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  Old sci-fi comics: Flash and The LegionNov 30, 2013 2:12 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A reader recently brought up illustrator Alex Raymond, and that got me thinking about the massive volume collecting the first few years of his Flash Gordon comic that another reader got me some time back (I blogged a show and tell with it here) and which I hadn't finished reading through because the hardcover is so big and heavy—like, 17" tall (just about the width of an original A* page, as it happens!)—that it's tough to read without hurting yourself! But now I've found a good way to prop it up so I'm gonna get through it at last. And I think it helped with whatever mojo made the unusually precise page 60; like, it occurs to me that I don't work in say a studio with other artists around to keep me on the ball, so maybe having (and reading!) books of art by really good artists is the next best thing.
 
I came across a page recently that I thought was particularly interesting from an illustration development point of view; this is the Flash Gordon strip from April 21st, 1935:
 
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Notice how in the last panel there, where Azura is making her dramatic appearance to Flash and his group, Raymond filled the shadows and currents with tight arrays of swooping brush lines—and contrast that with the previous panels, where he mostly left the backgrounds blank, possibly with just an isolated foreground or background element or two: that's how the previous Flash strips had looked, but this last panel here seems to represent his discovery of this curved line technique for expressing volumes, and the following strips would use it more and more heavily, until the whole production was packed with richly volumetric, dramatic panels of shadows and currents—all starting from this one panel!
 
I also like the way these strips are colored (although I don't think the color was done by Raymond himself); kinda makes me wish I could watercolor the A* pages, but I've tried that before and it didn't really work out for technical reasons (the main one being that I can't watercolor over my corrective white ink; I suppose the other main reason is that my watercoloring was coming out all blotchy : P)...maybe I'll hafta try some non-A*-page drawings with it, though.
 
Anyway it occurred to me that dang I should have more Raymond stuff around to keep myself on the ball, art-wise. Time has passed and more of those great oversized Flash Gordon collections have come out, so I've added them to A*'s Amazon Wish List, which I'd left empty for a long time. I also put in the first "Archive" volume of the collected "Legion of Super-Heroes" comics; those started out in 1958, basically introducing super-powered kids (often alien kids) from a superhero club in the 30th century who initially came back in time to visit Superboy—but anyway they're from the 30th century and apparently spend their time bickering over club meeting times (their clubhouse is an old space ship, I think I read), and saving the universe.
 
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1958's Adventure Comics #247, first appearance of the Legion (source)
 
Sounds like good clean fun, and also I like that lovely, polished pre-Kirby-explosion Silver Age DC illustration style.
 
So yeah, comics!
 
 
 
 
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  Harder LightNov 28, 2013 1:37 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:You can blame the cooked, aliased lines in today's page on Photoshop's "Hard Light" blending mode, which I ended up going back to in order to punch up the colors and contrast. I (over)used Hard Light when I first started using digital color in the comic (that was page 116 of episode 19); it made the scanned pencil lines I was using at the time even more jagged than they already were; now that I'm using ink, that effect isn't quite so bad.
 
The other main difference this time was that instead of blending the color image with *itself* in Hard Light mode, this time I used a grayscale version (or more specifically, the result of a Hue/Saturation layer set to full desaturate and Hue blending mode) of the image as the Hard Light--this blew out the colors far less than using a color copy, but still heightened the value contrasts. You can see that gray "luminance" mixing layer on the left below:
 
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The image on the right is what you get if you perform the Hard Light blending *before* scaling the image down from the high-res original to web size; it looks a lot smoother, but it loses what is to me one of the charms of Hard Light blends, which is that the edges of black lines get loaded with high-saturation color; when you compare the two, the pre-blended version there looks pale and fishy around the lines, whereas the pre-shrunk, then Hard Lit version I went with for the final image has a sort of red glow around the admittedly more jagged lines. In a way, though, a little pixelization fits the comic, if you ask me, what with its hard digital origins and stubborn web-only format.
 
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Yeah yeah, blah blah blah. I'm going to be occupied with family Thanksgiving festivities tomorrow--well, today (Thursday)--so I won't have a new page for you then, but I'll be back at the drawing board on Friday (and probably finish up that page in the wee hours of Saturday, as usual : P). Have a nice Turkey Day, or just a nice Thursday! Hopefully I'll pull off the mashed yams okay. : P
 
 
 
 
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  Just add inkNov 26, 2013 11:12 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:It's been a while since I snuck my way through a blog entry by showing the pencils for the day's page, so here goes!
 
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Yep. In retrospect, adding lots of black ink helped a bunch!
 
 
 
 
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  At least it beats NeapolitanNov 26, 2013 2:28 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Colored this one a slightly different way, because after spending a long time getting color into it, kind of a purple grade, it seemed to me that it was just a bit too dull. Using a Hue/Saturation layer in Photoshop to explore different color combinations, I found a few I liked at least as well as the original. I couldn't really decide between them, so I decided I'd just throw them all in together, doing this by masking off parts of the two added Hue/Saturation layers with black gradients. Here's the original color, then the two Hue/Sat layers added in, with thumbnails of their alpha masks in the lower left corners to show how they were laid on; the first one shifted from purple to yellow, and the second one shifted back toward red, with some spots left behind as yellow highlights:
 
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So we end up with this rainbow sherbet melange. Mmm...sherbet.
 
 
 
 
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  A future hairdo?Nov 23, 2013 5:24 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:There's a lot of hair in today's page. Speaking of which, I spotted a hairdo in a Louis Vuitton ad on the inside of the front cover of the October 7th New Yorker magazine that struck me as one that might work for Selenis:
 
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That's assuming I can draw it reasonably well, of course! I don't think she'll be sporting a short cut for at least a couple episodes, though.
 
 
 
 
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  Freaking out with Itō IttōsaiNov 22, 2013 4:39 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Wanna see something freaky? Sure ya do!
 
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Eeeeeeeee
 
My drawing style (if you can call it that) seems to be conflicting with the way my ink wants to go; the drawings are all lines and low contrast, and the ink ends up being almost no lines and all contrast, and it sure would save me a lot of time if I'd decide on that from the very start and sketch it up that way in pencil. Maybe next time? Maybe I just can't sketch that way. I dunno. : P
 
The initial version was I think an unconscious attempt to ape Takehiko Inoue's rendition of famed swordsman Itō Ittōsai in his "Vagabond" comic.
 
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I just realized that the previous scene between Selenis and Thierry was kind of like a role-reversal of (mildly NSFW in an old pulp fiction cover sort of way) this (which itself is a more literal impending role-reversal :o).
 
 
 
 
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  Art block blockingNov 20, 2013 11:32 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Oh boy I had me some art block today--had to pencil *and* ink three versions of this page before one turned out non-horrible. Although it seems like when I get stuck it's usually because at some level the layout I've chosen just isn't working for me, and there's a bad critic somewhere in my head who won't actually say what's wrong with it, but vetoes every attempt nevertheless. The first two attempts were sort of a 3/4 rear view of Treban, and I think maybe it was just too far removed from the path of her gaze or something.
 
Goal for tomorrow: waste less time and ink!
 
 
 
 
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  Color envyNov 20, 2013 1:48 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Oh it's late again--I let myself get distracted by the internet, and then by alarming Thanksgiving plans that had me looking up how to prepare mashed yams in my old Betty Crocker cookbook--so I'll just confess that for today's colors I pretty much just swiped from yesterday's colors, which I liked so much. Although a lot of previous pages relied heavily on this sort of pink to purple range, so I guess there's something about it I do like. Before that I'd done a lot of back and forth with other color schemes, and nearly settled on this one
 
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but in the end it was still a little hard on the old eyes, I think--it actually gets easier for me to detect this the tireder I get. : P Also it didn't capture quite the right balance of backlighting and front lighting on Selenis, I guess. Still I don't really like the idea of reusing color schemes to such an extent...maybe I'll manage to come up with something newer for the next page. : P
 
EDIT: Hah, I'm silly, all I needed to do was swap some of those greens around to get the lighting value relationships sorted out. So I used that version; here's the pink-purple version I'd uploaded as the final colors for a little bit there:
 
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The final green one has better value contrast, which helps a bit. Hey also this one's all about showing Selenis the (green--okay so whatever A* currency they use probably isn't green but never mind) money, right? It's almost like I planned that accidentally. Man this color stuff is deep.
 
 
 
 
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  Complimenting the uncomplementaryNov 19, 2013 1:21 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Oh these close-ups, they're killin' me I tells ya. I should really just draw a head like small or medium-sized like on the previous page and embiggen it in Photoshop; somehow when I have to draw them big in real life I get all fussy with them. I think it at least partly has to do with it being a lot harder to take the image in all at once as I draw it; various things just weren't fitting together quite right on this for a long time, finally I had to get up from the drawing table and view it from about a dozen feet away in the hallway mirror--then go back to the drawing table and squint at it and try to adjust what had looked off when viewed at double long range in the mirror. : P Oh well I'm kind of happy with the stained-glass sort of look the coloring came out with at least; it's nice and easy to color when most of the page it black and the rest is divided up into nice tidy little areas; oh and I'd probably been getting a little too in the habit of coloring only with complementary (ie opposite on the color wheel) colors, and being stuck with a lot of contrast all the time as a result.
 
Also, the singular/plural distinction can get a little tricky when talking about clones. : P
 
 
 
 
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  Of Oswalts and OrbshipsNov 16, 2013 2:51 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:In case you've missed (or forgotten!) previous mentions of Oswalts and orbships over the...years, here they all are (not counting the last few pages):
 
Oswalts:
- Episode 10, page 108
- Episode 11, page 77
- Episode 18, page 15
 
Orbships:
- Episode 18, page 15
- Episode 19, page 140
 
That's it! : o
 
 
 
 
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  The Battle of Blight and WhackNov 15, 2013 2:08 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I thought I was onto a good thing with something I've done sort of accidentally lately, namely "drawing" something by screwing it up to the point where I have to completely redo it with layers of white and black ink--rather than just using black ink over a pencil sketch; the alternating back and forth of white and black is a lot like the digital A* drawings I used to do with Photoshop's Lasso Tool, and you pretty much get rid of lines and are just working with masses, which is nice since lines are, you know, pretty artificial. Treban two pages back came out as a result of that back-and-forth process, as did Selenis' head on page 25.
 
The problem with this approach is that it takes forever--lots of waiting for ink to dry, or in my case not being patient enough to wait long enough and then getting things all messy--and gets increasingly inflexible as ridges and mounds and things start to build up. So if you can get it in one or two tries, that's good, but past that you're in trouble. I'd already done it once or twice for Treban in today's page, and thought it was pretty good and had already put up the ink drawing for auction, but while checking the digital coloring job I then went and did on it, a couple things about her face started bugging me--the cheek and chin--and after mocking up alterations in Photoshop I went back to the actual drawing and tried to touch it up. But it was already thick with ink and maybe that didn't help; anyway I screwed it up. I scraped away and repainted the figure a few more times and finally thought I had it down okay but scanning it in and comparing it with the previous version I'd scanned showed that it was actually just getting worse and worse.
 
Phooey! So in the end I had to use the original scan and just touch it up digitally, which is great and all except that I don't have an original piece of artwork left from it to sell. So I guess relying on the ink-on-ink method is not really feasible, which is too bad because that back-and-forth sometimes seems like it really cuts right down to the essence of what I'm going for. Oh well I guess I should try to get that done by regular pencil and ink work from the beginning like a real illustrator. : P Would save a lot of time, too! Soo yeah I guess I learned something, anyway. (But I hadn't screwed a page up irrevocably since page 9! Ruined a pretty good streak. : P)
 
 
 
 
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  Oh man, OMAC!Nov 13, 2013 11:25 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I've been reading the trade paperback collecting Jack Kirby's "OMAC: One Man Army Corps," one of the far-out comic series he came up with during his stint at Detective Comics in the '70s.
 
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It's pretty weird.
 
(^That panel's from OMAC issue 5, June 1974. Story and pencils by Kirby, inks and lettering by D. Bruce Berry.)
 
 
 
 
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  Row of Supermassive PinballsNov 13, 2013 12:00 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:(We return to non-pinball blogging tomorrow. : P)
 
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The Add-A-Ball pinbar in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood recently expanded into the area next door, adding a big new room to their existing three room layout filled with pinball, classic arcade machines, and beer. The near end of the big room boasts a gigantic mural painting of Kurt Russell...hm dang I guess I was too dazzled to remember to take a photo of it, come to think of it. Anyway it's neat. The far end has an all-star line-up of pinball machines: Stars (pretty much the best little pinball game ever), Star Trek: The Next Generation modified with a color DMD screen, and an Attack from Mars--although this was promptly taken offline after I got in there. :P
 
Filling one side of the length of the room is the single most impressive row of pinball machines I've ever seen in person: all five Bally widebody machines, in pretty much immaculate condition:
 
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Fantasy table Paragon was by far the most popular, but I think I had the most fun hitting the chain-reacting middle three captive balls to light up the inner birthing chamber on Embryon next to it:
 
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Space Invaders, with its bizarre Geiger-esque art not going at all well with its awful Space Invaders arcade sound effects:
 
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Future Spa, an old favorite of mine, and the thematic odd man out, the bright, ski-filled Hot Doggin':
 
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You can just see Attack from Mars across the way there, before it was shut down for maintenance. At the end of the night we finally got a chance to play doubles on Paragon; I didn't have enough quarters left for another game but we got a Match! and I had enough for the other credit, and on this second try I spelled all the letters in P-A-R-A-G-O-N! And jumped up and down and clapped, but then promptly drained before I got to shoot for the resulting Special. Still felt nice. : D
 
 
 
 
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  Pinball blogjackNov 11, 2013 10:24 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:For the next two days this blog is gonna be taken over by me writing about pinball stuff I've played recently. Um... A lot of the tables are science-fiction themed? Uh so yeah, pinball!
 
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According to Pinball News, the coming out party for Seattle artist Dominique Johns' custom pinball table, Galactic Girl, (aka "Dominique's Galactic Girl") took place at the Tiger Lounge in Seattle's Georgetown district in early 2010. The last update on Johns' silverAge silverBall pinball operator site, from October 2011, notes that Girl was at that time in the Seattle Pinball Museum, in the city's international district. But the other day, while idly thumbing through the latest "Skill Shot" ("Seattle's Pinball Zine") that I'd picked up at the Ballard Full Tilt ice cream / pinball parlor, I noticed a surprising entry: Galactic Girl was listed as one of three tables at the little "Sureshot Espresso" student hang out lounge coffee place on University Ave in the U-District.
 
I last hit the Sureshot in maybe 2009 or '10, when Space Mission (still listed as being there as of 2011 on Dominique's site) was there, although it was badly out of balance. Re-scrutinizing the location on Google Maps, I was somewhat fascinated to find you can access two distinct time periods in their Street View photos of the block: the sunny, contemporary one, with the bizarre "Crepe Cravers" on its right and the ugly Chase Bank on the corner to its left, accessed by clicking the wide thumbnail photo on the left-hand column of the Google Maps view, and an overcast one from some years back, when the storefront to Sureshot's north was vacant (previously this had been an awesome build-your-own ice cream place, with a cool old '70s pinball table of its own), and the corner was still graced by the Twice Sold Tales used bookstore--you get to this one by clicking the smaller thumbnail photo on the pop-up description of Sureshot that appears over the street map itself. Wouldn't it be neat if some day Google made it so you could just scroll the timeline back and forth through time as you navigate street view, so you could travel through it in space AND time?
 
But I digress. I had to visit Sureshot on the chance that Galactic Girl was still there--and it was, in the small back room next to the rest rooms, along with an Aladdin's Castle (Bally, 1975) and a Monaco (Segasa, 1977), all provided by Johns, according to the cards fastened to them--oh and a Street Fighter II Championship Edition arcade machine. Johns and I evidently share similar tastes in pinball machines--the late '70s is my favorite pinball era--so it was with extra excitement that I stepped up to his custom-built machine:
 
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The retro cast-iron and black rubber inlane-free construction of the lower playfield, anchored by two massively powerful flippers, gives Galactic Girl the strong, smooth feeling of a steam locomotive, or of the oiled bolt-action .22 rifles that I was inexplicably allowed to use at summer camp as a kid. The playfield has been left unfinished to the extent that the ball, if falling slowly down the length of the playfield, will have its course gently guided by the grain of the wood. Some of the mechanisms on the playfield, such as the Playboy-logo pop bumper, were obviously scavenged from other machines, but others, such as the dark drop targets, have a distinctively unique hand-crafted look. There are a couple surprising mechanical tricks at the top of the playfield: the ball enters from a long swinging-in horizontal gate that snaps shut behind it, sealing off the plunger lane, and sometimes the wire gate along the left side of the top orbit opens, allowing the ball to zing all the way around the field very quickly, which can really take you by surprise if you aren't on your toes. The game is low-scoring, but even so I can't say I really got a grasp of the rules as the deadly lower playfield made for very quick ball times; I tried to study the notes painted on the playfield while my friend was playing, but the writing is a bit hard to make out, and the cryptic references to a "red saucer" (neither saucer I could see was the slightest bit red) had me feeling as though I was trapped in that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy chapter about "a blue button, marked 'red.'"
 
The credit handling was also unique to my experience: the card says "one quarter one ball," altered by pen to say "one quarter one TWO ballS," and both are in fact correct: the first quarter gets you one ball, and the next quarter after that gets you two; I had wanted to purchase just two balls, one for me and one for my friend, but that is, in fact, impossible in the world of Galactic Girl, at least as presently configured. Also, sometimes the "Balls to Play" reel does not update when you put in the first quarter, and remains blank; if you then put in a second quarter, it may advance to "2," but you actually have three balls.
 
 
 
 
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  Postage robots at dawnNov 09, 2013 3:50 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's something I do once or twice a week now so I thought I might as well get my money's worth by making it into a blog post: shipping A* original art! Yeah so when someone wins an auction for the actual ink-on-paper drawing behind the daily A* page (here's the auction of today's page on eBay, for instance), then it's time to box it up and ship it off to them! And although these pages are of course flat, I use boxes rather than envelopes because well you'd be surprised the ways shipping people can come up with to mutilate even sturdy priority shipping envelopes and stuff. So here we have a sample piece of original art (this was page 30, which I shipped off a few weeks ago), the still-folded-flat box it's going to go in, and some materials to fasten it in there securely:
 
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Those are strips of hm I think it was about 150 lb illustration paper trimmed off from previous drawings--tough stuff, and I use it along with that spool of approved USPS packing tape to strap the page down to one inner side of the box:
 
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At first I thought I'd need packing material to fill in the rest of the box, but that doesn't actually end up securing and isolating the artwork any better than this simple and lightweight approach!
 
From there all I have to do is to seal up the ends of the box
 
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and march it down to the postage-printing robot at the local post-office--early in the morning the main office isn't even open, just the little side area with the PO boxes and the robot, so it's nice and quiet and generally no waiting :D :
 
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Pop the label the robot prints out for me onto the box, scan its bar code into the eBay app on my phone to send its tracking data directly to the auction winner, pop it into the shipping bin, and we're done! And just a few days away from one more happy customer getting their A* artwork, huzzah!
 
I'm not sure if they still have it but at least a while back I know the postal service offered a kit you could get to print out your own postage labels at home, and I think maybe even have the packages picked up for you. If I keep up selling four or five pieces of A* art a week like I have been then I guess I'll have to check into that--although then I'd kind of miss my early-morning visits to the postage robot. :o
 
 
 
 
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  SkyscrapingNov 08, 2013 1:57 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Man I thought this page was gonna be an easy one--no characters with that anatomy stuff to draw!--and it ended up taking me forever. I guess I don't draw buildings very often! Anyway now we have some. It's funny how you can make a building much bigger just by shrinking the windows about 90%.
 
 
 
 
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  Modern American Presidents' sinister secret!Nov 06, 2013 9:49 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Selenis, as this page perhaps reminds us, is right-handed. The other day I got to wondering what percentage of people were left-handed, because I wasn't sure I remembered it right, but looking it up on Wikipedia I found that I'd remembered ri--uh, correctly: about 10% of people are left-handed (okay actually 10% of men--including me, and 12% of women).
 
As often happens, Wikipedia had further information on the subject that makes for some absorbing reading. For instance, for some reason, left-handedness is way way waaaay more prevalent, at least recently, in American Presidents than in the general population:

Of the seven most recent U.S. Presidents, four, including Barack Obama, have been left-handed, while a fifth is said to have been ambidextrous: Ronald Reagan, who was left-handed by birth, became president after he defeated left-handed candidate George H. W. Bush in the Republican primary election. Four years earlier, Reagan had lost the Republican presidential primary to incumbent left-handed President Gerald Ford. George H. W. Bush succeeded Reagan and later ran for re-election against left-handers Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. Clinton's second term opponents included Perot and Bob Dole, who had become left-handed when his right arm was paralyzed in combat 50 years earlier. Left-handed then-Senator Obama defeated left-handed Senator John McCain in his race for the presidency. Including the 2012 campaign, the last time the United States Presidential Election featured no left-handed candidate from a major political party was 1972.

Weird! Presidential handedness records are only considered reliable after the early part of the 20th century, since "during the 18th and 19th centuries left-handedness was considered a disability and teachers would make efforts to suppress it in their students." This stigma against left-handedness even goes as deep as its etymology: "in many European languages, including English, the word for the direction 'right' also means 'correct' or 'proper.' Throughout history, being left-handed was considered negative. The Latin word sinistra meant 'left' as well as 'unlucky' and this double meaning survives in European derivatives of Latin, and in the English word 'sinister.'"
 
The particularly fascinating word I learned from all this was "ambisinistrous," which (along with "ambilevous") means that you're equally bad with both hands. : o I guess this is mostly the result of an accident or something; Dole, for instance, might have been said to have been a shade ambisinister after his preferred right arm was wounded, before he taught himself to use his left hand instead.
 
 
 
 
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  Maybe I don't need the next page after allNov 06, 2013 12:03 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This page came out the way it did because I had to do it quick, after having reduced the page I'd been working on all day to a black muddle. :P That almost happened yesterday, too, come to think of it. I like how this second attempt begun late at night ended up, though; maybe this getting up early and working while the Sun is out is the wrong way to go. ; ) Although that probably did end up influencing Selenis' look here though, because the "Today" show was on the TV looming over the cardio machine at the gym this morning, and that Natalie Morales has a rather striking face.
 
 
 
 
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  Beauty is in the eye of---waaait a secNov 05, 2013 12:50 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Boy, I've been having trouble with these last few close-ups. The page I initially put up on Friday went through some changes, as I tinkered with it through Saturday. It started with a sort of weird face that was interesting in a way but maybe a little too big and flat and bony for Selenis
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I tried to bring it under control by paring it back
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but that wasn't quite right, still needed some beauty and personality
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Later I was fidgeting with a different, less contrasty coloring approach; here it is at about its most elaborate
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but eventually I decided it was just a watering down of the original bright green and yellow, and chucked it. : P Now that I see it again, though, I kinda... Ah well nevermind, I've been overusing gradient fills anyway.
 
Today's Thierry close-up gave me problems for a while, too. Hmph, at least this it the last time I'll have to draw him for...a while. >_> That's what I get for coming up with an intentionally sorta homely character. Can't do that anymore, their pages don't sell! : P Also they're a pain to draw because I end up fighting back and forth with my urge to make everyone attractive. We'll have another youngish dude next episode and I'll have to see if I can make him properly handsome. :P
 
 
 
 
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  Longwinded shading/coloringNov 02, 2013 1:03 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:The following is something I wrote up earlier in the week in response to a thread on The Webcomic List forum called How do you do your shading?; it came out overlong as I tend to do and sort of killed the thread >_> so eh here it is!
 
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I don't really have a set method and keep experimenting with things to try to work out this whole shading thing, especially since I started using color three months ago. Here's what I've been doing recently:
 
Primarily I shade with black ink and a size 4 Raphael brush--sometimes with hatched and cross-hatched lines, or dry brush once in a while, although I'm really trying to use those sparingly and stick more with big bold blocks of light and dark--if I could figure out how to do it successfully all the time I think my pages would all be big chunks of black and white, leaving almost no linework, with a limited flat color palette giving just enough further information to define everything:
 
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I'm coloring digitally, mostly on layers beneath the scanned ink artwork, which is above them on a multiply layer. White or black ink spatter can serve to give some idea of light in the physical piece; digitally of course there are plenty of options for shading, for instance sometimes it can work with just color rather than value, like with these overlapping "Foreground to Transparent" linear gradients (there's also a very subtle yellow radial gradient over the inked lines in the upper right area)
 
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In that one I was also using different line weights--thin tapering lines made with the tip of the brush on the face, vs blocky thick lines drawn with the side of the brush on the tight material around the neck--to create different types of shading for different surfaces.
 
Once in a while I have resorted to using the lasso tool method, where you define your area to be shaded with the Lasso Tool in Photoshop, then fill that area with something, for instance a darker gradient than is used on the illuminated part of the object you're trying to shade
 
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although I try not to do that too often because it looks a little too slick to me.
 
If you're shading with essentially just one color, the obvious way to create depth and lighting is to vary the color's value, but you can also do it by varying the saturation--this has a bit less overall contrast in it but can make up for it in color intensity
 
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If I need to inject a bit more atmosphere into the inks, I may group a coloring layer above the ink layer, usually on Screen, and throw a light gradient or something in on low opacity, to give the darkness a bit of a glow, or even just a hint--lots of possibilities here
 
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although I think I've been overusing that of late.
 
Sometimes if something just seems a bit off I'll throw a Hue/Saturation layer over the shading colors in question and throw its Hue slider around to see what comes out; perceived value (brightness) changes with color, so this can yield some color and effective value shifts that improve the shading in surprising ways, or suggest new palette directions; for instance in my latest page I started with these colors
 
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used a Hue/Saturation layer set to "Color" blending mode ("Hue" blending mode works identically in this case, by the way) to shift just the colors--and not their values, as it would if left on "Normal" blending mode--to this
 
Image
 
which was interesting, (and here's the comparison with how the colors come out in "Normal" blending mode
 
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--notice the yellow is much brighter, for instance) but after playing with it some more I ended up switching the Hue/Saturation layer's blending mode back to "Normal" and going with this hue shift toward the other end of the spectrum
 
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Also in that one I broke from my usual default of leaving pure white as the brightest color in the image--with that big white jagged spotlight area on pure white it was just too bright and contrasty and distracting from the rest of the image; lowering it down a bit with a light color made it easier to read and even gave it a touch of atmosphere, I think.
 
Another thing I tried in that one was a bit of atmospheric perspective: on the left side, the faint light cyan glow from the unseen background light is at a very low opacity over the big black back of the character's head looming right in front of us in the foreground, at a higher opacity over those funky little prongs hanging down on either side of his head, which are supposed to be farther away from us than his head is, and finally at an even higher--though still fairly low--opacity over the black background, furthest from us.
 
Incidentally, if you ever want to desaturate your colors partially, without having their relative values shift--as they will if you just use a basic Desaturate process, because for instance we see fully bright green as brighter than fully bright red or blue, yet if you were to use a standard Desaturate on them they would all shift toward the exact same middle gray--there are a variety of ways you can make that happen; the handiest I've found so far is to use that Hue/Saturation layer set to "Hue" or "Color" blending mode, drag its Saturation slider all the way down, then change the layer's opacity until I get the level of desaturation I want; I used that pretty heavily to get the desaturated shaded look seen here, for instance:
 
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The darkest shadow colors there are not really dark but they pass for dark in part because the overall color contrast is very low, so small differences in value really stand out.
 
Another thing I tried in that one was to make the thin pencil outlines (this was before I switched back to ink) do some shading work: I colored the outline on the lit side of her head white, turning the whole line into a highlight, and then I colored the outline on the other side the same color as the interior shadow, so that the shadow itself wouldn't be upstaged by the black line.
 
I don't usually like to leave my linear gradients showing as obviously as they do there, because it gets to looking too artificial, but as a one-off hopefully I got away with that one.
 
Oh, yeah, and I've found that one really important thing particularly when working with shading in color is to make sure your screen's gamma is correct--otherwise the value balances of your colored shadows could all be out of whack on everyone else's screens, not to mention that the whole thing overall could be too dark or too light. My LCD monitor is kind of old and has a pretty small viewing angle, so if I happen to have my head too high or too low the colors look brighter or darker than they actually are. So I made myself a desktop background and a little gamma measuring image that I place next to the image I'm working on in Photoshop--out of the magic gamma calibration images found here: http://www.photoscientia.co.uk/Gamma.htm
 
For instance while working on shading in Photoshop I'll have the little gamma measuring image right
 
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right next to the one I'm working on; when the lines in it blend to an even gray I know that I'm looking at that level of my monitor more or less straight-on, so the colors I'm seeing are pretty much the real colors.
 
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Since I wrote that I could add that another way to do it is the ol' "color theory" way of warm/cool and complementary colors, like I just did--or close to it--here for instance:
 
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  The right side of sunriseNov 01, 2013 1:06 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This getting up at 7:00 am that I've been trying this week is pretty fun, only I'm bad at getting into bed at the right time. Practice makes perfect?
 
 
 
 
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