 | |
| |
|
|
view titles only (low bandwidth) |
| |
| Last day of the Supermassive Art Sale!! | Apr 30, 2014 3:39 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Okay we are now on *gasp* the last day of the Supermassive Art Sale! That means this is the last day to get original A* artwork for just $10 a piece, instead of usually $50 per piece. These are the actual pieces of paper I smeared ink and stuff on to make your favorite A* pages, yes! As you read through the comic, you'll see the availability of the art for each page at the lower-left corner—"original art" in gold means it's available to purchase, and clicking that gold text will take you to its ordering page. Here are some examples of pages that are still available as of this writing that you may want to cash in on on this last day of the sale! (Click the photos to jump to their details/purchase page.)
~~~~~
Thanks to new A* forum member Sungrazer for letting me know that "Radierervergleich" (from yesterday's news article!) means, roughly, "eraser comparison" in German. Even Google doesn't know that! : oo
|
·····
|
| |
| Supermassive Radierervergleiches! | Apr 29, 2014 2:04 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:I'm so gonna regret trying to do a starfield dress. : ooo Before I decided to do that, I had to do some sketches to figure out what kind of strap arrangement I wanted to go with this time:
Strapless is way easier to draw. >_> Anyway most of Selenis' previous dresses have had shoulder straps of some sort so yay, variety!
~~~~~
Thanks to fudepens.com for linking to my Supermassive Eraser Round-up from their Pentel Hi-Polymer Ain Eraser (2 Stück/(Schwarz) shop page, which is particularly interesting to me because the site—which sells imported Japanese pens and stuff I guess—is in German. According to Google Translate, they say
| Yes, even to erasers there is a very active scene of enthusiasts who deal with it: here a large Radierervergleich at SMBHAX. |
I don't know what a Radierervergleich is, but I guess I have a large one, and some people visited my site from there to see it, so, neat! (The context of the link is also kind of funny because one of the first capsule reviews in the Round-up is of that black Ain Eraser, and let's just say it is not an overly favorable review. : P)
|
·····
|
| |
| A* Art Bargains and Alternate Hairdos | Apr 26, 2014 10:12 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:The Supermassive Art Sale, in which all my pieces of original A* art that are available through the site are going for just $10 instead of their usual, like, $50, ends at the end of the month—April 30th! Just five days from now!—so I thought I'd point out some pages I think are nifty that can still be snapped up for 80% off:
Episode 16, Page 5
^ Frame not included! It's Selenis in her short black hair, black jacket disguise—because the '50s were cool, I guess? : P
Episode 16, Page 9
^Frame not included on this one, either! A lone prospector cuts a lone figure as he heads back to his ship on some icy planetoid—but things are about to heat up! This is back when I was using pens for some of the linework, and that let me do some fun skinny detail on the prospector.
Episode 16, Page 28
^ Selenis is back on the hunt as her retro rocket takes off from a space station! A huge planet, and more stars than you can shake a stick at!
~~~~~
Here are some of the attempted sketches for today's A* page, in chronological order (but not necessarily consecutively—there were a lot more failed drawings than this; these were just the better looking ones : p; you can see the paper accumulating more and more traces of erased eyes : P P):
I liked the lines (although the drawing does pull to one side slightly, so I probably couldn't have used the drawing anyway : P) and hair style in the first one there, but it isn't really a style that works with long hair, and I didn't think Selenis would have stopped off for a haircut at this juncture, so I'll just have to keep that hairdo in mind for another time (there are only two scenes left in this current episode, by the way). And there were good things about the sketch shown large and in third place there, but I drew it in the wrong part of the paper—too low!—so the layout would have been really awkward for just about anything. : P And there was a good 'nother hour of flailing after these where I got so tired I couldn't even sit up straight, but I guess the 1000 monkeys + 1000 typewriters type equation finally worked out for me and somehow a decent sketch finally popped out. And that's how we make a drawing! : D >_>
|
·····
|
| |
| Ink, I think! And gilded watercolors, golly. | Apr 25, 2014 8:03 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Brush and ink reward sketch for a supporter of A*, on Patreon, which they will have in their hands by now if the address they gave me through Patreon is the correct up-to-date one, or at least has mail forwarding : oo:
I'm a little rusty with the ink, I think! I'll get to do at least one of these per month though, so you have this generous supporter to thank for gradually getting me warmed back up in ink work! : )
~~~~~~
Note to self: the funky fadings and gildings in today's page colors come from Hue/Saturation layers set to "Exclusion" at various opacities and hues, and the contrast of the horizon on the right was adjusted with a Hue/Sat layer set to "Luminosity."
|
·····
|
| |
| So I Put My Faith In Something Unknown | Apr 24, 2014 3:56 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:I mentioned it once before but we're getting pretty close now so: the Supermassive Art Sale ends April 30th, so if you're interested in getting some of my original artwork on this web site, you may want to get it before the end of the month, while it's 80% off! Once May starts, most of the artwork will go from its current sale price of $10 back to its regular price of $50. The sale's actually been going pretty well : ), thanks to everyone who's been snapping my art up. : D
Here's a March reward pen (marker) sketch sent to supporter of A*, on Patreon:
Pens are fun! That's a combination of a 0.3 mm art marker (Rotring Tikky Graphic) with a big fat Faber-Castell "big brush" brush pen-style marker.
~~~~~
The soundtrack for today's A* page is (viewer discretion advised: violence, mature themes) Calvin Harris' "Sweet Nothing":
It's not enough to tell me that you care
When we both know that words are empty air
|
·····
|
| |
| A Sketchy Outfit! | Apr 23, 2014 2:34 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Weird coloring shenanigans today! Anyway here's another March reward sketch for another supporter of A*, on Patreon:
Will we ever see Selenis in such an outfit in the comic? Uh... Probably not! Fortunately the sketches don't care. ; )
|
·····
|
| |
| Selenis Skydive Patreon Sketch | Apr 21, 2014 11:12 PM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Here's another March reward sketch for a supporter of A* on Patreon that should be in their generous hands by now : ) :
|
·····
|
| |
| Five Years of A*! And It's TMI Friday : o | Apr 19, 2014 5:19 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:I'm a little late on this but did you know A* is five years old? Yep, the first episode—in its original, silent, animated form—went online on March 18th, 2009 (so I'm about a month late in remembering this ; ). Five years! That's a pretty long time! All I can say is thank you everyone for reading this little story, it definitely wouldn't still be puttering along without its loyal readers. Hugs all around!!! : DD
Speaking of thanking people, here's a reward sketch that went out in the mail a week or so ago to a reader who's supporting A* through Patreon:
~~~~~
It's TMI Friday! Man did I have an interesting day:
- I got a phishing phone call! My phone showed a weird incoming number ("1 (03"—which is maybe part of an international calling code or something?), and when I answered, a computerized voice instantly kicked in, saying they were sorry (no mention who they were) but my card (no mention which card) had just been suspended, dial "1" to connect to their call center or something to rectify it. Well this sounded like a hoot, so I hit "1" and pretty much the same voice came back and said to hit "1" (again : P) to get the card reinstated, or "2" to hang up. Sweet menu system, guys. So I hit "1" again. THEN we got to the meat of it: "Please enter your 16-digit account number." Uh-huh, suuuuure. : P Anyway I'd never gotten one of those so that was fun.
- I got yet another temporary member card and membership application in the mail from the AARP! They've been after me to join up for oh at least five years now. Is this normal? I'm 1.2 billion seconds old, which is to say, midway through age 39. : P It would be pretty sweet to get AARP discounts at like restaurants and stuff but I think I might get strange looks. : PP
- I tweaked a back muscle of some sort earlier in the day as I tried to pose for Selenis' picture in today's page. Feeling better now, but I guess I'm not quite in shape for swimsuit season yet. I'd better get on that, time is running out! : o
|
·····
|
| |
| It isn't what you know | Apr 18, 2014 12:20 AM PDT | url |
| | | |
Added 1 new A* page:I realized something about watercolor midway through coloring this page, which is that you can just slash down a stroke of concentrated color, dip your brush in water, and then swizzle the paint around on the paper to get various gradations, and those neat little gradients the cool kids do. Duh! I kind of knew that, but I didn't *know* it, you know? Maybe I'll be able to use it in a useful way tomorrow.
|
·····
|
| |
| Just 2 weeks left on these A* art bargains! | Apr 16, 2014 11:12 PM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Okay remember I said I was gonna end the Supermassive Art Sale at the end of this month—which means prices on all the original A* art you can buy on this site will go from the current $10 back up to their regular prices (usually $50)—and that before the end I'd go and point out some faves of mine that you might want to snap up while they're still 80% off or whatever? Well the month is already more than half over so I guess I'd better get started pointing out the bargains!
Episode 13, page 157
is one I always liked—one of the earliest traditional media pages I did, and I kinda still can't figure out how I did it—the guard's shiny helmet and face in particular, not to mention Selenis' swingin' walk. : o Man, this is making me nostalgic for ink wash. : P Also this early on was leaving the margins open on the paper, so the actual painted area is bigger than later pages. It's also one of just a handful of original pages left from this whole episode!
Episode 15, page 13
I *just* took this one down from being reserved for taking to art shows around Seattle (if anyone orders it this month it'll probably take a few extra days because it's still at my dad's house in its show frame : p), so now you can buy it online cheap (for the next couple weeks, at least) instead of having to wait to catch it at a local show!
Episode 15, page 17
Gosh, I got really detailed in this take on Selenis' face, didn't I? And that's got to be one of the best noses I ever did. Sheesh my art skills must be getting worse now. I've come to draw Selenis' features differently since then, so you probably won't get another chance at her looking like this! It was also fun to have the portal window as a framing device.
~~~~~~
Special bonus feature, the Instagram of today's pencils, before slathering them in watercolor:
|
·····
|
| |
| A Patreon Pencil Sketch | Apr 16, 2014 12:42 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I did as a March reward for an A* supporter on Patreon:
I've had a couple new supporters sign up there in the past few days, which is really exciting—to me, at least. : ) Still got a bunch more March reward sketches to show, but I want to make sure the people they're sent to have a chance to get them in the mail before I show a photo of them to everyone on the blog here.
Also, thanks to everyone who went and voted for A* since I mentioned the little TopWebComics widget I put under the comic yesterday—A* shot up in rank by about 15 spots already! : o Gee, if only I could mention it every day. Well I won't spam you with that, so I'll just settle for a big THANK YOU <3 <3 right here, which will have to last you for a while. : D
|
·····
|
| |
| Voting and Taxes : o | Apr 15, 2014 12:30 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Got my taxes done over the weekend, and in totaling up profits and expenses for last year, I found that 2013 was the first year in which A* actually made a profit! And one too small to be taxed, conveniently. : P A great deal of the thanks for this breakthrough goes to my readers, who gave me another year of kindly contributions via donations, ad revenue, and original artwork and other purchases. Thanks everyone, we made a profit, wheee!
It also helped a bit that I got stingier on spending ad dollars, I suppose, and, maybe because I've started to exhaust some of the obvious things to experiment with, I spent way less on art supplies in 2013 than in 2012—only $875! (It was more than twice that in 2012. : ooo ... It should kinda be coming down in 2014, too, since I've learned to use watercolor inexpensively, but then again this fancy watercolor paper costs like $2 or $3 per A* page, so eh hm maybe it won't be coming down. But I've been able to auction them off to readers for a bit more than before, so hopefully that will offset it. : ))
Getting back to the advertising angle, I popped the TopWebComics ranking/voting widget up on the main page near the comic there; I had it there years ago, briefly, but it didn't seem to make a difference in the number of votes A* got per month, so I decluttered it, relegating it to the "about" page. But over the weekend I had a reader ask if I could put it on the front page so that they won't forget to vote, which is awfully nice of them, and it *has* been a while since I tried it there (and my rank isn't quite as embarrassing as it used to be : P), so I guess I'll give it another shot. I don't save up artwork and stuff to show only to people who vote, 'cause I prefer just to show my artwork to everyone : D, so I don't expect a ton of folks to vote for me, but some people seem to enjoy doing it anyway, and I do it myself religiously every day—twice! ; ) 'Cause you're allowed to vote once every 24 hours from each unique IP address you have, so I vote once from my WIFI, and once from my cell. : D There you have it, the secret of my success!!
|
·····
|
| |
| Ohh Right April 15th | Apr 12, 2014 8:59 AM PDT | url |
| | | |
Added 1 new A* page:Boy, Tax Day kind of snuck up on me. : o Looks like I'll be adding up A* shipping expenses and art supply receipts from 2013 this weekend! : P
|
·····
|
| |
| This is *not* a Patreon reward; Just Add Pink | Apr 11, 2014 8:57 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch that *won't* be going out as a March reward to an A* supporter on Patreon:
Can hardly tell it's a hasty Photoshop job of rescaling the head and neck so Selenis doesn't look like she ate from the wrong side of a mushroom in Wonderland, can you? ; ) Anyhoo I'm working away at a more proportionally correct sketch that won't require Photoshopping—and Photoshopping doesn't work so well when you have to mail the actual sketch to someone, anyway. Maybe one of these days they'll have a Photoshop that can actually edit real things, that would be way handier.
Speaking of Photomashoppin', the crazy color sky in today's A* page is totally gratuitous. I had already hue-cycled the colors to this seaside scheme
but I guess I just felt like it needed a little oomph in that big, placid sky. And is there really anything a heaping dose of searing pink *doesn't* improve?
|
·····
|
| |
| Photoshop, Wizard Me Some Colors | Apr 10, 2014 8:26 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Welp, more digital manipulation of the watercolor colors today; it is actually painted in my usual magenta/ultramarine combo
and then I went and manipulated the contrast, re-colored it with the original, less-contrasty colors to brighten it back up, then shifted its hue 180 degrees around the color wheel—but this time I used black and white gradients to control exactly where the contrasts, colors, and hue shifts took place, so for instance I only hue-shifted roughly the left side of the image, so it sort of looks like I painted it in four colors, when I really used just two. Economy! : D Also way easier to do a transition like that in Photoshop than in actual paint, I would think. : P
This is what those adjustment layers look like in Photoshop's Levels list, you can kind of see how the gradients shaped them—in an adjustment layer, the white areas make the adjustment, like the hue shift in the Hue/Saturation layer, while the black areas do nothing; the three black radial gradients in the second (from the bottom) Levels adjustment layer, for instance, prevent it from darkening the darker shades in Selenis as much as it does in the rest of the image, so she stands out a bit more brightly:
Here are the pencils
I was annoyed with myself for erasing them as entirely as I could before adding the white ink, because the painting always looks like a blobby muddle at that point; fortunately the white ink saved the day, as it often does; since I was removing the light side of the figures completely rather than leaving an outline there like I sometimes have (I painted a very light outline there over the pencils, then erased the pencils, and then whited out the fainter paint outlines with white ink), it also sort of slimmed them down from my somewhat brawny pencils, which is probably for the best; one of these days maybe I'll actually learn to pencil trim figures. I notice I also subconsciously corrected little things here and there from the pencils, like the angle of her right (our left) foot; that's sometimes an advantage in drawing over things in multiple passes; for that matter, the whole scale of the guy ended up changing—his lines were not very well preserved from the pencils, which made for some worrisome moments, but fortunately I could blot out of a lot of him using lens flare as an excuse ; ), and in the end the smaller scale makes more sense, probably.
|
·····
|
| |
| Neo-grunge, Space Monkeys, and Ravenmania | Apr 09, 2014 4:39 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Just like a couple days ago, I turn to Photoshop high contrast to get myself out of a painting mess—but this time there's no going back and mostly restoring the painted look, because instead of just mostly screwing up one patch, I painted the whole thing way too light—as you can see in the photo of the original if you click the crossed-out "original art" link at the page's lower-left corner (it isn't for sale because I did go back and try to paint over it in darker colors, and of course this turned into a muddle : P). I'm going to blame this partly on adjusting my drawing table lighting yet again—I now have my dual 15-watt lamps beaming up at the ceiling instead of down at the table, so the lighting is very diffuse and indirect—eyes cool with it so far.
Anyhoo so since trying my usual adjustment of just making the scanned colors a bit darker resulted in light blotches all over from the too-light watercolor, I instead cranked it up to really high contrast, desaturated that to grayscale—so now I had black and white with dark grays, threw the darker-but-light-blotchy colored version over that in Color mixing mode only to put some color back into the dark grays, then scrolled the color spectrum from the painted ultramarine/magenta to this weird blue/green.
Next time I'll try just painting darker in the first place. : P This super-processed look is *sort* of appealing to me in that it has kind of a dark grunge-noir appearance, if you will, and lets me explore different color combinations without spending a fortune on watercolors. : PP If I hadn't had to crank the contrast up quite so much due to the original being way too light, the grunge would be more limited to neat watercolor-paper-texture patterns in the dark grays, rather than specks and streaks everywhere from pencil traces. I don't know if it's something I want to do regularly, but I guess I'll see how I feel about the next page, if I manage to paint it dark enough in the first place.
~~~~~~
Hey how about animals? We don't really have them in A* but for some reason I was looking at wacky animal videos today. The more on-topic one is an old "Department of Libraries" 1961 government documentary on Ham the Space Chimp, who I covered somewhat in a long blog entry years and years ago, back before I spent all my time fretting over paint; the film has that great old super-chipper-and-official type of narrator, creepily narrating horrible things the US was doing to animals in the name of science (or at any rate the Space Race—can't let those Ruskies beat us to hitting the Moon with an elephant or whatever!; you can watch Ham's star turn right here. (I found it in yet another excellent post by humanoidhistory on tumblr.)
And uh the other one, well, I was looking up actual talking animals for a non-A* story idea I've been vaguely mulling over in case I should need a story to pitch to someone, and anyway I ended up watching Ravenmania, which features a mad-professor-looking raven who seems to have been taught to speak by someone who's a big fan of Edgar Allen Poe...and maybe Pac-Man. And the raven seems to have a feline fan of his own. : o Ah, YouTube, where would we be without thee?
|
·····
|
| |
| Pencil lines and ink spatter | Apr 08, 2014 2:49 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:Well, after deciding I was okay with pencil lines after all on the last page, I thought I'd try going more whole-hog with depending on pencil lines for the final image in today's page. Think they were a bit much, once I darkened the watercolors up in Photoshop; in retrospect, I'm happier with the approach I took to leaving pencils in pages 76 through 80, where I would usually replace most of the pencil lines, but would leave them where a neutral line would work better than color or white ink (or nothing).
Did try some white ink spatter—been positively ages since I did that! Messy fun. Tried to leave it thick 'cause I wanted a sort of streamy foam effect, which I got just in a few places, but the thick, dried spatters also leave shadows on the scan; probably a bit much, I guess I'll either have to thin the ink out more before spattering, or chip off more of the spatters after they've dried.
I *was* kind of happy with how freeing it was, having the pencil lines, to then go in higglety-pigglety with red and blue watercolor for shading—whereas if I'd been planning to remove move of those lines, I'd probably have been more careful to do more of a solid fill thing. But I did learn, when trying to salvage the previous page, that you can do dry on dry with the color fills and still mix 'em together by putting a little brush pressure on the underlying dried color, and then you can build up some nice gradated color areas that way...so maybe I'll try more of that.
Also, today I learned how many stamps it takes to send a letter (or a Patreon supporter sketch—finished all the pencil ones for March!) to the UK: 3! Actually more like two and a half, but I don't think they actually let you paste on just half a stamp, which is too bad. : P
|
·····
|
| |
| Arguments I am having with my brain | Apr 05, 2014 4:54 PM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:
Oh dear. Well, this page [edit: original version, shown above] may look like ink or ink wash or something, but I actually set out to make a color watercolor page pretty much just like the other ones I've been doing for the past month or whatever. Normally it might've come out looking more or less like this
but something about the color balance or the shading or something was bugging me; I did this to it
and felt that was a vast improvement, design-wise: no more confusing shading on the face, and the enlarged white spaces make the forms more powerful and interesting, in my mind—if only it weren't so blindingly...bright. So I messed with it some more and the black and white version you see as the final page was the most compelling version I could come up with, although I did spend a long time mucking around with sort of subtly tinted variants like this
Anyway, the point is I don't know what I'm doing. Oh yeah, toward the end of all that I got to thinking that maybe the real problem was that I just wasn't reconciled to the pencil lines being in there with the watercolors, so I erased them, and then tried to shore the border-less watercolors up with watercolor and white ink, but I lost the face and the whole thing kind of went weird. So we won't be using that version, although you can buy it off eBay if you're into weird things.
This isn't part of some intentional shift back to black and white. As you've probably realized by now, I kind of just take each page as they come in sort of a desperate struggle to come up with something that seems to express what that page is meant to convey. It is certainly true though that I've been going back and forth in my mind as to how I feel about the pencil lines; sometimes they seem fine to me, other times they seem like they shouldn't be in there—but usually I'm dissatisfied with the changes that occur when I try to replace them. What I should really do then, probably, is convince myself from the start of a page that the pencil lines are definitely just temporary, and I need to put the watercolor down in such a way that it will be able to stand on its own once I erase the pencil at the end. But I almost always get attached to the pencil lines and think oh, these came out really well here, I'll keep them, I'm sure that'll work okay. And then later they bother me. : P Sheesh, what a waffler.
There's an even larger issue though with the watercolor, which is that I have not been able to shake myself out of more or less just filling in the pencil lines with color, rather than actually slinging watercolor around like a painter. That is bothering me. I actually started doing a bit of it once I erased the pencil lines from today's page and was forced to try to salvage something from the page with watercolor; possibly if I had come in from the start knowing I would do that, I would have been able to make it work (not losing track of the intended layout of the face would have been nice, for instance!)—but then again, when the lines are there, I just tend to default to filling in the blanks. I felt better about this prior to page 44, when I didn't have proper watercolor paper and didn't really have the option of doing neat watercolory things with the paint. Maybe it would help if I went back to starting off painting wet-on-wet like I was doing from pages 52 though 71, because then unpredictable watercolory things can happen and force me to go somewhat outside of my neat little fill-in-the-blanks comfort zone. Like, hm, I felt like I hit a nice groove in pages 55 through 57, and in retrospect I had a kind of simple and loose approach but one that still made room for plenty of control—but then, I guess, I tried teaching myself some other tricks and got away from what I'd been doing there.
Huh hm huh. Well who knows what the next page will bring. I was at least pretty happy with how the pencil drawing went (which may have ended up being a problem in painting when I treated the pencils too preciously!); I was struggling with it for a while, and my eyes were blinking out on me, which has been happening lately, and finally I figured out that the lighting was too bright with the 40 watt bulb I have in my drawing table lamp; before, I was using two 25 watt bulbs, and that was okay for a long time but started bugging me a few weeks ago, maybe when I started getting super scrutinizing about my pencil approach, around page 74 (which was also a disaster). So anyway today after my eyes were okay with looking around my apartment, I went and replaced the 40 watters with 15 watt bulbs, and almost immediately was able to get the pencil drawing to come out okay—actually I think that started as soon as I turned off the 40 watt bulbs and was just drawing in the admittedly rather dim ambient light from indirect lights on the far side of the room. But so far my eyes seem much happier with the 15 watt bulb or bulbs, so that's a plus.
Maybe next week I'll stop overthinking everything and just paint, that would be nice. : P
(Oh but yeah there is the nice abstraction in black and white, isn't there? And the pencil lines fit in nice and tidy with the watercolor once color is removed...and the paper creates some kinda nifty tones, too. Maybe I'll paint in color, hyperconvert it to this high contrast black and white look, then recolor it digitally, haha! ... No I really shouldn't do that. I *do* wish I had a super-fancy printer that could print the contrasted design back out on heavy watercolor paper (in waterproof ink, too, I guess! : P) so then I could watercolor back over that, that would be interesting.)
~~~~~
EDIT/Update:
Took another stab at the paint, on the theory that maybe if what I had really objected original was the shading on the face, all I had to do was white it out:
That helped, but after losing the lines, the painting as a whole had gotten fudgy compared to the original version I'd scanned with the pencil lines intact, which looked nice and sharp. Comparing the two, it occurred to me that if indeed my objection all along was to the shading on the face, then maybe I was actually fine with the pencil lines after all, and all that was needed was to replace the shaded version of the face with the brightened version via the magic of Photoshop—and voila, the final, color version you see in the comic viewer now, with sharp pencil lines, and the face magically lit up. Whewwww.
Okay, so what lessons do I take away from this? Uh well #1, I am okay with pencil lines, they aren't to blame for bad painted shading. #2, I shouldn't just go automatically shading everything—maybe especially complicated small detailed areas like smaller faces of main characters? Or something. #3, if I screw up on #2 again, Photoshop can salvage the pencil lines from under bad watercolor shading. Anyway, I owe my pencil a hug. There you go, buddy—let's never fight again!
|
·····
|
| |
| Watercoloring water & other madness | Apr 04, 2014 2:46 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:You know, watercoloring water is pretty fun. And come to think of it, I think I've definitely decided that episode 23 will be an underwater (or some liquid, anyway) episode. After 22, which will be a dry desert episode. Unless I change my mind. : oo
~~~~~
A* Patreon supporters, check your email, your e-book download link should be in there. Got another reward sketch done today, and the first one mailed off; the second I think will be going to the UK, although first I gotta get to the PO and make sure I get the postage right. : o Sketching is fun, though! At first I was getting all uptight and worried about these, but then I noticed in poking around Patreon's reward-tracking back-end thingy that it kind of implies the rewards are meant to go out each and every month you're supported, which is what I'd thought when I first came up with these sketch rewards, but then I got the impression from some rewards in other campaigns that they were more like one-time things...so I was anxious about getting someone's ONE sketch just right. But now that I know I get to do them every month for my supporters, man, the gloves are off! : D It's crazy sketchin' time! : )) And this is kinda what I wanted to make myself do more of, anyway—drawing, I mean, and with gusto—so yeah, just gonna have fun with these. (Actually last night a sort of visual theme I want to explore in a larger piece finally crystallized in a "oh gosh get out of bed and pace around" sort of way; not sure when I'll have the time for that but that will let me get in some exploration of it in these smaller sketches.)
~~~~~
If you went looking for my art at the art show I had going here in Seattle and didn't find it, I apologize—turns out the people running the show took my art down without telling me, sometime in the past few weeks; heck, could have been right after the opening reception three weeks ago, for all I know! Sheesh. I think they were kind of new at this putting on an art show thing. Oh well, the local art council has been notified about them, and I've got a new show coming in May, to the Fremont/Wallingford area of Seattle, and a much more established establishment. : )
~~~~~
YouTube decided to try to get me to watch Skydiver nearly struck by meteorite, which is interesting—and, you would think, extremely unlikely! And speaking of semi-random videos, do you know who strikes me as a pint-sized, punked-out, cute Swedish version of Selenis...sorta? Robyn, that's who. Uh-huh. Or maybe this is just an excuse to get you to watch her crazy videos, which have been amusing me no end lately.
|
·····
|
| |
| Vacuums, Segways, & starting Patreon rewards | Apr 02, 2014 11:22 PM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:In addition to a lawnmower, Selenis' jet ski has now been compared with startling accuracy by readers to b) a vacuum cleaner and c) a Segway. : o
All of A*'s Patreon pledges have been processed now, so tomorrow I'll start to work on sending our rewards to current backers. I'll do the e-books first, since that's just emails, and then it's on to sketches for those supporting A* to the tune of $10 and up. Got the first one done today! (I'm starting with the pencil sketches, since those are the quickest!) I'll post photos of them here, but maybe not until a week or so after I've mailed them off, to make reasonably sure that the supporter they're going to gets to see it first, live and in person. : )
|
·····
|
| |
| Power Mowing through Patreon Pledges | Apr 02, 2014 12:03 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:A reader commented about yesterday's page that it looked like Selenis was taking a lawnmower out for a spin on a big yard, and, with that image in my mind, I can see that today's page does nothing to dispel it! So now we know that futuristic minimalist jet skis look remarkably like lawnmowers—an important discovery for science fiction, I feel.
Turns out that Patreon takes up to 48 hours after the end of the month to process all the support pledges, and it looks like they've got through about half of mine in the first 24 hours here, so I guess they're right on schedule. : P Should be able to start sending out the rewards soon, then!
|
·····
|
|
|
