39Mar 17, 2010 1:07 AM PDT | url
 
Added 5 new A* pages:I had never done "fan art" before but I did some recently! A couple weeks ago I did one for Nedroid that nobody seemed to like so I'll just post it here. :P
 
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And a few days ago I did one for Nothing Happened Today that he liked enough to post in his gallery. His actual comic is way funnier than my ragged little homage though so consider giving it a look.
 
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I came across an awesome half-finished one-shot little webcomic serial called Space Girl by Travis Charest, who is apparently an artistic big shot in the super hero comic world. The writing is pretty awful but the art is super, and check out that A*-ish single-panel wide screen format!
 
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Speaking of wasting time on the Internet, Venera: The Soviet Exploration of Venus has all kinds of rad details and images from the Ruskie side of the Cold War space race, with lots of drone-dropping, crushing atmospheres, and redundant systems!
 
And just to get you in the mood, here's a photo of NASA's Pioneer 3 space probe being worked on, probably not long before its 1958 launch. Look how tiny it is!
 
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image by NASA (source)
 
Pioneer 3 was supposed to pass the Moon and then go on and orbit the Sun, but its launch rocket ran out of gas, and it fell back to Earth after 38 hours, burning up over Africa. But the data it returned in its inadvertent Earth orbit helped James Van Allen in his discovery of the Earth's radiation belts. Way to go, Pioneer 3!
 
 
 
 
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  Brushy shading!Mar 16, 2010 1:16 AM PDT | url
 
Added 4 new A* pages:I started applying grays in a different way today--with a brushy brush tool rather than with linear or radial gradients. Still getting the hang of it, but it looks a little more organic this way, I think.
 
 
 
 
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  Identifying dwarfs and smashing cometsMar 13, 2010 2:46 AM PST | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Spent way too long doing random cool space "research" on Wikipedia today but hey, that's where I get my inspiration for most of this A* stuff. And anyway I wrote up little summaries of the neat parts with nice pictures in forum articles in case you want to see neat stuff. SUCH AS:
 
- The doomed moon that's going to crash into Mars in 11 million years!
- The probe that's going to reach never-before-well-seen large bodies in the asteroid belt next year and maybe help determine if one of them is a "dwarf planet"!
- Smashing a comet and going back to check the big crater made on its surface!
 
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Kaboom! Oh the space excitement, people!
 
 
 
 
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  Gimme a dynamo any dayMar 12, 2010 3:36 AM PST | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Kind of slow going, probably too many FX. Oh well. Magnets!
 
 
 
 
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  Get up and goMar 11, 2010 2:47 AM PST | url
 
Added 4 new A* pages:Phew, I need some wakey wakey too! Gotta stop pulling those Princess and the Giant weekend all-nighters. ;)
 
Didja notice the scene transition there with the big halftone effect? Did that work? I'm used to relying on animation for fadeouts, not sure how to do this static stuff. I was thinking I'd have to do one of those "Later..." caption-type thingies you see in comics a lot, but then this static fade out/in effect seemed less intrusive.
 
 
 
 
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  Blowing staticMar 10, 2010 4:40 AM PST | url
 
Added 3 new A* pages:Playing with more types of static. The page 20 stuff is actually artifacts created by "lossy" GIF compression settings in a GIF animation program of mine; does a reasonable job of looking like some kind of interference pattern. Funny that a GIF would actually come out smaller with all that junk scattered around it, huh?
 
 
 
 
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  Scanlines are foreverMar 09, 2010 7:21 AM PST | url
 
Added 3 new A* pages:I threw this thingy together today; it might end up as a sort of filler page on another webcomic:
 
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On Friday I was thinking that I might put a large version of daily 16 up in the A* "gallery" viewer, but you know, with the new larger A* strip size, I don't know how much point there would be in putting up double-sized versions that probably wouldn't fit on most peoples' screens anyway. So I settled for posting the comic on deviantART, and while I was doing that, I found that deviantART's artist comment field didn't like the ampersand in my comic URLs. Silly deviantART! So I made a little script that will take a short version of an A* comic URL and redirect to the full address, like so; the long number at the end is just the number of the chapter (0008) and the number of the strip (0016). How exciting!
 
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Ed Harrington was kind enough to add a Princess and the Giant link to the links page of his fine Nothing Happened Today comic, which you should check out, particularly if you enjoy reading meticulously drawn humorous non-adventures of semi-cerebral drunkards--and who doesn't, really?
 
Speaking of the Princess, here's a clickable link/bookmark/ad thingy that leads to her latest strip:
 
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  Iconageddon Pt. DeuxMar 06, 2010 8:32 AM PST | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Hm, that second one came out all right, maybe I'll put a full (double) size version in the gallery on Monday.
 
Some time in the not-so-wee hours last night I realized my iconography was only halfway done--still had to update outdated representations of A* and my other comics on my various mirror sites, which tend to have their own custom icon sizes. So here's another slew:
 
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  Episode 7 banner overloadMar 05, 2010 6:27 AM PST | url
 
Added 4 new A* pages:Now I'm thinking that technically if you poked your finger through a holographic screen it would just block out the hologram in rays opposite from the directions the projection was coming from, but you know, that probably wouldn't look as cool. Anyway, this is probably something much more sophisticated, like...um...a magnetically controlled plasma field of radiant gas. Yeah! Also I gots ta keep ripping off Matrix effects, you know. :P
 
Banner dump! Time to update my various ad campaigns, so I made myself some "leaderboard-size" banners with chapter 7 art; you might have seen the first one a month or so ago, the others I whipped up tonight. Feel free to use these yourself for linking or whatever; they will reside on the icons page until I get tired of them!
 
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Help a brother out and let me know if you think any of these are particularly good or bad. :D I have a definite favorite and a mostly definite least favorite.
 
 
 
 
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  Floating toolsMar 04, 2010 4:02 AM PST | url
 
Added 4 new A* pages:Stayed away from the maths and finally got a decent number of pages done! Just more proof that math is evil.
 
I think floating screwdriver is my new favorite character.
 
We'll have to wait until tomorrow for Vero to complete his latest thought (he is slow of mind) but MAYBE YOU CAN FIGURE IT OUT?? :o
 
 
 
 
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  How to be really heavyMar 03, 2010 7:57 AM PST | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Bah, still just two today! Got too caught up in black hole math, initially trying to show how ridiculously powerful the fantasy "mass effect" technology in "Mass Effect 2" would have had to have been to keep the crew at their normal weight as close as they appeared to get to a certain notorious black hole: it would've had to have been able to nullify 650 g-forces, as it turns out! And then I went on to figure silly things like how far away from A* you could be to be getting the equivalent of Earth surface gravity from it (answer: a distance equivalent to Pluto's furthest distance from the Sun!), or how fast you'd have to be going to have a stable orbit around A* at a distance just above that of Mars' furthest orbit from the Sun (answer: 15% light speed!). So if you want to see a lot of nutty calculations like that about black holes, they're in this A* forum post!
 
Hopefully less math, more drawing tomorrow. Although having figured out some of this stuff will help me for hm episode 8 or 9, in a way.
 
 
 
 
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  Swirling gasses and floating screwsMar 02, 2010 5:28 AM PST | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Still not up to full speed but hey, I got twice as many pages done today, and if I can double again tomorrow, I'll be all set. :D I think the nebula came out a little more gaseous today, which isn't good for a lot of things, like digestion, but I think it's okay here. Still gotta work on getting them a bit more flowing, though. (I swear that wasn't a digestion pun.)
 
I *did* blow (again not digestion!) some time (see?) today getting A* and my other comics on Twitter, and drawing a couple pages of my One Off strip, which was sorely in need of an update, even of particularly iffy jokes! Those pages start here.
 
And I gotta throw out a thank you return link to Slamlander, who I notice gave A* a spot in the comic section of his site's portal page. Thanks, man!
 
 
 
 
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  A* starts TweetingMar 01, 2010 10:42 PM PST | url
 
I had something of a social networking epiphany over the weekend, *finally* realizing what fan pages on Facebook are for (you post your updates so people can get them in their Facebook news feeds, duhhh), how beneficial a network like Reddit can be for a webcomic (I've been experimenting with it through that "SHARE" button I put next to the comics last week), and that hey I should probably get with this Twitter thing too that all the kids are talking about.
 
So! A* and my four other comic series now all have Pages on Facebook (these had been there for a while, except for -word-'s, because "word" isn't an allowed word in Facebook Page titles---so I got a little creative :p) and tweet streams on Twitter; fan/subscribe/whatever to them and you'll get timely notifications of each comic's update through the respective service. The links:
 
Supermassive Black Hole A*: ----Facebook---- ----Twitter----
The Princess and the Giant: ----Facebook---- ----Twitter----
Sketchy: ----Facebook---- ----Twitter----
-word-: ----Facebook---- ----Twitter----
One Off: ----Facebook---- ----Twitter----
 
If you need to look up these links in the future, you'll always find them on each comic's "about" page. Speaking of One Off, I've been neglecting that for a while and I had a few comic ideas pop into my head in the shower today, so I'm gonna see if I can't get an update or two in on that while the inspiration is upon me.
 
 
 
 
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