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| Putting pictures on wall all old-school | Oct 30, 2010 8:07 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Woo slacker Friday. On a similar note, next week may see a few more single-page days than usual, since I'll be having to hang a bunch of pictures up for a show Thursday night, and probably doing some additional preparatory things prior to that. Real life is hard; I think I'd rather stick to the web. =p
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| Sci-fi vs real life | Oct 29, 2010 7:08 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Page 7 was one of those pages that insists on being difficult. I made a little animation chronicling my struggles with it!
So first I tried drawing it freehand, and came up with a nice rough face, but not at the right top-downish angle. So I brought in my storyboard sketch (that sketchy second frame in the animation) and tried using that as a direct drawing guide, but as is often the case when I try that, I'm just not feeling it, and the face ended up twisting around on me, so that it was more side-on than top-on--and of course I don't realize this until I'm nearly done with it, but something isn't quite right and I keep trying this and that and then you realize the whole thing is just off. ;| So I thought *maybe* I could just tweak the details a bit to angle it back...but that didn't work, of course. So I had to scratch the figure and start over, back to freehanding it rather than tracing off the storyboard, and fortunately, this time it came out pretty well on the first try. Phew.
I'll have to ask other art people if they have that problem, because it happens to quite a bit: trying to draw a figure at an angle--not side or face-on, I mean--and it stealthily twists around to the wrong angle as you're working on it, just to be contrary.
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I'm still messing around with the computery font size a bit, so if you find your browser has had to reload the first few pages of this episode a few times, that's why... It's the same size in relation to the main subtitle font as it was back when I used it in oh say episodes 1 & 2, but back then I always put the computer text up in the picture area, rather than down on the subtitle bar, so I never really realized in a concrete way that it's a) a lot wider and b) shorter than the regular font--so when you put them next to each other at the same size in that subtitle bar as I'm doing in this episode, they don't really play nicely together. I've gone to a compromise size now for the computer font, and hopefully that'll work all right, because having to go back and redo all the previous strips in the episode when I decide to tweak the font a bit is a pain! :P
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Yesterday I was sort of making fun of myself for resorting (or trying to resort) to an old big blinking lights on the wall type of sci-fi interior decorating; well today a friend of mine just happens to send a link to a real-life interior that *looks* like a super sci-fi lair, without resorting to the flashing lights! It's a data center (where they keep the servers and stuff) for a Swedish ISP, Bahnhof, built 30 meters below solid rock in what was originally a Cold War-era anti-nuke military bunker. You can check it out at your own speed in some nifty 360-degree panning photos here, or hitch a ride on a walk-through of it with their CEO on YouTube.
Sweet pad, hm?
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| Square roots are very important | Oct 28, 2010 6:59 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Well, my weekend fairy tale comic, "The Princess and the Giant," is going gangbusters at the moment--by my standards, anyway--so if you're one of the two people on the internet (*cough*) who haven't given it a look yet, now's the perfect time to do so, because I've just created you a handy link to the latest page in the form of this clickable vertical banner:
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For some reason I seem to like drawing water splashing around, so a little water action got inserted into episode 11 page 5 here. And in page 6, I wasn't originally going to have a camera drop down there, but the silly ENIAC-style stuff on the far wall there just wasn't providing enough presence.
Ah, ENIAC.
U.S. Army Photo (source)
You could still do way more square root operations per second (3!) than I can.
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| Blame it on the sweet, sweet pens | Oct 27, 2010 7:32 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I was so woozy from working over the weekend yesterday that when I was signing all the prints I made for the upcoming show, I signed two of them upside-down. :o In fairness to myself, one of them had an upside-down person in it, so... *cough* Anyway it's a good thing my dad urged me to print two of each. >_>
When we were at the art supply store--to buy frames; we needed way more than they had ;P--I found their pen section, and was somewhat surprised to find myself drooling over all the fancy brush pens they have these days--those are the big sort of tapering felt nib pens that a lot of other webcomic people use for inking their strips, and that a lot of superhero comic people seem to use for quick drawings done for visitors at conventions. They're so neat...but I work entirely digitally, so why do I want one so badly? So I resisted...but I was able to justify buying a few metallic silver Pitt pens for signing the prints; they're much nicer than the Sharpies I had. But apparently they have this writing-upside-down glitch...
Gosh this column needs some more art in it... Oh hey look, here's a preliminary version of a free postcard I'm thinking of handing out at the show:
What ya think? The text (name, web site, etc) would be on the left side. The head is actually from an A* storyboard sketch--a quickie, but it somehow seemed to come out pretty nice--and then I added in a bit of body to fill out a bit more of the card. Here's a larger and slightly cropped version.
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| A* episode 11 is Go! | Oct 26, 2010 7:18 AM PDT | url |
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Added 3 new A* pages:Woohoo episode 11 kick-off!
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I ran across a BBC article / news segment about the opening of the runway at "the world's first spaceport" last week; this is Virgin group billionaire Sir Richard Branson's operating center for his "SpaceShip" shuttle in New Mexico, "Spaceport America" (Branson himself is British; too bad he didn't go with "SpacePort Brittania!"). The craft will be hauled up to 50,000 feet by a more conventional aircraft (still kinda funky twin fuselage design there), from which point it boosts on its own to 62 miles up; in the three-hour round-trip up and back, passengers who ponied up £127,000 will enjoy 5 minutes of weightlessness. Steep! Also, make sure you go before you leave, because the SpaceShip has no bathroom.
In a way, calling it the "first spaceport" isn't exactly fair, since the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan has supported commercial rocket launches for a long time now, and I think even NASA has launched commercial stuff--corporate satellites or something, maybe? well I don't know--in their shuttles from Cape Canaveral. Didn't they also have a paying passenger or two in a widely publicized thing a few years back, anyway? Buuuut I suppose there hasn't been a facility dedicated to taking paying customers up there, so maybe we'll allow it.
The other quibble with the title is that 62 miles up is only in the lower part of the thermosphere, still part of Earth's atmosphere, albeit a very low-pressure one; the International Space Station is way higher--200 miles up--and even that's still the thermosphere.
(Hm well I suppose I stand corrected on that point: a bunch of people consider 100 km, or 62 miles, the "edge of space" (the BBC even used that specific phrase in their video), dubbed the Kármán line after the Hungarian-American engineer by that name who figured that it was the maximum altitude at which you could hope to get any aeronautical lift in an aircraft. Interestingly, the US still holds to an old and rather arbitrary "they went at least 50 miles up" yardstick for deciding who is and is not an official astronaut.)
Oh and I suppose I was also thinking that it isn't much of a port, considering that its traffic won't actually be traveling and stopping at a distant destination--although I'm sure they'd love to have a commercial station up there they could dock with. Maybe that's the next big step once they get the flying up there part down.
The craft is pretty small and slender, and I was surprised at first that it doesn't need any big disposable boosters or fuel tanks, but in addition to the relatively low "space" flight ceiling, I guess it doesn't have any real cargo it has to lift, aside from passengers. If they ever do get to the space station stage they might need something with a bit more muscle.
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| I'm having an art show in November! | Oct 23, 2010 8:24 AM PDT | url |
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A pretty large display of printed artwork from my various comics--half of which will be A* prints--will be on display at the plush coffee house Caffè Fiore here in the old Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, from November 5th through the end of December.
The prints will in many cases be a bit larger than the ones I sell here online, and will be all matted and framed like actual art stuff. :o
The official opening shindig is at Fiore on
Saturday, November 13th, from 7-9 pm
with cheese and crackers and all the usual art opening trappings, apparently! It's free and open to anyone, so if you're in the neighborhood, why, stop on by and ask me embarrassing questions about my drawings in person. :D
More photos of the freshly-hung artwork here.
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| Storyboards done--episode 11 starts Monday! | Oct 23, 2010 8:15 AM PDT | url |
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Okay! The storyboards are complete, so on Monday we'll be kicking off episode 11 for real with actual comics. For now I can show you one last bunch of semi-non-spoilery storyboards, although maybe you can tell that there's some significant carnage of some sort or other going down:
There's also another sort of carnage, but I can't show you that yet...you'll just have to wait until whenever we get to the climax of the episode, at whatever point that is in the far-flung future! But at least the beginning isn't far off now.
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| I can see through time | Oct 22, 2010 9:05 AM PDT | url |
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Got nearly twice as many storyboards done for episode 11 today as I did yesterday; just gotta do about the same number tomorrow, and I'll be set for kicking off the first real pages of the episode on Monday. Because this is taking a day longer than I'd have liked, and because yesterday's were not exactly the pick of the litter due to me wanting to avoid spoiling certain things, you get an extra-large batch today, in random order:
#6 (close-up of Proctor's glasses) and the last one are alternate layouts that I'm not going to use. And no that first one isn't Proctor's grampa, it's just him undergoing the g-force of of a rocket launch! Notice how he uses a hair net to stay neat and tidy. >_> And yes, that *is* Mar's nose bending in the foreground in front of him.
Some research I did just for the sake of completeness today turned up some nifty stuff. First, we've got U.S. Air Force surgeon John Stapp, who served as their human test subject for g-force and other acceleration testing in the '40's and '50's. This dude survived the force of 46.2 Gs in one test! Although that was one of his last ones, and left him with permanent damage to his sight. I used this sequence of one Stapp test for reference for g-force distortion of the human face:
image by USAF (source)
Here's the "rocket sled" they strapped him into for these tests:
image by USAF (source)
Looks like some fun, huh? :o Stapp was a trooper, that's for sure.
The other thing I was double-checking was visual effects of near-light-speed travel, although I'm only moving something at a pretty tiny percentage of light speed in episode 11, so the funky distortions of relativity won't really be evident anyway. Still, it's pretty trippy stuff to see demonstrated, for instance in simulated images and movies on these pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
That last one is Carl Sagan from his "Cosmos" series, and it isn't quite accurate, since he covers only Doppler shift and the aberration of light. The aberration of light is the phenomenon of stuff in your peripheral vision actually curving around into your forward view as you approach light speed, so everything--except what's directly behind you--gets compressed into a tunnel in front of you, kind of, because you're catching the photons carrying that data right in your face; the usual analogy is that when you drive faster and faster in the rain, you get more raindrops in the face--so imagine photons are raindrops as we accelerate to light speed.
And while Sagan discusses color changes due to the Doppler effect--something moving very quickly toward you will shift blue, and something moving away will shift red--he doesn't take that to the extremes, where stuff moving toward you close to the speed of light will go all the way to white, apparently (?), and stuff moving away from you close to the speed of light will red shift so much that it goes black. Like, stuff falling into the event horizon of a black hole won't actually just vanish as it crosses that invisible horizon; rather, it will gradually get redder and redder, and fainter and fainter, until it just fades out completely. ... Well, in theory.
Then there's the *really* weird stuff: stuff moving at near-light speed gets compressed in its direction of travel; this is called the Lorentz contraction, which involves a lot of math I don't understand at all. You can't even exactly see it, apparently, because the photons hitting your eye simultaneously weren't necessarily released simultaneously from the moving object, since it's going so darn fast. Supposedly you will still see a sort of contraction effect in many cases, and that is a visual distortion resulting from Lorentz contraction and all that jazz, I think; anyhoo, it's called Terrell rotation, aka the "Penrose-Terrell effect," where your view of the object warps in a very funky way, and generally gets shorter (except that a sphere won't get shorter, since when you rotate a sphere, it's still a sphere), because you're seeing the back part of it nearly simultaneously with the side...or something like that, I dunno. Heck if I'm ever going to try drawing it, though! See that third link above in particular for some 3D-rendered examples of it.
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| Flip-flopping on episode 11 storyboards | Oct 21, 2010 8:50 AM PDT | url |
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Eesh. Slow as molasses trying to get through storyboards today; I only got through about a quarter of them. ;| This probably means I won't be able to get to actual episode 11 pages until Monday.
I guess it was because I was trying to work out some tricky camera angles and lighting for the opening of the episode, because the character in these scenes isn't wearing clothes, yet I'm determined not to show nudity in A*! So that was a bit of a challenge. I guess I just make things difficult on myself on purpose, don't I.
And I can't even show you those scribbles that took so much time to work out, because I don't want to show you the main character of this next story yet! So...boy, I don't have much to show you for a day of work. Here's about all I can show you, and I'm not particularly excited about any of these as drawings in their own right:
But at least we've learned that flip-flops are just the thing for icy moon bases around Saturn-like gas giants, eh? (And actually that flip-flop storyboard--the top one--is one of the many rejected sketches for that page; can't show you the winning version, too revealing ;P. The tricky part for that page was that I wanted to show the person both putting on their flibbops, AND going through a doorway--in the same picture. In the end (and after a good deal of hurting myself trying to act it out) I think I got it worked out, but it took a while. :P) Guhhh hopefully I'll make better progress tomorrow--I'd better!
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| Episode 11 words, round 2! | Oct 20, 2010 11:29 AM PDT | url |
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Okay, think I've finished the script, so next I get to do...about twenty fewer storyboards than I had to do for episode 10, which was probably too long. :D In fact I'm fairly pleased with how concise the episode 11 script has ended up, considering that it summarizes about half a year (story time, I mean) of the story through to episode 10--not to mention an event or two that took place well before it began--and then covers something close to another two years after that. How's this for a general summary of Vero's story in a single line of dialogue, for instance?
"She had been tracking a shipper--Vero Plank--in connection with an advanced, clandestine Core Sys cloning project: a project that appeared to have some degree of access to Perriman's perfected cloning techniques."
Perriman's Perfected Cloning Techniques! Available only from A* and licensed resellers!
Ahem. Anyway, I don't want to give you the impression that there isn't any new action going on in this episode, because there's actually plenty! Covering two star systems and even a goodly bit of interstellar space! And oh, those corporations...
"It MUST have been one of the corporations. Only they could afford to be this devious. But why?"
But it isn't all just suspense and big speeches! Nope, there's the down and dirty, too:
"These are robots we're up against, men; don't make the mistake of thinking they'll accept surrender or escape."
Robots?! Whose idea was that? They always turn on mankind and cause trouble, don't they? Boy, maybe the high rollers cruising around near A* should have read more sci-fi.
Okay, that's probably more than enough dialogue leakage. Next day's update will have what will probably be the first of two batches of sample storyboards from the upcoming episode.
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| Episode 11 research and script goods | Oct 19, 2010 9:16 AM PDT | url |
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Got the research done--I posted some nifty photos I got out of it here on the forum, like this one of liquid methane seas on Saturn's moon Titan
image by NASA (source)
--and over half of the script for episode 11 written today, I think. Actually after much hand-wringing ("Why why won't science let me do this?") I realized that I'd already lit upon--or come to peace with--the same solution I settled on today, months ago. So at least it's nice that I agree with myself! It was good to get a little more in-depth on spaceship limitations, though. One particularly neat site I found today was Atomic Rockets, a rocket science site written specifically with an eye toward science fiction writers.
Keen stuff, and some of the equations and tables on their Space War: Weapons-Conventional page even confirmed that the plan I cooked up a while ago for this episode would produce a sufficiently large boom--I didn't know I was this good at estimating huge space detonations! I mean sure, we've set off a few nuclear explosions so far here in A*, knocked around an asteroid and some big ships a bit, but them's small potatoes compared to episode 11! See, this time, we're going after a whole darn planet. ;)
Also, I came across the name Geminga, a neutron star, or pulsar, specifically, in the direction of the constellation Gemini, and just a bit over 800 light years from Earth; that's relatively nearby, and it's thought that it might be the remnant of the supernova that blew the low-density "bubble" in the interstellar medium in which our solar system currently resides. Funky name! According to this page, "its name is both a contraction of 'Gemini gamma-ray source' and an expression in Milanese dialect meaning 'it's not there.'"
Oh and we need our traditional script line leak, don't we? See if you can guess who this is:
"R-really, sir, you've been listening to too many ghost stories. I'm sure it's someone much more mundane."
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| The next story--coming next week! | Oct 16, 2010 5:52 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:And that somewhat anticlimactic--but spoiler-free!--panel is the end of episode 10, and the end of Vero's story! Did I really leave him hanging or what? =o
I don't want to leave you hanging in other ways though, so here's what's going to go down now--or next week, more like. Aside from Vero's exact fate, you may have found this episode brought some things up and just left them up; well fret you not, because the very next episode--episode 11--will be picking things up and running with them, and should help explain at least a few things (while bringing up others, muhahahaa! Hey I gotta keep you reading somehow :P).
So while I say that episode 10 is the end of Vero's story, episode 11 will pick up the overall A* story more or less right where episode 10 leaves off, only with a different main character. And we'll be seeing some familiar faces--or noses. >_>
As usual, my plan is to take a day to finalize the script, then two days to crank out the hundred or two storyboard sketches I need to lay out the action. It might take an extra day or so overall, but in any case, if things go according to plan, I should have the first episode 11 pages for you by the end of next week, and in the meantime, I'll be posting various teasers such as particularly spiffy--and relatively non-spoilery--lines of dialogue, storyboards, and so forth. So stop on by!
Speaking of which, thank you for stopping by. I started episode 10 with about 4,000 stopping-by-ers per day, and figured I couldn't complain if I was at 6,000 daily visitors by the end of the episode; well, here we are, and there's actually about 10,000 of you lovely people now! Gosh! The internet is crazy--but it makes me happy, and you folks reading my comic make me happy, and hopefully it makes *you* a little happy in return.
So yah episode 11 teasers and then the launch of the episode proper next week; the story continues, but this will also be something of a fresh start with the new lead character and all, and I think I'll be able to get more action and adventure packed in, yar!
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| Almost done with episode 10! | Oct 15, 2010 7:38 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Gosh today I can think of lots of stuff to say, but I guess I'd better save most of it for tomorrow, since *that* will be **the final page of episode 10!** Assuming I get it drawn, of course! :D
Here's a in-progress version of page 151:
I made that for a thread over on ComicFury.
Okay so see you after the next page, when I'll have lots to say about next week and the exciting NEXT EPISODE! :O
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| I type words in box? | Oct 14, 2010 4:55 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Huh! I got nothin' to say today. :o Must...try...to...think of something... Well there is that "Throw It On the Ground" Andy Samberg SNL skit I just saw in some other comic site's blog...a comic that ended like a year ago... Nah too immature anyway. Oh well maybe I'll just get some sleep or something!
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| Some kinda nice stuff happened on other sites | Oct 13, 2010 4:49 AM PDT | url |
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Added 3 new A* pages:Hey, a three-pager! Maybe I will finish this episode by Friday, after all.
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My Sunday fairy tale comic, "The Princess and the Giant" (check out the latest page here if you haven't taken a gander already this week) is currently featured in the "Comic Spotlight" tab on the front page of comic hosting site Smack Jeeves--or more specifically, the Smack Jeeves Princess mirror is being featured. Thanks, Smack Jeeves spotlighters!
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You may or may not recall that about a year and a half ago I made a poster for a "Miniposters Girl" [sic] contest on Newgrounds.com. Here's one version of it:
Sort of a pseudo-Selenis, see? Well originally the winning entries, of which mine ended up being one, were to be printed together in a little art book. Then the contest holder announced that the book wasn't going to work out. D-oh well.
But this weekend, a mysterious package from Newgrounds' "Prize Department" showed up on my doorstep, and what should it be, but the long-thought-canceled glossy color flip-book of the winning entries! It's a little silly in a way since they aren't selling it or anything, so it's just something nice for the winners to see, but hey, I'm in print! ;) One of the others posted a photo of the booklet somewhere near the bottom of this thread on the Newgrounds forum.
Thanks, whoever followed through on that after all this time! :D
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| Oh boy an unrelated bonus drawing! | Oct 11, 2010 7:01 PM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Well I drew stuff instead of sleeping this weekend, which seemed kind of silly, but two pages done today and hopefully they aren't too awful, so I guess so far it worked out. ;P Anyhow you may at least get some enjoyment out of this revamp of a "Dark Persephone" look, originally something I made for a game I worked on a few years back called The Matrix Online.
(The original design sketch is second-from-the-bottom in this post on the forum.)
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| Logic will fail | Oct 09, 2010 6:19 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:In a desperate attempt to overcome my one-page-Friday lameness, I will now regale you with a tale from my youth, recently unearthed during a trip to the old homestead.
Ahem, Ahem.
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The Great Power Failure
In this book a nuclear power plant in eastern Washington is attacked by nuclear assault elephants who feed on nuclear power. But they eat to [sic] much and somehow cause a power failure throughout the whole world. As a result the Earth loses its gravity force. Our hero's [sic], Jake and Jane Jamjuice try to escape in their private space shuttle but are captured by invading lizard people from another galaxy who hadn't attacked earlier because the Earth's gravity made their ships go out of control.
So, having nothing else to do, Jake and Jane spend their life in meditation searching for the meaning of life.
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A great failure, for sure! On the back, whatever despairing elementary school teacher's class it was for wrote "A- Logic will prevail!"
So clearly Jake=Vero, Jane=Selenis, and invading lizard people=Core Sys. Not sure who the nuclear assault elephants are yet. Ooh maybe that's in episode 11! :o
Which hm isn't all that far off now. If I hold to my usual schedule I should finish all but the final page of episode 10 next week. This is the big one!
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| Eyebrows up, nostrils down | Oct 08, 2010 7:23 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Had an annoying headache today and didn't think I was gonna get more than one page done, but then I drank like a couple gallons of water (yes my life is this exciting!), the headache got better, and I got on some kind of roll; not only did page 141 there come out, and I think that's one of my best efforts on this comic so far (I do like close-ups, so that helped :), but I also fixed some eh body width issues with Selenis on pages 137 and 138. Man! I wish I could be "on" like this every day.
Although 141 was a bit of a battle; as I mentioned yesterday, sometimes trying to work straight from a storyboard image just doesn't work, and I relied on that method for both pages today, which I knew was pushing it, and sure enough, it didn't work with 141, so after a long struggle, I had to give up on that attempt and start over from scratch. Gar. Some day I will get better at this and waste less time.
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Since I did a Vero artwork comparison recently (ooh, which I posted in the episode's thread on the forum, but forgot to put into the news--well here it is), and since I've now done a low-light profile close-up of Selenis in several chapters now, I thought I'd make a little art comparison of her from that; here she is from episode 9, page 65 on the left, vs the more recent 10:139 on the right:
This is a trickier comparison since they're only about 1.5 episodes apart, but I've at least managed to get Selenis' facial features a little more distinct, as opposed to defaulting to the sort of Greek statue look she had in the older drawing; that also helps when trying to make her face a little more animated, I think. And I've learned a thing or two about eyebrows since the first version, where she...doesn't really have eyebrows, since I got uncertain about it and just left the vaguely eyebrow-shaped shadow on her lower forehead to cover for me. =P I think the eyelashes--and the hair in general, for that matter--have gotten a little better in the meantime, too. And production-wise, drawing the new profile took way less time; on the old one I spent ages just trying to get the bridge of her nose into a decent position, for instance. And finally, the more subtle shadow layers I use now give the newer drawing smoother shades.
But! Looking at the lower part of the older one, I notice that I streamlined the nostrils and lips into nothingness or close to nothingness in the new one, whereas I'd spent a lot of time--and fairly successfully, for me--working them out in the old one. So I should try to remember that: don't skimp on lips and nostrils, self! The old one *was* supposed to be lit more from the front than the new one, so they'd stand out more, but still, I definitely skimped a bit in the more recent drawing, particularly on the (nonexistent) nostil.
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| Story thoughts and a little of our man Flynn | Oct 07, 2010 6:25 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Hey I need to squeeze in some pimpage for the latest page of my Sunday fairy tale comic, "The Princess and the Giant." Hm I don't have a preview banner thingy for this particular page, buuuut let's see, okay you can get to it by clicking on this image I used as a reference:
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Today's A* page 139 was a case where I had an uncommonly decent looking thumbnail for it, so I started off by tracing over the storyboard, and went from there. A lot of times that doesn't work—saps the energy right out of it, which is one reason why I don't use the usual comic method of tracing over "pencils" with "inks"—but in this case I think it worked out. Here's the original storyboard:
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Found myself scribbling down notes for yet another little story I want to tell in my Sketchy daily sketch comic; that means I've already got two ready to go now—gotta wrap up the current "Tale of Death Boy," this burgeoning buffer makes me nervous! =P The story after Death Boy will be a comedy adventure, and then the one after that—if I stick to these notes—will be a sort of ghost/horror type of thing, which will kind of be a first for me. Maybe I thought of it because Halloween is coming up? Hm. I was actually kind of creeping myself out as I was writing it, but that doesn't mean much because I generally avoid scary stuff as much as possible. O_O
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| Supermassive Tron-Star | Oct 06, 2010 6:31 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:I gotta throw out a few thank-yous today, because I noticed I've been getting traffic from a few new sources lately: the comic list on the blog Daveawayfromhome, and the links page on Paul's Exciting Home Page. So thanks Dave, and thanks Paul, for linking to A*--it is much appreciated!
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The way Page 136 there turned out reminded me that a friend showed me the trailer for the upcoming "Tron Legacy" this weekend, a follow-up--in these days of rampant sequelization--to the 1982 original. Not that I was ever a huge Tron fan (although I did like playing our own version of "Tron Deadly Discs" with Frisbees, ie throwing them at each other; and I guess I *did* work for a company that made a recent Tron PC game), and not that this new one couldn't be good in its own right, but I thought it was pretty odd that they've mostly dropped one of the primary aesthetics of the original, namely the sort of grayish/negative rendering of skin; they seem to have settled for just overall grayish lighting instead.
Which is weird! Granted, the effect in the original is very artificial looking--but that was exactly the point. Maybe in these days of super high-res CG stuff, art directors are just too obsessed with achieving photo-realism, I dunno. Anyway for my money, the film from 28 years ago still looks cooler--but compare for yourself! Here's trailer, and trailer.
(And actually that wasn't the one my friend showed me; it was the LITERAL Tron Legacy Trailer Parody version. =P)
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| Pickin' out some A* art | Oct 05, 2010 9:14 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I added three pieces of enlarged or composite artwork from recent pages to the episode 10 gallery; you can get to 'em by clicking on these thumbnails:
  
I made them for my deviantART page, because that's kind of my collection of what I think have been the best drawings, and my dad and I are going to use it for choosing which pieces to include in the show of my prints that I'm going to be having at Ballard's swanky Caffè Fiore in less than a month. So if you have any particular favorites that you think I should go with, even ones that aren't on my dA page, now would be the time to let me know!
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Also I made some icons out of this latest page, 10:135, like this:
You can find the rest on the icons page.
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I'm going to try out doing my daily sketch comic, Sketchy, before I start in on A* each day; I don't know if you've noticed, but often my first A* panel of the day doesn't turn out quite as nice as the second one, so doing a Sketchy panel first will help me be a little more warmed up when I start in on A*. In theory... Tried it today and it still took me about four tries to come up with a layout I liked for today's page... For now though I'm going to blame that on lemon tart overdose. =p
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| Be very very quiet we're hunting peppers | Oct 02, 2010 6:27 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Still the silent treatment. Just one more page of that, promise!
Speaking of silent comics, I was so excited with posting other stuff this week that I forgot to toot the horn of my weekly and completely silent fairy tale, "The Princess and the Giant." Check out last weekend's update via this preview linky banner:
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On the "about" pages of my various comics, I've added links to their--in some cases new--entries on Piperka. "Piperka" is Bulgarian for "paprika," but the site is not about eastern European spices. No! It's a thingy you can use to keep track of when your favorite comics update, or something along those lines. I saw someone mention it last week, and imagine my joy when I checked through it and found that not only had some nice person already made entries for A* and The Princess and the Giant on it, but they each had nearly two dozen Piperka subscribers. (Here's A*'s Piperka entry, for instance.) Neat! So I got those jazzed up a bit with the help of Piperka's friendly webmaster, added entries for my three other comic series, and yay now they're all on Piperka and stuff!
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Ohh yeah Monday might be similar to today, ie a single very late comic. Yep, it's my nutty Monday party group, at it again. I think. Actually all I know so far is that I'm supposed to go to a "dilapidated death house" somewhere. Hm. Welll anyhow hopefully I'll survive and have a late page for you--the last one in this little silent stand-off in fact!--to start off next week.
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| Use your words | Oct 01, 2010 8:46 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Boy, all this silence is getting a little creepy. Hm... Looks like one of them will finally say something about Monday-ish.
A friend sent me a link to this Vimeo today, the result of a dude attaching a movie camera to a weather balloon so it would sit at just the right angle, and letting it go. Pretty neat!
But--since, with yesterday's rant about exoplanets, I seem to be on a YOU AREN'T USING ASTRONOMY WORDS RIGHT trip, which is funny because I'm in no way qualified to go on one, but it's fun...--the title is maybe a bit of deceptive advertising: "Homemade Spacecraft"--the "spacecraft" part, specifically, and it's clarified in the movie where he says stuff like "this thing was in space."
It wasn't, because it--and other weather balloons--only get into the lower stratosphere, about 20 miles up, and the Earth's atmosphere has wayyyy more stuff going on above that before you get clear of it and get into space proper. Heck, even the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station are still in the atmosphere, and they're 10 times higher--maybe they should be renamed "Thermosphere Shuttle" and "International Thermosphere Station"?
Well okay, that's a bit silly. Obviously at some point you have to make an arbitrary decision as to where "space" begins; still, calling the stratosphere "space" is a considerable stretch; maybe it does only have 1/1000th the amount of the planet's surface pressure, but that's still considerable in the scheme of things, actually, and heck, there are bacteria up there, and they aren't "space bacteria." The title is so silly, when I read it in the email I received, my first thought was that it was going to be referring to this, which...is also something of a stretch. ;)
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