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| Leadholders and the things they do | Nov 30, 2011 1:58 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Bonus art day! Erased attempted sketched layouts for today's page on both sides of the paper. This one on the back survived; it's an okay sketch I think, but it just wasn't quite right for the situation (like why would her head be tilted and apparently stuck in a jet stream?) ('Cause it's dramatic, that's why! =p):
Since last Monday I've been using a Staedtler Mars Technico 2mm Lead Holder to draw the comic before applying ink (much more graphite to erase!), and although this exact branded model isn't listed at the otherwise encyclopedic leadholder.com ("The Drafting Pencil Museum"), you can see hundreds of other leadholders from all over the world there, from those of the modern day to the very first (which was also the very first pencil of any kind! According to the leadholder.com history page, this first leadholder/pencil was "described in print by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner in 1567.") And you can also get all kinds of info about how they work, how they're made, how they're used, etc. Apparently the leadholder heyday was eh maybe in the '50's or so when they were in vast use in mechanical drafting; lately they've started to be replaced by thinner mechanical pencils and, of course, computers. Hopefully they will still be around in some form for eh the next 50 years or so, in case I ever need to replace mine. >_>
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| Unusual Perspectives | Nov 29, 2011 12:36 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Crazy perspective aside, I had some fun with a few ink washy things on this page. I'd erased the desk a lot (and the figure, but not as much as the darn desk which didn't seem to want to sit right and still technically isn't but for some reason I liked it that way so whatever), to the point that the paper under it was getting sort of worn and knobby—so when I painted in that area, it easily gave the kind of scumbled look you usually only get with a very dry brush. And then I painted a dark-to-light wash across the left side, but thought I'd see if I could get actual drops of water to run along it if I held the page up sideways; I got one—I had to load it up pretty heavy—and for a while it was cruising straight toward Selenis' head; I was thinking I was going to have to dam it off with my hand when it very conveniently stopped above the terminal, where I smushed it into a nice big gray area. Ink wash is fun sometimes!
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A friend tipped me off to a pretty cool time-lapse video of the Milky Way revolving over the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in the high Chilean desert, which came online earlier this year (I wrote about it last month); this video of some of the ALMA radio telescopes was made by José Francisco Salgado in June of 2010:
http://vimeo.com/19711309
If you like that video you might also like the second one in this news post from September, which is taken from another array in Chile—the Very Large Telescope ("VLT").
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Episode 14 will end next Monday, I think (toldja it was a short one)! So I gotta get started on the full final draft of the script for episode 15...which I think I'll do right after I'm done posting this.
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| A* Uncropped -- on deviantART | Nov 26, 2011 7:51 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I accidentally discovered a kinda cool effect working on this page. The last thing I did was add eyeballs (I was going to have the eyes be blank white but then that seemed like a little much), and the wash on the right one (her left) was a bit darker than I'd wanted, and I knew it had some pencil under it, so I thought I'd just give it a little rub with the eraser to see if that lightened it a bit; well, I hadn't waited long enough for the wash to dry, so it brought away part of the paper under the wash in this nifty iris-like pattern! Neato, thanks paper.
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If you haven't checked out A*'s deviantART page, well gosh! Not only is there lots and lots of stuff there--the pick of the litter from my artwork on multiple things, including A*--oh and here's that nice shiny button link to go there, so much more enticing than a boring old text link right?
So yeah not only is there loads of my better stuff there, I've lately been posting the uncropped versions of some of the more successful of the ink wash A* pages--so you can see the bits around the edges that don't fit into the online comic page; in some cases it's an extra, not inconsiderable amount of the image! For instance here's the uncropped version of episode 13, page 143, which I'm just hotlinking from deviantART heehee
Kind of fleshes it out a bit, right? So yeah go over to the A* deviantART page for more of those.
With the new paper I've been using this week, I can only leave tiny margins if I want to get as many A* pages out of each rather expensive paper sheet as I can, so the margins on the newer stuff won't be as big as on some of the old ones--BUT since I have to hand-cut them anyway, I'm cutting them so that it's close to even all around, and instead of having to draw a little framing rectangle on in pencil so I know where the actual visible web image will be, I just paint right to the edges of the paper. Eh okay that sounds like a load of gibberish; here's a photo of the latest page to show what I mean:
The cut paper size is about 17"x7.5", and the actual area that ends up fitting into the final online version of the A* page is 16"x6.75".
Also, I *finally* got a little hand mirror to keep by my drawing table, so I can check my own face for drawing reference instead of having to get up and run off to the bathroom mirror to remind myself, say, how lips look. :P Been using that since a couple pages ago, and it's already been pretty useful! I'd heard for ages how like Disney and other animators would all have little mirrors handy, to help capture expressions and stuff in their drawing, and I'd said to myself say that sounds like it couldn't hurt, I should get a little mirror one of these days, but I only just now finally did it, sheesh. It was 'cause I was reading this article on drawing characters by Lora Innes and it said pretty much exactly the same thing, and I was like okay I'm tired of hearing this over and over I'll just go get one stop nagging me already internet!
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| Hold still darn you | Nov 25, 2011 7:26 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:An animation of the later stages of pencil work for this page:
That final twist of the shoulders made the figure more dynamic, but it also complicated things for me later; in the inks I subconsciously carried the twist upward into the face, which turned slightly to follow the shoulders--but because this was subconscious (bad artist, bad!) the change wasn't made completely, particularly to the profile of the cheekbone and nose. Here's the first version I uploaded, before I realized that:
See the difference? Darn tricky subconscious grumble grumble...
I hope those of you who were into it had a nice day of turkey eating and such! I've almost got through all my leftovers already :d
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| Falling on, falling on the Moo-oon | Nov 24, 2011 5:17 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page::D
The pencils for this page, before they got all ink washed up:
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Tomorrow (well technically today since it's past midnight but nevermind that) is Turkey Day here in the U S of A, which means it's time to gather into our family groups and gorge ourselves even more than usual. I will try to hold off on the gorging enough that I can get back in a sufficiently conscious state to make a decent comic page, but I can make no guarantees of my success in that endeavor! You will, though, have this amusing compilation of mooninauts falling over to keep you company (darn that tricky low gravity!):
video on Youtube
The link to that lovely little film came to me by way of @racerabbit on Twitter. :)
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| Lensing a black hole, & two curvilinear heads | Nov 23, 2011 7:12 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:^ This page was another instance where I had the whole thing done, scanned, ready to post...and only then realized the head was placed wrong, and had to repaint it. And like the last time, the head came out way better the second time around anyway. So I should probably just redo my heads every time and the comic would be that much better! (And that much more delayed, yargh.)
This time around was different though in that, thanks to the darker pencil I'm working with now, I could tell as I was sketching the layout that the head wasn't *quite* right; but I made that critical art error: I was so fond of the way I'd drawn that part that I didn't want to erase it and redo it, and so fooled myself into leaving it by saying 'oh, it's pretty close, it'll work out.' I should know by now that something that just slightly irritates me in the early going will keep me from sleeping in the final version. ;P So I gotta be more ruthless with my eraser, and no matter how charming a piece of the drawing may be by itself, if it doesn't fit with the rest of the scene, it's gotta be obliterated immediately. No mercy!
Here's the original version of the head:
Just a bit too big--especially since this is a sort of tricky double perspective: it's an side-angled view of a flat screen, plus that screen is tilted away from us. Why I decide to try these things, I dunno. :P (And like a dummy I refuse to graph out my perspective, since well that's boring, and anyway one/two/three point perspective isn't really how our eyes see perspective anyway (see: curvilinear perspective)--so I prefer a less precise but more naturalistic eyeballed approach; although, I *did* use a ruler for the first time for drawing A* in this page! Look at me I'm a big boy now--actually I shouldn't have done it, on the same principles as why I don't graph perspective, but eh I was having a hard time getting the screen to feel straight, especially cutting behind the arm in the foreground.) I suppose the head was probably a bit too cartoony, too. And I did so love the delicate ink wash on it, sigh; the replacement head is straight black and white because the white ink used to cover up the old head is not waterproof, so you can't do any ink wash over it.
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An interesting article appeared on the ESA's Hubble site lately: Hubble Directly Observes the Disc Around a Black Hole. Because the target galaxy--or quasar, specifically--HE 1104-1805, is behind another one, [WKK93] G, the one in front bends light coming from the more distant one around it; so for instance in this Hubble view, the farther galaxy appears twice, since the foreground galaxy (the sorta blurry crescent in the middle) bends the light from the more distant one toward us along multiple trajectories:
image by NASA, ESA and J.A. Muñoz (University of Valencia) (source)
That's neat, but how the researchers were able to use the lensing galaxy as a sort of telescope was really tricky: as stars in the foreground galaxy passed in front of the light from the distant quasar, they bent individual beams of light from the quasar's central disc into Hubble's lens; by reading these individual beams, the team could define the size of the distant quasar's disc--the superheated material spiraling into the supermassive black hole at the center of the quasar--much more precisely than they could have from the blurrier, less precise view normally afforded of the quasar; they could read the color, and thus the temperature, and thus original nearness to the center of the supermassive black hole of each beam of light--the light is bluer/hotter near the center (until it crosses the event horizon of course, but an object that size would be impossible to see at this distance anyway, probably)--and ultimately determined that the central disc "is between four and eleven light-days across."
That's vague, but still way better than they could have done otherwise. The article doesn't say exactly (or even approximately) how far away HE 1104-1805 is thought to be, but there are mentions of scales in "billions of light years" so maybe it's something in that range, which is pretty far. Some of the data on this page might help the scientifically inclined make a more precise determination, but all those galactic coordinate systems and such are a bit beyond me!
Oh yeah, here's a diagram showing the "magnifying glass" effect I was trying to describe above, where precise beams of light from the quasar are deflected into Hubble's telescope lens by stars in the foreground galaxy:
image by NASA & ESA (source)
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| Super (cheesy?) '70s sci-fi: Starcrash! | Nov 22, 2011 6:04 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:^ First page done with my fancy new pencil and paper! The pencil is a German-made Staedtler Technico 2mm Lead Holder (kind of a mechanical pencil that holds whole pencil leads—I'm using "HB" leads, sort of a soft but not too soft variety), and the paper is French-made Arches Watercolor Paper, specifically the Bright White 140lb Hot Press variety; it's expensive stuff, but my local art store actually has a relatively great rate on it, and if I cut carefully I can get 4 A* pages out of a single 22"x30" sheet, so it only comes out to about $1/page, which ain't bad for what lots of people seem to think is the bestest paper in the world.
So far this stuff seems to be helping. The 2mm leads are softer and much thicker than the 0.5mm H leads I'd been using in my old mechanical pencil, and the paper is a lot tougher, so I can do a lot of sketching and erasing, and experimenting with light and dark at the pencil stage before having to commit to ink. It's a very good set-up for detailed modelling, actually, which could potentially get me wasting a lot of time since the pencils are mostly erased later anyway, replaced by ink. ;) For instance, in sketching out this page I really got into rendering the face seen in the television monitor, even though I knew I was going to cover it in black ink:
But what that did do was force me to get the rest of the head worked out pretty well, so maybe that wasn't such a waste of time after all.
The Arches paper has this really nice, almost cloth-like feel to it; it isn't the zippy tang I liked in the old acidic sketchpad I first started testing ink wash on, but it's quite a pleasurable surface to work on in its own way—so much nicer than the dead, spongy feel of that cheap Bristol I tried a while back (I'm still kind of curious to see what Strathmore's top-line Bristol is like, although it costs over $1/page, and I can't see it being better than the Arches stuff). And black ink on it has an almost velvety quality, ooh. And not least of all, it doesn't rumple up when it gets wet, which is quite handy when working with ink wash!
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But actually what I wanted to talk about today was
Starcrash! How have I never seen this movie? An Italian-produced spaghetti sci-fi, it was pumped out in 1979, ie as quickly as possible after the amazing success of 1977's Star Wars. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on particular movie-viewing needs), it was bad. Real bad. How bad? Well, the trailer starts out with "You are about to be hurled..."
video on Youtube
...and kind of goes down from there. Supposedly the movie also has some classic examples of really cheesy dialogue.
But it does have some things going for it, not least of which is Caroline Munro in the starring role. And check out her space helmet design!
Rather Selenis-like, eh, eh? And that dark 70's eyeliner and that slightly curled-to-the-left sneer she sports so effectively
are rather reminiscent of a certain galactic core bounty hunter as well, I'd say!
What else does the movie have? Well, there's also her sort of Darth Vaderish sidekick
although he actually has a sort of Yosemite Sam voice. Huh!
And finally, let's not overlook
Yes, The Hoff factor.
He even fights a stop-motion robot with a lightsaber.
I should probably see this movie sometime.
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| Episode 14, Moon maps, Saturn storms | Nov 19, 2011 10:32 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:So if you didn't notice from the episode title page ;), this is a flashback episode. Don't worry, it'll be brief--only about twelve pages (not counting the title page), in fact. Also pretty punchy. It might just be the best episode EVER.
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NASA and ASU just released Moon-wide high-resolution maps taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Here's a sample:
image by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/DLR/ASU (source)
You can get your own--at pretty much any size and angle--from ASU's LRO color-shaded relief map explorer.
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Photos of Saturn gathered by the Cassini probe have been put together to show the evolution of the longest-lasting storm ever recorded on the ringed gas giant:
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute (source)
That "great white spot" was a bit wider than Earth, and over its record 200-day lifespan has grown into a storm band that encircles Saturn. According to this article, only five other white storms like this have been observed on Saturn in the past 135 years.
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Today's page is the third of four attempts. The first took hours and hours, following the pencil, ink, wash process I've sort of been building up--it took all that time, I say, and came out badly. This has made me realize that a lot of the more fundamental problems I'm having with these pages come from the pencil stage; I've been working in a thin, hard, mechanical pencil lead, so light it's hard to see, and it can't be used to do shading very effectively to test things out; also, I'm on a relatively thin (70 lb) paper at the moment, and it probably couldn't take really heavy pencil and eraser work--not without risk of damage, anyway. It's also been "buckling" (also called "cockling"--anyway, warping in random waves that form distracting light and dark patterns across the scanned pages) a bit from the ink and wash layers I've been applying, AND unlike the fifteen year old acid-having pad I did my initial tests on, this new acid-free stuff doesn't really show the ink any brighter than the cheap (I now realize) Strathmore Bristol I was using earlier.
So it's time to upgrade my materials again, I think: I want to get one of those cool "lead holder" pencil-like things some of the pros use, so I can really throw graphite around heavily; I think the give and take, fighting it out that I used to do digitally with the lasso tool is going to have to take place at the pencil stage, because ink takes, but doesn't really give. :P So I need to pencil (and erase) heavily to work out a dynamic image, because all the inking in the world won't fix a dull pencil sketch. Gar!
And to do that I also need a sturdy paper, and ideally one that will buckle less from liquids, and show ink more brilliantly. I hear good things about this fancy French "Arches" (pronounced "arsh") paper, and if I get it in bulk packs at the local art supply store and cut the sheets carefully, it'll only cost a bit over $1 per A* page, which really isn't that bad for 140 lb bright white hot press top quality watercolor paper. Hopefully they have some in stock when I storm over there tomorrow. I'm not sure they have the lead holders, so I may just have to order that online; speaking of which, I've also got a couple more paper pads, these by Canson, another French company, on their way from dickblick.com; one is another 70 lb drawing pad, which I now realize probably won't work because it's too light for the washes I want to do, but the other is a 140 lb illustration pad, and it supposedly has a special surface treatment that minimizes bleeding or something and makes it great for pencil and pen and ink. So I'm kind of interested in seeing how that does when it gets here, although it does have an "ultra-smooth" surface that I'm not too sure I'll like.
Anyhoo, so this surviving version of today's page was freehanded without any pencil layout--fortunately it was a pretty simple subject, so it only came out a *little* funky looking. It does have a nice dynamic free ink look that most of my pages have lacked, though, so I need to find a way--hopefully by some of the means described above: heavier paper and pencil and attacking--to marry that with reasonably accurate layouts.
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| Ep. 13 ends; Sean Murphy ink demo | Nov 18, 2011 9:50 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:So ends episode 13! Episode 14 starts tomorrow! It will be a bit different than what we've been doing, and I think you'll dig it--and don't worry, we'll get back to what we've been doing pretty quickly, too. So yeah! More on that (and the first pages!) tomorrow.
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I think I've seen the direction in which I want to head with this ink wash business, and over the past few days I've decided I may as well go for it. Naturally, it's the most difficult direction I could think of for myself, and there will be lots of stumbling and bumbling and spilling of ink along the way, but I think fairly soon you'll start to see it paying off--unless I turn out to be just awful at it, which is always a possibility! But there is no reward for timidity in art, so--onward!
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If you wanna see someone with a definite bold inking style of their own, look no further than Sean Murphy. The dude is merciless with ink (over his own pencils, I should mention), and if you don't believe me check the many examples on his deviantART. For a day or so (this was around about page 161) I thought man, I'll do a ton of hard dynamic lines in a zingy linear style, just like Sean Murphy! As you can see, that did not last long--I just don't seem to work that way. Fortunately, though, Murphy does, and you can even see him at work with a brush and "crow quill" (what the comic industry seems to like calling dip pens) in this video, in which he's also talking about what he's doing as he inks a typically complicated and heavily lined background:
video on Youtube
One thing I noticed there was that most of the dips of his brush weren't in ink--they were in water; he does that to thin the ink and get a gray. That inspired me to abandon the little pre-mixed gradations of ink wash I'd made, and start trying to mix on the fly, just with a single jar of water like that; at first I had thought it would be impossible to get consistent tones, but then I realized that each dip, swish, or wipe in the water jar will lighten the subsequent wash from the brush down by an amount you can predict if you have a steady dipping method, and have been paying attention to the results of previous dips. And this way you can quickly make any gray you need, on the fly, and mix it into what you have on the page before it dries, so you can get some nice gradients. I've been practicing that on the past two pages, and I'm still inconsistent and not-so-smooth with the technique, but it should get better with each page, and eventually the pages will be much more organic than they had been before.
Oh! And here he is inking a head from scratch (no pencil)--such assured strokes!
Murphy also has a journal entry here about the value of original art--that he collects inked pages by other artists so that he can see their process; you see, one the secret of comic inkers is that inked pages are not actually all nice and smooth and black like they look in printed comics or even mostly online; in reality, there is a lot of dark gray, and little ridges and ripples and things that get eliminated during the scanning and Photoshopping process. So if you have someone's original inked page, you can see a lot more of how they did it. I thought that was an interesting point!
One artist whose pages Murphy collects is the late Jorge Zaffino; here's a decent gallery of some of Zaffino's work. Impressive stuff, and it's easy to see how it influenced Murphy's style.
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| Blind spot | Nov 17, 2011 8:07 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I screwed up on this page. And I kept screwing up, until...maybe it almost kinda worked out?
If this is the way it's gonna go...I'm gonna need a lot more ink.
And caffeine.
Did you know your eyes have a blind spot your brain tries to hide from you?
Where the optic nerve comes through the retina. Take the O-X test on the Wikipedia page and you'll see it.
Or rather, you won't.
Octopi do not have this problem.
image by Hans Hillewaert (source)
Speaking of ink.
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| How to draw old ads, with Andrew Loomis | Nov 16, 2011 6:57 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:It was a red letter day today for me: one lovely generous reader sent me a donation, and then imagine my excitement and thrill to find a mysterious package on my doorstep, which turned out to be Andrew Loomis' classic guide, (note that the cover behind this link may not technically be safe for work, although it is tremendously artistic) Figure Drawing for All It's Worth, which an equally lovely and generous reader purchased for me from A*'s Amazon Wish List. They didn't specifically say I could name them, so I guess I'd better let them remain anonymous for now (although if they let me I'll be more than happy to praise their name to the internet heavens :D), but I hope they see this and know that I am very grateful indeed.
I plunked down and started in on Loomis' book, and it appears to be just what I had hoped. First published in 1943, not only Loomis' wonderful illustrations (I posted some examples last Friday), but even his words seem to capture perfectly the spirit of that golden era in American illustration; addressing himself primarily to the young artist wishing to make marketable art—probably for a beginning career in advertising illustration, as Loomis himself started out; the book's dedication is in fact "to the young men and women of the United States who have turned to the drawing of the human figure as a means of livelihood"—Loomis exhorts the reader to strive to achieve attractive, idealized figures, in language that is inspiring and lofty, yet sounding firmly rooted in experience (he was "advised to go back home" after two week in art school) and practicality. Here's one of a number of striking passages from the introduction, for instance:
| As a student I thought there was a formula of some kind that I would get hold of somewhere, and thereby become an artist. There is a formula, but it has not been in books. It is really plain old courage, standing on one's own feet, and forever seeking enlightenment; courage to develop your way, but learning from the other fellow; experimentation with your own ideas, observing for yourself, a rigid discipline of doing over that which you can improve. I have never found a book that stressed the importance of myself as the caretaker of my ability, of staying healthy mentally and physically, or that gave me an inkling that my courage might be strained to the utmost. Perhaps that is not the way to write books, but I can see no harm in the author realizing that he is dealing with personalities, and that there is something more important than technique. In art we are dealing with something far removed from a cold science, where the human element is everything. |
Toward the end of the introduction he notes that "I have hired and paid the best models I could find, knowing that the limited funds of the average young artist would not permit that" (indeed, my mother teased me about a recent A* page, asking if I was getting some young woman in the neighborhood to pose for me—"if only!" was the gist of my response), and he really has packed the later parts of the book with a vast number of his own excellent illustrations by way of example of the things he goes on to discuss in detail. It was primarily that classic "idealized" figure technique that drew me to the book—because it's one thing to learn proportions and anatomy, but another to know how to render them with a flair and economy of line that can separate the beautiful from the grotesque.
The "idealized" figure is mentioned very frequently in the early part of the book that I have read—some detailed illustrations of proportion, for instance, directly comparing the "dumpy" old realistic proportions (7.5 heads high—the figure here is a balding older man :p) with the idealized proportions (8 heads high) of the illustrator's figures, as well as those of the contemporary fashion industry (8.5 heads) and of "heroic" figures, such as mythical gods (9 heads). I'm not too worried about those and the perspective sections—if I can't eyeball it, I don't wanna draw it, says I ;)—but the veritable need, more or less taken for granted by Loomis—to produce this "idealized" figure is remarkable. And if you think about it, that's kind of how advertising was, back in the day; for instance, here are some old adverts a relative just happened to forward to me today (specifically for their quaint language or products, but never mind that :P):
[Update 3/22/16 - My old external image host seems to have lost these pictures, and I don't seem to have stored local backups >_<; my brief notes say they were "hoover," "blatz," and "tapeworms" : o]
Check out those idealized illustrated figures!
Of course, that job market for illustrators, so vital and vibrant in Loomis' day, has pretty much vanished over oh the past fifty years or so. And you sure as heck don't get figure drawing in fine art like you did oh say before the abstract expressionists and impressionists kind of put an end to that. Blame it all on the camera, I suppose. Really the only commercial place figure drawing *has* stayed alive to a significant degree, if you think about it—well, aside from concept art, maybe—is in comics. And while I do think it is good that comic art, now more than ever perhaps, has an appreciation for being able to draw very non-ideal figures, it certainly doesn't hurt to be able to do idealized ones as well.
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| Space Pirates, Martian Trailer, new brush | Nov 15, 2011 5:12 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's a silly thing I did of a whimsical "Space Pirate Selenis" over the weekend:
She *is* kind of a space pirate, of course (which is to say, she does sometimes engage in piracy, in space), but normally she wouldn't dress or pose like that. But maybe she would if she hung out on Twitter, because that's where this came from.
There's a smaller version in the gallery that may be handier for whatever you might need one for.
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Speaking of space pirates, I came across a webcomic called Pirates of Mars that has some really nice art--a sort of casual elegance in the black lines and subtly gradated electronic grays of which I am oh so jealous. It seems to update somewhat sporadically but hopefully it'll keep the installments coming.
And in their blog I noticed that there's a trailer for Disney's upcoming "John Carter of Mars," an adaptation of one or more of the classic pulp science fiction books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It, eh... Well, it's early yet, and I bet they'll have a more coherent and interesting one closer to the movie's release.
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I got a new brush today! Which is kind of why I went a little crazy with the little black lines in today's page. But it's such a nice brush! It's a Winsor & Newton Series 7, size 3, and I'm replacing the Da Vinci Maestro size 3 I'd been using, because it was getting a little wacky--forming two points rather than one, for instance. It probably wasn't the Maestro's fault, as I didn't really know how to take care of it when I first started using it, and (at the recommendation of a clerk at the art supply store, and Doug TenNapel) I was bathing and pomading it in this snake-oil-looking stuff
which was fun, but probably more chemical treatment than the sable bristles really needed--from now on I'll stick with warm water and gentle hand soap. So hopefully the W&N will stay nice and pointy yet silky soft as it was today for a good long while. It's sort of the classic cartoonist's brush--although twice as expensive as the Maestro, and no better according to the store clerks and various internet sources--and it does seem nicer and better at carrying ink than the Maestro was, even at the beginning.
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| A*'s Amazon Wish List! *hint hint* >_> | Nov 12, 2011 9:50 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The Internet got me looking through some really neat drawing reference books on Amazon recently—I mean, they are really neat. I suppose I can't really afford to go around buying books willy-nilly, though, so I've settled for lusting after them and putting them in the brand new *drumroll*
A* Amazon Wish List!
Woo! The link to that can also be found on the "store" and "about" pages, just in case you don't take a hint easily. >_> *cough* ANYWAY, there are three things on there right now, and why don't I talk about why they're there? Okay, I will!
Gary Martin's The Art Of Comic-Book Inking (2nd Edition)
I'd been following Gary Martin on deviantART for some time without particularly knowing his real name or that he has a book out under that name about inking, or that it is in fact one of THE books on inking, and he is kind of a big deal. Apparently this is the case! I've been following him because while his inking style is the classic neat, precise, bold comic book style that is nothing like I can muster, it is also...the classic style that is nothing like I can muster, and I should probably sort of try to rectify that, if just to improve my technical ability. One thing that sounds neat about this book of his is that he'll take a pencil drawing by a well-known artist, then have say three well-known inkers ink their own version of it, and show them all to you so you can see how different approaches work out. That sounds like a useful kind of thing for someone like me—who's just trying to learn to ink—to see!
Klaus Jansen's The DC Comics Guide to Inking Comics
Jansen was the inker on some of my favorite 90's-or-whatever comic book work by Frank Miller, and lo-and-behold, he's written a book about inking, too! Stylistically, he's much closer to something like what I would like to be able to do. And according to the preview pages on Amazon, it's filled with some really basic but really practical stuff too that other people might not have thought to put in a book, like what to put your ink in and where to keep it as you're working.
Andrew Loomis' Figure Drawing for All It's Worth
If we really want to talk about classic drawing styles, illustrator Andrew Loomis (1892–1959)...did kind of write the book on it, at least one of the well-known ones, and at least when it comes drawing people. Check the video review on the Amazon listing to see the amazing reference drawings the book is just packed to the gills with (a lot of them are of nude models, so maybe don't watch it at work!). Man! Here are some other examples of his work I culled from the intro-nets:
 
Pure class! So that's the current wish-list. Everything on that list will be stuff that will help me make A* better!
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Oh that Russian space program! They've got another problem: this time, their probe intended for the Martian moon Phobos, "Phobos-Grunt" ("Phobos Ground"), has got stuck in Earth orbit; apparently its guidance system failed before it could point itself toward the Red Planet. They're still hoping to save it, but chances seem slim for Grunt!
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This article talks about an announcement of the discovery of what are thought to be, more or less, a couple primordial gas clouds—clouds of hydrogen and deuterium, without any of the heavier stuff that would have formed later in stars; such clouds are thought to date from perhaps 2 billion years after the Big Bang. The article is a bit low on detail and thus not all that convincing I guess, but still an interesting perspective; it also mentions a sorta related study that has concluded that the early stars—the first generation of stars that formed from such pure primordial clouds—were smaller than scientists had thought: maybe ten times the size of the Sun, rather than hundreds of times.
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| Bienfang Raritan <3<3<3 & bonus art | Nov 11, 2011 12:11 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:After resisting the urge for years, I caved in today and put grotesquely large, colorful social networking buttons on the site, just above this news article. ^^ Yep! I've been having more and more fun of late chatting with people on A*'s Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and deviantART pages lately, and now I want...more! Yarm! So click the big colorful buttons which in theory you will not be able to resist, and come join me and the people who were perceptive enough to notice the tiny, black and white buttons that have been there for a while under the comics--or maybe they even saw the text (what's that?) links on the "about" page! Anyway now there are buttons we can't avoid looking at, grrrrrreat. Click click!
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The new drawing paper came today and holy wow! It is amazing. It is Bienfang Raritan drawing paper, and compared to the Strathmore Bristol I'd been using, it is light as a feather, white as snow, toothy as a chihuahua, and crisp as fresh potato chips. Working on Bristol, with its hard, absorbent surface for the past number of weeks, I'd started to think I'd already worn out my brush, and/or that I'd never be anything but a very clumsy inker, as I just couldn't seem to get much done in the way of precision work. But today with the Raritan I found myself diving into details, joyfully painting little tiny things with the single longest bristle of my brush. The bristles move friskily across this paper's surface, even if there's just one of them carrying the load, and, well...it's good! :D Painting on this stuff is much more fun than on the Bristol, the results are much more crisp and vibrant (whiter whites, and blacker, more even blacks), and golly if I don't just <3 it to death! Yes I am marrying Raritan this weekend in a small private ceremony. >_>
Okay maybe John Q LAW won't allow that, but anyway I did manage to do an extra bonus drawing for you today--my practice with the new pad of paper:
(There's a smaller version in the episode 13 gallery here if you want to zoom out a bit.)
I also tried one of my sea sponges for the first time, rather soaking it in white ink to see if I could squeeze out some interesting star effect. It kinda worked! Very Kirby Krackle-ish, in fact, although that wasn't quite what I'd intended--methinks I need a lighter touch with the delicate sponge! Still it looks kind of neat, I suppose, and I'll have to try some more in the future.
Also I'm thinking I may ditch that big plate collar thingy on Selenis' space suit, it kind of just gets in the way. :P
Oh but the paper! As I was saying it's very white, as I think you can see--none of the slightly yellow tinge the "vellum" Bristol had, and far whiter than my 15-year-old+ pad of Raritan I've had since my art college days--I guess that thing really *did* yellow quite a bit in the intervening decade and a half. =o Fortunately the manufacturers seem to have kept the good--the strong, lively surface--and fixed the bad, as the modern Raritan is now acid-free, which means it shouldn't yellow in our lifetimes (ah, mortality!). It doesn't come in 11x17" size like the Bristol did, which also happens to be what fits in my scanner, so the pages I'm painting on are now HAND CUT--well at least on or three two sides :p--from larger 18x24" sheets; I get two pages out of one sheet, how's that for economy? :)
And speaking of the manufacturers, it appears that Bienfang changed owners since 15 years ago, as the new pad has the "Speedball" logo on it; their site (that link above) doesn't say exactly when they acquired Bienfang, but anyway some time in the past 15 years, I guess. Speedball seem to be best known for their black India ink, and their dip pens: back in 1915 it was when Seattle (:D) sign letterer Ross F. George took his new pen design to the C. Howard Hunt Pen Company in Camden, New Jersey, and the soon-to-be-famed "Speedball" pen was born. Speedball became independent from the parent Hunt company in 1997.
The excitement! And according to their site, "Sebastian Bienfang founded the Bienfang Paper Company in a loft in New York City" in 1926, importing fine papers for the American market. I wonder if the "Raritan" came from somewhere in particular, originally. Awesome paper country, I guess!
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| Damn you, Walt Simonson; also, nanotubes | Nov 10, 2011 9:06 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I blame this page on Walt Simonson, because after ripping through the extensive art galleries on his Facebook page this evening, I sat down to draw this page, and the pencil drawing came out kind of Walt Simonsony--with a certain scribblinear zest, I mean. And I thought "man, drawing like Walt Simonson is fast and easy, this page is gonna be a breeze!" O fool! Because at least half the trick of drawing like Walt Simonson must be in inking like Walt Simonson, and I wasn't even clever (or stupid?) enough to try that; I just set about inking it my own way, and of course ran into well-deserved difficulties.
I mean jeez! Just look how he arcs these crazy stylish lines across with a brush pen here:
video on Youtube
Phew. Anyway, I got turned on to his art way back in the days of his legendary run on Marvel's "Thor," and the particularly inspiring thing about his Facebook galleries is that he's posted a lot of his old stuff--like, just outta high school stuff, or even earlier--and some of it is actually fairly non-fantastic. So you mean a Walt Simonson isn't born fully styled and mature from the head of Zeus? Well maybe, but apparently just practicing a lot helps, too. So that's encouraging and should give the rest of us some hope.
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NASA just announced that they have developed an ultra-black material made of carbon nanotubes, which they describe as "tiny hollow tubes made of pure carbon about 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair." In this material, the tubes stand on end "like a shag rug"--as you can see around the rim of the cutaway section here
image by Stephanie Getty, NASA Goddard (source)
--and incoming light bounces down their sides, getting trapped and absorbed before it can escape. This allows the material to absorb about 99% of incoming light; even the best black paints, by comparison, only absorb about 90% of the light hitting them, and inside a telescope, where image quality depends greatly on minimizing excess light bouncing around, this nanotube material, in replacing the black paint with which telescope insides are usually coated, could significantly enhance the telescope's image refining ability.
The material is also lighter and better at radiating heat away than other black coatings used in spaceflight, and thus could prove useful in a variety of space applications.
Keen! And now if NASA would develop it into a nice ultra-black ink for oh say artists trying to paint things like black holes, that would be super, too. :D
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| A*'s Google+ page, inking photos, nuke Mars | Nov 09, 2011 9:17 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I think I've figured out a couple useful techniques in this whole ink wash thing in the past few days:
- Drop straight water on very dark ink or wash and let it run a bit for a very organic kind of gradient effect
- Use black lines only selectively, in areas where you need a really sharp contrast, and it will leave the forms open to light and give a much more natural, less cartoony look
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Google just enabled fan page thingies on their Google+ social networking site, so I had to go ahead and make pages on G+ for my various comic series, including A*. If you use Google+, click on these button thingies to go to the pages, then add them to one of your circles to get updates from my comics right in your G+ stream!
    
Unless you look like some kind of insane spambot, I'm pretty good about circling back, so yes I'm saying you can probably get some easy follows out of me. >_> And if you need a sixth, there's always my personal G+, too!
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For some reason I figured I'd take a photo of today's page midway through--this is after the pure ink (plus some straight water on that ink in parts) phase, before hitting it with my prepared washes of varying degrees of gray:
And the final version from sort of the same perspective, for comparison:
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This recent Reuters article says that NASA's got their new Mars rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, in Florida in preparation for its November 25th lift-off for the red planet aboard an Atlas 5 rocket. After landing on Mars in August of next year, the MSL's rover, Curiosity, which is five times the size of its predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity, will truck around the 154-km-wide Gale Crater--which has an unusually large 5 km high central peak--for a year or so, examining the environment in a quest to determine whether or not Mars was ever suitable to hosting microbial life. Unlike the earlier rovers, Curiosity has an internal, plutonium-decay power source, the Boeing-built Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, so it can't go dead if buried in dust like the solar-powered Spirit. The MMRTG has a power output over four times greater (2.5 kilowatt hours/day) than the solar panels of the earlier rovers.
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| G+, Webcomic Asylum interview, green fire | Nov 08, 2011 7:28 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:This page got a little wild. =)
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Google+ just rolled out their fan page thingies, so instead of just circling my personal G+ account--or in addition to, I should say! :D--you can now befriend the official A* Google+ page.
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There's a new interview with me about A* at Webcomic Asylum, a webcomic review blog. The interviewer is a webcomic author himself, so he knows how to get right down to it and ask the right questions! It's a good quick read, yet we manage to talk about storytelling, working in black and white, and oh so many wonderful things.
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Last week China launched Shenzou-8 toward their budding Tiangong-1 space station; the Shenzou capsules sort of follow the classic Soviet Soyuz design, but a bit larger; the name means "Divine Craft" or something like that. This article about the launch has the video feed of the launch, from cameras attached to the craft. Hm well I guess I'll just embed it here, even if YouTube videos do sorta slow the page display down a bit:
video on Youtube
What I like about the video is the bright green flame of the Long March 2F rocket carrying it (that model is according to this article; I suppose the green tint might (I don't know!) be due to the fuel it's burning, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine ("UDMH"), a derivative of the more commonly used hydrazine. UDMH is more stable than hydrazine, especially at high temperatures, and "is used in many European, Russian, Indian, and Chinese rocket designs." Anyway, whatever it's due to, the green flame is keen.
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Here's a sharper version of part of my original rejected version of page 141 of this episode:
It was a pretty good rendering of the character, by my standards, but the pose was just too weirdly robotic; also, the perspective in the right side of the page was way too awful to show you (and in retrospect, revealing the knife rack there might have been too much foreshadowing anyhoo). For future reference, you'll find this picture in the episode 13 gallery, which is accessible from the site's "episodes" page in the top menu.
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| Right into the Danger Zone | Nov 05, 2011 9:01 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Su-par bonus! Initial sketch on the back of today's page, which wasn't quite right so I turned the page over and tried again:
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Apparently, an aircraft-carrier-sized ("1,300-foot-wide") asteroid, 2005 YU55, will pass about 85% of the distance to the Moon from Earth on Tuesday. "The last time an asteroid flew this close to Earth was in 1976" and "the next time won't be until 2028." Various telescopes will be taking lots of pictures, since usually you need a space ship to see an asteroid this close up.
What we really need though is for some hotshot rocket jockey to fly out and land on it while blasting Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone. What hero will take up this quest??
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There's this nifty-sounding new Lytro camera that captures a light field of its viewing area by means of plenoptic camera micro lenses, which is to say that it actually consists of tons of tiny little cameras, and when a computer compares their viewpoints, it can triangulate the distances to the objects photographed and reconstruct the scene in 3D, which allows for nifty tricks like photos that can be refocused after they've been taken, kinda; you can play with some of those in the gallery there.
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| Hair, Moon photos, & a Stumble mystery | Nov 04, 2011 7:42 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I tweaked my macro for making the giant subscriber preview versions of these recent hand-painted A* pages to get them a bit sharper. Did you notice? :D I mean, they were already pretty sharp, but now they're even a sharper--appropriate given the content of today's page, I suppose!
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And I had to rescan it because a big ol' hair managed to get in the scanner bed on the first attempt. And then it was still there after I had cleared the scanning bed, dusted it off, and put the painting back in for a second scan! Dar! So I finally wiped the whole thing down with cleaning solution--which I guess I need to do more often; check out the difference between uncleaned and cleaned
--and the third time was the hairless charm. Phew. Hm I guess I'd also better clean my monitor so I can tell the difference between dust on the screen and dust in the scan. 8o
I already let one page go by with a hair in it--did you spot that one? Well okay fine, it was this one. See if you can spot the hair! I kept that one because I wasn't all that fond of the painting anyway I suppose and besides, the hair was pretty small. Today's was bigger and naughtier, though! Perhaps I should vacuum one of these days. =p
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I noticed a nifty arrangement of Moon and clouds in a little midnight jaunt around the neighborhood to get my circulation going, and raced inside to get my new little digital camera (which I use for taking photos of the actual A* paintings, like today's) to try to photograph it! I don't have a tripod (not even a Martian one) or special lens or anything, and just left the settings on automatic, to see if it could get anything. Well, it did okay I suppose:
And another one, after the clouds had almost passed underneath:
Here was the uncropped view of that second one:
And if you raise the levels a bit on that in Photoshop:
The Moon is smoking! Oooh.
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I saw an interesting website address among recent referrers to A*, namely "wwwstumbleupon.com." I've seen that one in the past, too. Now, if there was a dot between the "www" and the "stumbleupon.com," that would be the popular social networking site, which would mean that some hardy readers had recently "stumbled" A*, which gets other Stumblers to stumble this way as well, which is neat. But without that dot, it's just a weird URL, and *not* the social networking site. So why would it be sending me traffic? What does it MEEEEEEEEEAN?
Well I finally decided to see if I could Google up an answer, and behold and lo, it appears that the mystery site is the result of a typo in StumbleUpon's Android app. Huh! Well that's good to know. And I guess it means that people are enjoying A* on their phones, which is also good to know--that the comic is still legible and interesting in that format, I mean.
So, cool! And thanks to whoever stumbled A*. :D
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| To Bristol or Not to Bristol | Nov 03, 2011 6:28 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I think I got out of that painting funk I was in for the previous several days, and if I did, I might owe a good deal of that to the inspiration I got earlier today when I found the work of Gabriel Hardman, a professional comic book artist. Hardman— Well, just look at what he does in ink and ink wash. What I like about his inking is the brushy quality he can bring to it, which makes it capable of communicating so much more than the hard smooth lines with which most professional inkers seem to content themselves. And that ink wash—jeepers! Stunning, evocative, effortless, and I wish I knew how he's able to go from pitch black so smoothly into dark gray, seemingly in one stroke. Man.
So that made a big impression, and I think brought me back to a more productive way of thinking about this ink wash business I was foundering in for the past few days. Thank you, Mr. Hardman!
And before that, last night, I was trying to think of ways I could get myself back on track, and one easy train of thought led to the materials I've been using—particularly, the paper. It's been this stuff, Strathmore's "vellum" Bristol board (Bristol board is a heavy, relatively stiff multi-layered type of paper with a fairly smooth finish):
If you look closely at the packaging there you'll notice that the "vellum" type says it's for dry media, whereas the "smooth" is also for wet stuff like ink. I tried the smooth first—in this test painting—but it didn't seem to allow the brush to spread the ink quite as densely and evenly as the slightly rougher "vellum" surface.
So I've been using the vellum for these painted A* pages (hm and according to Wikipedia, Bristol is what comic book artists traditionally use), but comparing the results last night with the old drawing pad I did most of my test paintings in—this one, for instance—I noticed that the ink had come out blacker, glossier, and smoother on that toothier old drawing pad paper than it has been doing on these fancy Bristol boards. And the rougher yet slicker surface of the drawing pad paper is an altogether friskier environment for the brush and ink, as I recall; the Bristol, by comparison, really sucks the ink in, making for slower going and a duller dried appearance. Oh, and the drawing pad paper warped less when wet with wash.
That drawing paper is from an at least fifteen-year-old (I used it as an undergraduate art student in college :P) pad of Bienfang Raritan Drawing Paper; it's old enough that it's from back before the current "acid-free" and "archival" craze, and I think it's yellowed slightly (by which I mean, it's slightly yellow, and I think more so than it was originally, although I can't say I remember its original color with all that much clarity). So I was a little worried that it might not be made anymore, but it is:
Acid-free now, too. I don't think I saw it at my local Daniel Smith art supply superstore, so I ordered some off the internet, and am looking forward to it arriving possibly some time next week. It doesn't come in 11x17" sheets (the size my scanner can handle) like Strathmore's Bristol did; the closest it comes in is 18x24", which is way bigger than I can fit in the scanner—but so big that I can cut one sheet in half and make two pages out of it, with a little trimming. :D I suspect it *isn't* quite as white as the Bristol, which means that the white ink I've sometimes used on the Bristol to cover over a mistake in black ink will stand out rather than blending in with the paper—you can see I sort of used it as a corrective *and* highlighter in that test painting.
So that could be interesting. Anyway, I think the zestier surface will help me keep a little more pizzazz in the pages, which *some* of the Bristol pages have been lacking a little.
Incidentally, the ink wash pages I've been happiest with so far are...hm well probably today's, and 140, 142, 143, and 146. How about you?
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| Another fine day in Woking | Nov 02, 2011 5:36 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Although the layout is almost identical to yesterday's page, I'm a little happier with this one stylistically--even if the drafting of the face is a bit off, as I notice now to my annoyance. Oh well gosh. Maybe one of these days I'll get it all right. And the style still isn't quite where I want to be, but it's closer. Thank you all for your patience as I sort out this whole painting business.
(EDIT: Hm there's still something awfully off about these last few pages. I suppose I just didn't get the composition and lighting right at all. And this is sort of a problem since I can't really easily sketch out lighting in pencil ahead of time. Hum. HMMM. Maybe I'd better go back to thumbnailing them in GIMP first, so I can try some black and white arrangements out quickly.)
I was talking yesterday about a free audiobook I didn't like, so I thought I should at least mention one I did, which is The War of the Worlds by H. G. ("Herbert George") Wells. Benefiting from about 28 years of additional scientific progress (it was published in 1898) over Verne's lunar effort, the science is much more contemporary, and Wells doesn't make the mistake Verne did of trying to use his work to "prove" theories that weren't known to a certainty at the time, which further dated Verne's work.
This audiobook recording is also a particularly good reading: the reader really captures the horror and suspense felt by the characters caught in the midst of an alien invasion. The book as a whole is, in fact, largely a study of human reactions under extreme upheaval, with a good deal of subtle parody directed at our own foolishness, civilized or savage. It's a tremendous book, with beautiful language, and I heartily recommend checking it out of you haven't read it before--or even if you have (it had been a long time for me), I'd say listening to this reader's interpretation is still time well spent.
And hey let's get a picture in here. The WotW Wikipedia entry has a nifty photo of a modern sculpture of a Martian invasion tripod, placed in Woking, Surrey, England--a small town outside London, where much of the initial invasion and story takes place:
image by Warofdreams (source)
The Martians are coming! The Martians are coming! Watch out for their heat rays! =o
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| Around the Moon and a marginal effort | Nov 01, 2011 3:21 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:While drawing this today, I finished listening to the free audiobook version of Jules Verne's "Around the Moon"; and it was something of a relief, as it was not a great reading--the chapters were handled by a committee of readers who seem to have been selected for their singularly robotic reading style. :P Also, the 1870 work of science fiction has not aged particularly well; the text is primarily devoted to "scientific" discussions among two of the three passengers of a "projectile" shot to the Moon from a giant Earth-mounted gun, in which they spend a great deal of time proving to themselves the astrophysical theories of the day--seemed to me that Verne was showing off his education here--many of which (aether, for instance) are ludicrously outdated by current standards, so the whole is rather unintentionally comedic than mind-blowing as it might have been to contemporary readers, although I can't help but think that even many readers back in the day would have found the going rather dry; Verne blows through more than his fair share of "just sos" and other such expressions of nineteenth century pomposity. (Although this could have been at least partially the fault of the English translator, whoever it was.)
So anyway the reason I'm mentioning it is because in its somewhat deleterious quaintness, it manages to use words like "selenological" and "sidereal" quite a bit more than anyone would have had a right to expect--and it just so happens those words share the same roots (for "moon" and "stars," respectively) as the two names by which our bounty hunting anti-heroine calls herself in this episode of A*. So huzzah for Verne--and/or his translator. And hopefully this is an indication that A* will be as erringly amusing to readers 140 years from now as "Around the Moon" is to us. =P
And if this A* page seems oddly cropped to you, that's because it is; after--of course :P--having drawn and painted and scanned and prepared the whole thing, I found myself rather disgusted with the thickish, totemic style I seem to have fallen into over the past few pages, and hauling the whole thing upward to reveal the uneven, foamy bottom in what had been the lower margin at least stirred things up a bit. Here it is in its original cropping. Gar. Gotta get back to something better tomorrow. >_<
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