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| MESSENGER finds water ice at Mercury's poles | Nov 30, 2012 5:56 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The big news today was NASA's announcement that their MESSENGER probe has found pretty convincing evidence for the presence of water ice on Mercury. Initially this may sound surprising, given that the planet closest to the Sun can boast daylight surface temperatures of 800 degrees Farenheit, but without an atmosphere it can get down to below -300 F in the shade, and, much like on the Moon, there are shadowy crater areas at the poles of Mercury into which the Sun never reaches. MESSENGER scanned those areas with laser pulses (to create accurate 3D maps of the terrain), measured infrared reflections from them, and checked their composition using neutron spectroscopy, all of which told them that these low crater interiors near the poles have shiny spots and high hydrogen content, which almost certainly indicated the presence of water ice:
image by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington/National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, Arecibo Observatory (source)
On other worlds--like Mars and the Moon--the presence of water ice is interesting as it raises the possibilities of alien life on the planet, and human colonization; in Mercury's severe environment both would still be pretty iffy, I guess. Still, it's a start!
That neutron spectroscopy technique was used in 1998 by the Lunar Prospector to help find water ice on the poles of the Moon. It involves collecting and measuring neutrons and gamma rays coming from the target, in this case craters on Mercury's poles. The neutrons and gamma rays are released from the surface by energetic cosmic ray impacts; since different elements emit gamma rays of different energy levels, their wavelength and number can indicate the presence and abundance of particular elements: in this case, gamma rays of the wavelength emitted by hydrogen were detected coming from those craters in fairly large numbers. And since free neutrons lose more energy and speed when they collide with smaller atomic nuclei than they do when they collide with larger atomic nuclei, the relatively low speed of incoming neutrons also indicates that they were bouncing off very light atoms--and hydrogen, abundant in water ice, is the lightest you can get.
So there you go! Large patches of this probable water ice are covered by a darker, less reflective substance, and it is thought that this is likely to be organic material deposited there by asteroids and comets--which would also be the likely source of the water ice itself.
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Some stages in the drawing of today's A* page:
It was fun to get a bit loose with the overall composition--that also seems to help open up possibilities for making an interesting mix of black and white areas when it comes to inking the thing. Also I'm having way more fun drawing the Major than I thought I would. :)
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| Google's hidden reverse image search! | Nov 29, 2012 5:19 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Did you know that Google has a reverse image search? I didn't! But if you go to images.google.com and, instead of typing some image keywords to search for in the search bar, drag an image from a folder on your computer into the search bar, a "search by image" drop box appears over it, and Google will try to find pages on the web that have that image. Neat!
Heretofore the only reverse image search I'd really known about was TinEye, which has sometimes been useful but also has sometimes not been so useful. So it's nice to know there's another resource for looking up the source of specific images like that.
This handy internet tip was pointed out on The Webcomic List forum by Zoe Robinson of the long-running webcomics All Over The House and The Life of Nob T. Mouse.
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Some process points in the making of today's A* page:
Those intermediate inking stages before big black fills always look nice somehow. I used to dread having to do scenes in light-background areas, but now I'm rather looking forward to it. Gotta work on ways to utilize that stage better in dark areas, too; I left the fills away from the lines in a few places in this page--wanted to try more but somehow it didn't quite seem like the thing for this particular image. Hm hm hm... Maybe strokey fills instead of solid fills... I'll keep working on this. :P
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| "Artist grade" watercolor test | Nov 28, 2012 3:37 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Did a little test with the Winsor & Newton "artist grade" watercolors that arrived in the mail recently:
(That's in the episode 18 gallery, where the original or prints can be purchased.)
I'd previously tried W&N's "Cotman" mid-grade watercolors, which were quite disappointing--weak and muddy. These "artist grade" ones are their top-of-the-line pigments, and boy, they really are much more vibrant than the Cotman line. I'm quite happy with the pink and the purple; the other colors are a bit off from what I'd like--the blue's a bit too reddish, the red's a bit too yellowish, and the green's a bit too bluish--so I've ordered slightly different shades for those, and I'll hafta do another test once they arrive. Hopefully though I'm actually closing in on a useful color palette.
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Here's an intermediate state in the inking of today's A* page:
Bit happier with how I was able to keep things looser today, although I think the drawing ended up a bit more cartoony than I'd prefer to be doing. And hm, you know sometimes I think there's more energy when I let the black fills remain isolated, rather than carefully filling them in all the way to the lines--leaving that gap there kind of gives the thing a crackling energy that gets lost when I try to tidy everything up. Well, back to the drawing board--tomorrow!
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| Obsessing over Gruau | Nov 27, 2012 4:43 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I went on a big René Gruau kick on Tumblr today, which probably has something to do with why today's page came out like it did. Gruau (1909-2004) is primarily known for his fashion illustrations for Christian Dior, beginning shortly after the end of the second world war, whose simple, bold lines and colors apparently brought about something of a revolution in illustration in general. Here is just a tiny example
(source)
and you can find other examples on my Tumblr, like here and here and here.
Notice also his signature! "G*" is having quite an influence on A*.
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Although I have to be careful with it, because like today for instance I started with a nice loose pencil sketch but then somehow got obsessed with making big smooth shapes with the ink, and spent forever just trying to get the exact right line along all the edges—I seem to tighten up like that all too easily and I think in general I'm better off staying loose. Even the pencils ended up getting pretty tight, and I'm not sure all the tightening is for an overall gain (although now I wish I'd taken a photo of the initial pencil version). So I really shouldn't fixate on trying to produce some specific effect when it comes to the inking. I'll have to try to keep that in mind for tomorrow's page, which I think will be a somewhat similar layout. Anyway here are the pencils and an earlier stage in the inks:
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The author of a new-ish comic (note: some mature themes), Moth City contacted me recently, in part to commiserate about the relatively small number of crime/mystery webcomics out there. Moth City is one of those, with a very accomplished loose-yet-clear style of the really professional type that I will probably never achieve; it also has the most high-tech web site I can recall seeing among webcomics recently.
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| To boldly go, etc | Nov 24, 2012 4:12 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Well, I'm gradually getting somewhere with something, I think, maybe. Anyway revisions today took me a little less time than some days earlier this week, so I'll count this as progress. :P Some of the progression:
Some day I'll learn to skip the hours of gradual cross-hatching and just go straight to big bold black marks! That'll be nice.
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| Thanks to you! | Nov 23, 2012 2:37 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Before I succumb completely to food coma, I just want to thank you for reading A*. Maybe you just got here, or maybe you've been reading since the very beginning oh so long ago--in any case, I just want you to know that I appreciate you indulging me in this little science fiction comic-making pastime of mine. Thank you!
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| The first A* page that is actually a photo | Nov 22, 2012 2:14 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Oh boy. Still catching myself in overthink mode. What you see for today's page is not actually how it ended up--which was this:
Note to self: slavishly and dutifully plugging in big shadows does not necessarily an exciting page make! Fortunately I had photographed the page at an earlier stage--right after I'd finished the ink guidelines and erased the pencil sketch that had been underneath them--so I ended up using that photo to make the final digital version of the actual A* page.
Before I did that I considered a few alternatives, mocked up in Photoshop:
They didn't seem quite as nice as the original line version, though. And for the sake of completeness, here's the photo of the pencil stage:
So yeah, I take photos as an insurance policy against screwing up later. :P Comes in pretty handy sometimes!
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| How to make a lot of lines with a ruler | Nov 21, 2012 2:09 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Got more technically involved in this page than per my usual--rulers and grids and backwards lettering and gosh. Here it is at the pencil stage:
and just after having put down the ink guide lines and erased the pencils:
Notice I'd started the tricky lettering bit on the right side and screwed up a few things with the inverted overlap of the figure--I'd have to go in and correct those later with white ink.
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Say this week has Turkey Day in the States which is a big holiday but I will be working right on through and posting A* pages on my usual schedule, woo.
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| The Mateba Autorevolver | Nov 20, 2012 12:21 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The upside-down barrel configuration of the Major's little pistol there came from an interesting revolver I happened across when double-checking that revolvers would still have a place in this some-time-in-the-future world: the Mateba Model 6 Unica, aka the Mateba Autorevolver. Its barrel is positioned at the bottom of the cylinder, which means that the recoil is closer to the center of the gun, rather than jerking it so much upward:
image by LoCo CNC (source)
The Mateba even uses that central recoil to cock the gun for the next shot: the whole upper carriage of the revolver slides back a half-inch from the force of the shot, which rotates the cylinder and activates the cocking mechanism for the next shot. Here's a video of the Mateba in action.
So I thought that would make the pistol in today's page a little different looking than the average snub-nose some current Earthly private dick might have in their desk drawer. And it's even practical! The Major's pistol probably wouldn't be semi-automatic, though, since all those moving parts would sort of defeat the purpose of having a self-defense gun be a revolver, which is that it's just about the most reliable firing mechanism possible, and won't let you down when you need it. Or so I gather! I don't actually know that much about guns.
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I did that thing again where I don't use enough ink at first:
Sheesh :P
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| Saturn moon photos, CLASH, and rogue planets | Nov 17, 2012 5:06 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:How about some nice recent-ish Cassini photos of Saturn and its moons?
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute (source)
^ Saturn and three of its moons are pictured in this photo from last December. Enceladus (313 mi / 504 km diameter) is the one on the left, below the rings, Tethys (660 mi / 1,062 km diameter) is on the right, and tiny Pandora (50 mi / 81 km diameter) is...well, can you spot Pandora? It's just a little tiny speck right above the rings on the far left.
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute (source)
^ That's Saturn's third-largest moon, Dione (698 mi / 1123 km across), seen in front of the planet's largest Moon, the yellow cloud-shrouded Titan (3200 mi / 5150 km across).
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute (source)
^ This photo from June has Enceladus again! Maybe they like getting that one in photos because it's all icy and bright and shiny.
There's a similar photo of Saturn and its moon Mimas from about a week and a half ago over here.
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NASA's Hubble and Spitzer telescopes just zeroed in on what the galaxy-hunting project CLASH ("Cluster Lensing And Supernova Survey with Hubble") thinks is the most distant, and thus the earliest, galaxy yet seen: the extremely faint reddish blob known as MACS0647-JD is postulated to be a galaxy seen just 420 million years after the Big Bang, its light having traveled 13.3 billion years to reach us. What's particularly remarkable about the galaxy--not that much else can really be told about it, given that this is at the very extreme edge of our detection abilities--is its size: just 600 light years across! Theory says that a typical galaxy of that age should be 2000 light years across; for comparison, our Milky Way galaxy, thought to be a fairly typical modern galaxy, is 150,000 light years across, and we have orbiting dwarf galaxies that are themselves over 10 times as large as MACS0647-JD. One theory is that the old, tiny galaxy represents a "building block" that would go on to form much larger galaxies through galactic collisions and mergers.
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The ESO announced the discovery of a free-floating planet about 100 light years from Earth. Object "CFBDSIR2149" (oy!) is estimated to be about 4-7 times the mass of Jupiter, with "an effective temperature" of about 430 degrees C; it would also be relatively young: a mere 50 to 120 million years old. Those numbers derive from more definite measurements taken of a cluster of stars, the "AB Doradus Moving Group," with which the planet appears to be moving through the galaxy, and with which it probably shares its origin.
Free-floating planets have been spotted--or, rather, suggested--since the 1990s, when telescopic capabilities were refined sufficiently to start picking out their tell-tale signs in the flickers and wobbles of neighboring stars. CFBDSIR2149 is the closest yet, though, and also the easiest to examine directly, since it isn't too close to a bright star. While CFBDSIR2149 may fall into that fuzzy "brown dwarf" classification area between planets and stars--ie, objects that aren't *quite* massive enough to ignite into stars--it's getting clearer and clearer that our galaxy must be filled with many such free-floating bodies; the article cites one estimate that there are twice as many free-floating planet-things in our galaxy as there are visible stars.
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Today's page was originally a light brighter:
But after uploading it and looking at it there for a while I finally realized it didn't have the shadowy dramatic impact I'd meant it to have. So I cracked open another ink bottle. :)
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| (D)ARPA wants YOU! | Nov 16, 2012 6:24 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:UNCLE SAM SAYS
ONLY YOU
CAN DEFEND THE WORLD
FROM SPACE DEBRIS!
At any rate, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA") is reportedly reaching out to amateur astronomers to help them track the ever-multiplying swarms of dangerous space debris in Earth orbit. This "crowd-sourcing" government project goes by the name "SpaceView."
DARPA was founded in 1958, in their words, "to prevent technological surprise like the launch of Sputnik, which signaled that the Soviets had beaten the U.S. into space." Although back then it was "ARPA," without the "D" for "Defense." It got the "D" in 1972, lost it in '93, and got it back in '96. Sheesh.
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Some earlier stages in the doing of today's page:
Gotta stop overthinkin' the inkin', gar. Although the actual page version kinda reminds me of a photo of Veronica Lake that I saw earlier today.
Also gotta stop accidentally hitting the switch on my surge protector that instantly turns my computer and everything off. :P
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| How to make drawing harder | Nov 15, 2012 4:44 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:You know, I wrote a blog article in the past month or so about how drawing this sort of silhouette invert shadow thingy way was difficult, and now I can definitely say yes, yes it is. Like, the pencils are way more detailed and went pretty quickly
but when it comes to inking it you have to make all these tricky decisions about what to show and what to hide, and how to control--not to mention render dramatically--all the forms with just large blocks of black or white. And all that detail gets covered up and boiled down to what looks like a really simple drawing. Shuh! Kept me up way past my bed-time, it did.
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| Hats | Nov 14, 2012 4:10 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Do you know what's interesting? Hats. Hats. Hats, hats, hats, and more hats. It's so rare you see a good hat these days, much less a coordinated outfit to go with it! So research is required. Into hats.
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| Episode 17 e-book! Episode 18 begins! | Nov 13, 2012 2:57 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Here we are starting episode 18! The downloadable .pdf version of episode 17 is now available on the episodes & e-books page; you can get it for however much you want, so yes that can be $0.01 if you want to do that. I've also updated the SUPER EXPRESS PACK available on that page; it will always (or for the forseeable future, anyway) contain all completed episodes in a single downloadable file for $20, even though it's increasing in page count with every newly completed episode.
Boy wrapping up episodes is tricky now! Phew. Well here are some working shots of today's page #2; I tried that nasty masking fluid stuff again. I guess it worked out all right, although it did pull up a bit of paper.
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| Episode 17 finito! | Nov 10, 2012 4:18 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:That's the end of episode 17! If I manage to row my ducks over the weekend, episode 18 will be kicking off next week, complete with fedoras and stogies. :)
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This page was one of those ones where I spend a lot of time drawing it one way and can't quite get it to work for some reason and finally have to give it up and start over. I think the problem was that I'd always been picturing it as this shot kind of from level and a bit behind and to the side, with a missile pointing right down at Selenis, but that's more of a vertical than a horizontal thing, and my pages are definitely horizontal.
Another thing I realized was that I shouldn't settle for just drawing someone in the old "here's the head-shaped piece, here's the upper-torso-shaped piece, here's the upper arm piece..." way, because that is just dull and not really how people in motion look anyway. Once I gave up on the painstakingly careful initial layout and had to come up with another one in much more limited time, I got looser and wilder and a much more interesting figure, drawn as a pretty weird and mostly cohesive shape, came out of that.
Here are the pencils for the layout I went with:
Then I was kind of frustrated with not having been able to get the first one to work, so I settled for doing a quick mockup of it in marker on a vertical-ish scrap of paper:
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| Circle of Life, Baby | Nov 09, 2012 2:41 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Hmph, still doing poorly with the time management thing this week. Just one more page left in episode 17 though! Who knows what a MIRV is? Well, those aren't in it--quite--although it took a bit of research and consideration to decide.
I should probably stop blasting Lana Del Rey's Born to Die on loop, the neighbors will start worrying.
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| Model crater Linné & why we needed asteroids | Nov 08, 2012 1:57 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:NASA has created a video about the 1.4 mile-wide Linné Crater on the Moon; Linné is so remarkably young, for a lunar crater--just 10 million years old!--and untouched by other asteroid strikes that it is still in "pristine" condition, and thus perfect for studying a crater in its most basic form. One of the big surprises so far is that it isn't actually a bowl shape, but more of an inverted cone shape--implying that other craters we see get their bowl shapes due to erosion of the original cone shape.
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This article talks about a new study that has presented the theory that an asteroid belt like the one we have in our solar system between Mars and Jupiter is necessary to the formation of life; not only may these icy and rocky asteroids, hitting a planet, provide that planet with the water and organic molecules necessary to create life, but major asteroid strikes, like the one on Earth 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs, allowing mammals to evolve and proliferate, may be essential to evolution (granted, we may have a bit of a bias in that particular case). And even more specifically, this theory says that the asteroid belt has to be at about the distance that the Mars-Jupiter belt is from its central star, which is beyond the "snow line" where it is cold enough for water and vital gases to condense and collect into ices; furthermore, you need a massive, Jupiter-sized planet out there to keep disrupting the belt with its gravity, preventing it from collapsing and forming into its own planet, and probably also shaking things loose to go sail toward the inner planets. This all further suggests that, with these conditions being relatively narrow, life as we know it may be less common throughout the galaxy than some earlier estimates (*cough* Sagan *cough*) had expected.
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| Episode 17 wraps this week | Nov 07, 2012 1:20 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Boy I'm bushed, it's gonna be straight to be for me. Gotta write something here though, hmm... Well, this episode will be wrapping up at the end of this week, and um...hm no I'll wait a bit more until I say anything about the next episode, but it's gonna be a fun one. :)
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| Adventures in latex...masking fluid | Nov 06, 2012 1:15 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I tried using a masking fluid for today's page, to hide the figure and the edges of the doorway while I sprayed white ink stars around them. You brush the stuff on where you want whatever you're going to add *not* to hit the paper, and when you're all done using the stuff you wanted to block, you peel up the now-dried masking fluid, and voila. Here's the page with the dried masking fluid peeled off the top half:
And here's me pulling the rest off:
It's latex-based so it's all stretchy like that. After I was all done peeling it off I happened to go to a comic blog web site to look at a pen article I'd just heard mentioned on a podcast I was listening to while working, and heck if that blog's latest article isn't on the very same masking fluid. It doesn't cover one important thing I learned in using it today, though, and that is that it will pull up ink you already have on the page...so one shouldn't really use it like I tried using it; you'll notice that it pulled up some of the ink on on the figure and to the left of the doorway, leaving a sort of faded look in those areas. I thought that was kind of interesting, though, so I didn't try going back over those areas in black ink. I don't think I'd try using the masking fluid again...unless maybe I wanted to get that effect? Or if I was doing a black ink spatter, since then I could just put it down on the un-inked paper and peel it up without removing any ink under it. Although, it did peel up a bit of the paper in that white dust cloudy area next to her feet. Hmph, silly masking fluid.
Oh yeah and it did totally ruin the beat up old Winsor & Newton brush I applied it with--the only Winsor & Newton brush I had, in fact, since I switched to Raphaëls after that first one. Destroyed by Winsor & Newton's own masking fluid, how ironic. Or something. Hm so yeah although I do have some old brushes around that I've saved for destructive activities, I probably *won't* be using the masking fluid again unless I really really really need to for some reason; cut-out transparent sheet masks are less precise but much safer. :P
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| Titan, the glow-in-the-dark moon | Nov 02, 2012 6:05 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Scientists have found that Saturn's moon Titan glows in the dark:
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI (source)
| This set of images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows Saturn's moon Titan glowing in the dark. Titan was behind Saturn at the time, in eclipse from the sun. The image on the left is a calibrated, but unprocessed image from Cassini's imaging camera. The image on the right was processed to exclude reflected light off Saturn and it is clear that even where Titan did not receive any Saturnshine, it is still emitting light. Some light appears to be emanating from high in the atmosphere (noted by the outer dashed line at about 625 miles or 1,000 kilometers in altitude). But more surprisingly, most of it is diffusing up from lower down in the moon's haze, from about 190 miles (300 kilometers) above the surface. |
The higher-altitude glow, a phenomenon called "airglow" in which "charged particles from the magnetic bubble around Saturn strip electrons off of atmospheric molecules at Titan" was expected; but the light coming up from lower down, although so faint it would be invisible to someone in Titan's atmosphere--it's estimated to be about a millionth of a watt--was unexpected and is, so far, unexplained.
One theory is that it comes from lightning; the planet Venus, for instance, glows with what's called Ashen light from lightning--it was first spotted there in 1643! But while lightning is known to occur on Saturn, it's never been seen on Titan, so the possibility exists that this moon's very faint light is due to something else entirely.
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| A Martian self-portrait | Nov 02, 2012 12:33 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:The Mars Curiosity rover took a mosaic self-portrait; the dark footprint-like marks to the left of it are where it scooped its first samples of the Martian soil for analysis:
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems (source)
^ The "Full Size" version you can download from NASA's source page is quite high-definition, letting you see every nuts and bolt on the rover and nearly every grain of sand around it.
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Astronauts on the International Space Station have taken a spacewalk to find the source of an ammonia link in the station's cooling system. The leak's been known since 2007, but it's so slow that it's very hard to track down, and even if they find a likely spot and "fix" it, it would be weeks before they'd be able to tell whether or not that was actually it.
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The layout you see in today's page was the second version; first I tried more of a dynamic isometric viewpoint, but with the characters having to be slightly separated and all I was having difficulty capturing the necessary drama--so I scrapped that and went back to an earlier idea of just showing it from the side:
Then I was dithering about whether or not I should fill in the lower-left corner, behind Val:
I loaded that photo in Photoshop and filled the area digitally as an experiment to see if I'd like it, and it seemed to be better that way so I went ahead and inked it in.
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