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  A*vania 50000Oct 31, 2015 4:46 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a Halloweeny sketch (that I actually did a few months ago—not sure why I was in such a spooky mood back then!) that I gave to a reader as their monthly reward for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign:
 
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The support I get each month through Patreon from generous readers is *super-duper* important; even if it's just a buck or two, every contribution there is a huge help! I couldn't do this without you guys, so thank you very very much!
 
And Happy Halloween! ^_^
 
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Turns out the place I was having an A* art show this past month here in Seattle (details back here) developed a scheduling conflict, so my show will end after the usual one month, rather than extending through November! So um you have until early tomorrow afternoon to catch it : o
 
 
 
 
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  Just like on those cop shows!Oct 30, 2015 3:51 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:My own "optical enhancement" was a ton of white ink! : oo
 
 
 
 
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  Blogging about the future--not so coolOct 28, 2015 11:32 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I'm working on an illustrated post about a nifty old comic I got recently—the one I alluded to um a week or two ago—and I have the pictures ready to go but not the writing, so I guess um well we'll see how we do tomorrow. *Friday* (or really early Saturday) I will definitely have a new A* Halloweeny picture for you, though!
 
 
 
 
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  No Selenis? Get happy!Oct 27, 2015 10:41 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:In scribbling down the more or less final arrangement and script for this week's pages, I discovered that Selenis wasn't going to be in any of them. : o How did I get myself into this. But if you need to get your Selenis art fix in, you could always go and bid on the original watercolor art for last Friday's page
 
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which as of this writing is still available for its starting price of $9.99 on eBay—auction ends this Friday. I don't see us having too many if any more super-happy Selenis pages any time soon, so uh LQQK R@R3! Yeah there we go. ^_^
 
 
 
 
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  How I got slightly less bad at paint mixingOct 26, 2015 10:10 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Okay so I promised I would talk about what I started doing different with watercolor painting mixing beginning on page 34. Actually it's pretty simple. I don't have a ton of work space in my apartment, and I use a little palette with tiny paint-holding bowls in it:
 
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You can get those for like a buck or two at just about any art supply store. Before page 34, prior to beginning the painting each day I would prepare one bowl with red watercolor, and one with blue, each of about medium saturation that would give you a good solid color without overloading the paper with pigment; on their own, red and blue can only get so dark, after all. I would also prepare two more bowls, each containing about the same amount of red and blue pigment as the plain red and plain blue bowls combined: one bowl mixing up as dark reddish purple, and one as dark bluish purple. While painting, if I needed to go darker than the regular red and blue bowls allowed, I'd start throwing in the darker mixes from the purple bowls.
 
That was all well and good but it made mixing up certain gradations of color rather complicated: how to go smoothly from a light red to a semi-dark bluish purple, for instance? So finally I realized I could simplify all that a great deal by just starting with two bowls: one of super-saturated red, and one of super-saturated blue; sure, these may be slightly overkill if you just need a regular red or blue, but they can mix anything from medium to dark blue-purple-red on the fly—and if you need lighter colors, you just add water. I've been using this arrangement since page 35, and it's been helping me get richer colors and gradations.
 
And more color variety! My palette has just 10 mixing bowls, and since I have a small jar in the middle holding all my brushes while painting, the two bowls on the far side from where I'm sitting are rather inconvenient to use, so in effect I have 8 bowls available for regular work. In addition to the two bowls for plain red and blue, I usually have two more for very light red and blue—and with those, plus two bowls taken up by pre-mixed purples, I had only four bowls left for custom mixes while painting—and I was habitually using two of those as overflow containers for the dark purples, since it wasn't possible to mix those back up on the fly (I'd need to dig into my paint tubes for that). So I was really only using two bowls for mixing anything besides my set colors; in practice this meant I was almost always just painting everything with those six: light red, light blue, medium red, medium blue, dark purple-red, and dark purple-blue. It was a little lacking in variety! Now, I can move the two light colors to the back of the palette, since I don't find myself using them as much when I can mix anything easily on the fly (this only occurred to me just now, mind you : P), leaving myself a whopping six bowls in the front of the palette for on-the-fly mixing of any sorts of delicious purples or maroons or ultramarines that I want.
 
Of course, in these all-blue cruiser interior scenes, those don't come into play so much, but uh *otherwise* I think this new arrangement has been helping me get more out of my two little colors. : )
 
 
 
 
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  Kerberos; I can't tell timeOct 24, 2015 11:12 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:NASA's New Horizons probe has returned a photo of Pluto's moon Kerberos, a tiny little thing now seen to be composed to two lobes, like the Dawn spacecraft found at comet 67P—likely two objects that came together, in this case objects about 8 and 5 kilometers across.
 
I may get some extra art streaming in this weekend 'cause I gotta get some sketching/painting for supporters of the A* Patreon page done; I've been trying to get to it during the past few weeks but that has not met with much success (including me just really having trouble with a drawing! ; P).
 
So maybe that'll happen, or maybe it won't, because I've already wasted far too much weekend time here trying to find a suitable replacement for my phone's clock/weather app, which I've found is constantly overestimating the temperature, and making me double back to get a hat when I go out! : P One difficulty I'm running into is that while there are some nice-looking apps for this, many of them, even though they let you switch to the US-style 12-hour clock, don't have an AM/PM indicator to go with it, I suppose because most people in the world—outside United States, anyway—aren't used to needing such crutches—but I'll be darned if I'm going to learn to subtract 12 from an hour just to figure the evening time at my advanced old age. Hmph! : P
 
 
 
 
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  In WWI did they just shout "Hey, look out"?Oct 23, 2015 5:05 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:For a while I had "red alert" in the captain's little announcement here, and out of curiosity tried to look it up, but to my surprise found that the internet (ie Google) does not have any real idea of where the phrase comes from. It definitely had Cold War usage (a 1958 book by that name by Peter George, for instance (originally "Two Hours to Doom" in the UK), which formed the basis for Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" film, on whose screenplay George collaborated), but before that, who knows? Was "red" a reference to Soviet communists? ("Red Scare," a reference to fears of a violent "Bolshevik" uprising in the United States, goes back to at least 1920, and Red Terror came two or three years before that, with the definitely violent Bolshevik campaign of systematic oppression unleashed in Petrograd and Moscow (the Bolsheviks even had a newspaper named "Red Terror," how's that for leveraging media propaganda?)) Tied in specifically with a nuclear threat? (Given that "red" as the highest alert level has figured into a number of official government warning systems since the 70s or so, an exclusive Soviet/nuclear slang origin seems unlikely...but stranger things have happened in etymology and government, I suppose.) A WWII military origin, maybe? You'd think someone would have made a note of it. Like "Dear diary: Today, the captain had a real zinger for getting us on our toes in the air raid drill." Or an old military reference handbook or something. Anyway, someone let Google know.
 
 
 
 
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  Patience or impatienceOct 22, 2015 2:20 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Ooh, not doing so well on the time thing again. While I was painting this one, a kindly viewer on my Twitch stream said that they admired how patient I was with the process. I don't know, maybe I was too patient! Say speaking of which, a little after that I got impatient waiting for the red background (which I painted first) to dry, and went and painted the far left figure, so the light purple there bled out into the still-wet red background around it. That was kind of fun. The background was dry by the time I got to the other two figures, though.
 
 
 
 
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  Oh boy, Hellboy!Oct 20, 2015 11:07 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Today I got myself digital copies of the five remaining volumes of the Hellboy series that were both written *and* drawn by creator Mike Mignola (in total, volumes 1 through 6, plus the latest, Hellboy in Hell volume 1) that I didn't already have; some months back I'd snapped up Hellboy volume 1 in paperback when my brother decided to dig up and clear out our childhood comic collection (we'd stopped collecting in the 90s, which is when volume 1 originally came out, but he must have picked up the collection in recent years), and enjoyed it quite a bit; then last week I finally gave in to curiosity/temptation and got myself the second volume, digitally (they'd all recently arrived on Comixology), and that was a hoot, and after I finished it today I just couldn't *not* get the others, which I am now devouring.
 
Mignola has a unique, boldly expressive yet enduringly solid graphic style perfectly suited to his taste for stories of exploration of folklore and battle with mythological monsters—plus Nazis. That might sound horrific, but despite vast swaths of pitch black ink, his stories and characters have an unmistakable lightness and charm
 
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that is just so much fun. Did I mention the Nazis?
 
He's quite the student of folklore, too, and he's had me dashing back and forth to Wikipedia to look up the characters and references he snatches from history, both fictional and (as far as is known) actual, such as Rasputin (I hadn't realized there were so many creepy photos of him : o), Elizabeth Báthory (aka "The Blood Countess" : o), and Baba Yaga, of whom the Russian animals speak after her first encounter with Hellboy:
 
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And he doesn't just know the obvious stuff like that; he seems to have a vast knowledge of smaller scale tales and legends; for instance, his intro blurb to the first short story collected in volume 3, a tale titled "The Corpse" (and yes, it turns out to be quite the charming fellow!), says the inspiration came from "an Irish folklore called 'Teig O'Kane and the Corpse'"—not one with which I expect most casual readers of folklore are familiar!—and then he "added bits and pieces of other English and Irish folktales (the changeling, the bouncing rock, Jenny Greenteeth, etc.), and there you go." Simple! : o And then he takes all these fascinating bits and boils them together into his own adventure stories that are their own thing altogether.
 
 
 
 
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  Actually I'm running low on blueOct 20, 2015 12:10 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:The color red returns tomorrow! : )
 
 
 
 
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  Don't try this at-- Well, you could tryOct 17, 2015 5:47 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I mailed to a reader as their monthly reward for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign, which is super-important for keeping this crazy comic going—thanks to everyone helping me out over there!! ^_^
 
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And extra bonus: astronauts have always loved to float things around for the camera in microgravity, and they've got a new 4K camera to play with on the International Space Station these days, so now the heat is on to come up with new tricks to film floating around up there. So here we have dyes and effervescent tablets being inserted into a floating drop of water—in case you were ever wondering how Alka-Seltzer might work in space.
 
 
 
 
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  Do you want stem cells with that?Oct 16, 2015 3:59 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Early in A*'s comic life, my mother asked me a seemingly simple but very insightful question: "What do they eat?" After all, in the colonized worlds around A*, they don't have most of the plants and animals we're used to eating here on Earth. I think I answered mom with some response about bacteria cultures engineered to simulate traditional foods, but a team of Dutch scientists—whose work has now formed the basis of a new company—has taken a different approach: growing meat in the lab:

"The team had a prototype cooked and eaten in London two years ago that cost £215,000 to make. [...] The process starts with stem cells being extracted from cow muscle tissue. In the laboratory, these are cultured with nutrients and growth-promoting chemicals to help them develop and multiply. Three weeks later, there are more than a million stem cells, which are put into smaller dishes where they coalesce into small strips of muscle about a centimetre long and a few millimetres thick. The strips are then painstaking layered together, coloured and mixed with fat. The resulting burger was cooked and eaten at a news conference in London two years ago."

So this is old news—I think I missed it the first time around. The new news that got it re-published by the BBC is that the team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years.
 
Oh yeah, and the reason / selling point for all this?

"An independent study found that lab-grown beef uses 45% less energy than the average global representative figure for farming cattle. It also produces 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires 99% less land."

And these days there's a potential new direction for their enterprise to explore:

"The researchers will also investigate ways of making chops and steaks using 3-D printing technologies - but that is likely to take longer to commercialise."

There's more than one way to make that McSynthBurger(tm)!
 
 
 
 
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  I like to blog about not having time to blogOct 15, 2015 2:16 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Today I found and acquired a super-nifty little digital collection of a comic series from the '60s that I hadn't known anything about before, with really inspiring artwork by an illustrator I hadn't heard of before, and I'll show and tell all about it (hm now I'm behind on *two* blog topics I've promised : o) as soon as I've actually read it and then also whenever I stop getting myself way behind schedule each gosh-darned week. I sense a pattern here... It's almost as though I take my sweet time on pages until I get good and behind and then have the thrill of zipping through the work in exhilarating battle against the daily deadline. Uh hm well when I put it that way it does sound far too plausible!
 
 
 
 
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  Science can ID you by your brain activityOct 14, 2015 12:43 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I don't know if my brushes and paints will ever forgive me for the horrible things I did trying to get today's watercolor page to work. : o
 
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Privacy buffs might want to get out their tin foil hats, because according to a new BBC article, "Neuroscientists have found that they can identify individuals based on a coarse map of which brain regions 'pair up' in scans of brain activity." And not only can they ID you based on your brain activity—with greater than 90% accuracy, already—they can also use these brain scans to predict things like how quick you are on your feet, the size of your vocabulary, and your income level.
 
Beat that, Professor X.
 
 
 
 
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  How to draw the mighty Kirby wayOct 12, 2015 10:44 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a frustration sketch I scratched out this afternoon between trying to start a painting for a Patreon supporter (couldn't manage to draw the left eye in that one, either! >_<) and drawing today's A* page:
 
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I was trying to get myself to draw with proper drawing form, because I've found that I've devolved into a limp-wristed, palm-downward style that can end up being painful after you've been putting weight on your drawing hand with the wrist bent back for a while. Don't do that, silly me! Got to keep the palm up, with the blade of the hand braced against the drawing table; I went and watched Jack Kirby's iron wrist in action for a while (that thing could draw 6+ pages a day, every day!) to remind myself how to do things properly! (I think that's the only video of Kirby drawing that I've been able to find on YouTube. Anyone know of any others?)
 
So if you see me slacking with the wrist on my Twitch live stream, please use the chat box there tell me to straighten up and draw right! ^_^ (I think part of what's contributed to it is that I draw and paint on the same image, and those activities use different grips (and actually different grips among the different size brushes, too, really), and I might be getting those confused. : P)
 
 
 
 
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  Mr. Fantastic is a jerkOct 10, 2015 2:26 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I sent to a reader as their monthly reward for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign; the support I get from readers through Patreon is absolutely instrumental in keeping A* going!
 
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Thank you!! ^_^
 
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Weekend bonus link! If you need to while away some weekend hours, why not do it by hitting YouTube to watch the 1978 Fantastic Four cartoon series? Mr. Fantastic, The Invisible Woman, The Thing, and...Herbie the Robot! (The Human Torch was licensed separately for a movie at the time.) It's pretty bad! Probably *really* bad... I've only managed to make myself skim one episode so far. >_> Mr. Fantastic tried to stretch really far and got all weak and limp and Sue had to reel him in. Also he likes to let Sue go on for a really long time with wild theories, and then shoot her down in a super condescending tone. But, you know, he's a genius and stuff.
 
 
 
 
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  Lose two videos, gain a manOct 09, 2015 1:23 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Twitch didn't save copies of my A* drawing and painting live streams today. : | My YouTube archive will have a gap! Dagnabbit. And after I fussed so much over this painting. (What's funny too is that I'd sort of planned on having just five people plus the commander in this squad—but when it came time to lay it out I kinda miscounted and so there's an extra person now! ^_^ Is it that weirdly spectral guy in back? Nah not really, he was normal enough in pencil. Except that his nose was too long. Which I didn't realize until I'd painted him. So then stuff got weird. : P)
 
 
 
 
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  Directed-energy weapons and deadly comic sinsOct 07, 2015 11:03 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Sheesh well I got straight late again today after spending too long wrestling with today's painting (the ambient pink color scheme I fell into for this ship's bridge is driving me nutty! : p). But fortunately I tripped across a couple nifty links I can share with you quickly:
  • Pertaining to yesterday's blog post and A* page, a reader sent me the link to Wikipedia's extensive page on Directed-energy weapons, which makes for some useful and fascinating reading
  • While searching for a list of which Whiz Comics issues (they're public domain these days, you can read or download them here for instance) include art by Captain Marvel co-creator and art director C. C. Beck, I stumbled across his list of The Seven Deadly Sins of Comics Creators—how many of these am I breaking? : o
 
 
 
 
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  Ceci n'est pas un électronOct 06, 2015 10:34 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Got a bit behind yesterday so I'm cutting off the blogging today to help get the ol' sleep schedule back on track. No blogging for me! (Incidentally, electrons moving through a vacuum (like in outer space or vacuum tubes) are invisible, just like the photons in laser beams would be—but it's more fun to draw them. : P)
 
 
 
 
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  John Paul Leon's 'Challengers of the Unknown'Oct 05, 2015 11:33 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:About a year ago, I wrote about how I'd bought my first new comic book in like decades or something, a Detective Comics Batman story by illustrator John Paul Leon. Well this past weekend I made myself a little present of his work from a short-lived late-'90s resurrection of a late-'50s science fiction team Jack Kirby drew for DC, Challengers of the Unknown. Here's a sample of JPL's work from the '90s version, with inking by Bill Reinhold (Shawn Martinbrough also did some excellent inking on him in the series), fabulous colors by Matt Hollingsworth, writing by Steven Grant and lettering by Ken Lopez:
 
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I really like how Leon combines flawless draftmanship with semi-abstract line and shadow, and he always comes up with creative yet perfectly natural ways of positioning the characters in the frame. I wish he drew more comics!
 
 
 
 
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  3... 2... 1... Launch! And sketch!Oct 03, 2015 4:04 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:So if you're reading A* and thinking to yourself "Gosh, A* sure is nifty, I hope I can go on reading it forever and ever," then you might be interested to know that the best way you can help make sure that happens is to support the comic through the A* Patreon campaign! Patreon is a service that makes it easy to send your favorite creators a little money each month, automatically, to help them keep making the stuff you like. It is a HUGE help to this comic and all the support I get through it is vastly appreciated! And I can even send out monthly rewards to folks there, for instance here's a brush and ink sketch I mailed off to a supporter for her monthly reward a while back:
 
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So yep, Patreon! Thanks everyone who's helping A* keep cruising along—even if you're simply reading the comic, that helps too! ^_^
 
 
 
 
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  But I plugged it in and everything!Oct 02, 2015 12:56 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:If you were watching me draw today's page—the pencil part—on my Twitch stream, I have to apologize for the abrupt, several minutes premature termination of the feed! The battery on my streaming laptop died because the power strip I had it plugged into had somehow been switched off. : p I *knew* I should have investigated why the screen was dimmer than usual when I started...
 
 
 
 
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  67P may be two comets in oneOct 01, 2015 1:12 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Well I said yesterday that today I'd rattle on about the streamlined paint mixing I've been doing on these A* pages of the past few days, but when I said that I had managed to reckon without the impact on my schedule all of yesterday's art show supervision and bloggetry would have, so, in short, it's late and I gotta go to bed. : P This state of tardiness will probably persist for the rest of the week, but *next* week is a whole new week in which to get behind, so I think I'll manage to be able to write about the paint stuff properly then. And by that time I ought to have a better perspective on this newfangled paint mixing, so I'll know a little bit more of what I'm talking about. Yeah... Yeah, that's the ticket!
 
So for today I'll just dump a space science link on you, it's a recent BBC article about how various analyses of comet 67P by the Rosetta probe—studying its strata layers visible in deep pits, an apparent crack across its thin "neck," and the direction of local gravity across its irregular surface—strongly suggest that the comet was once *two* comets that joined together ever so gently while sailing along similar paths through space. The article goes on to point out a few other known comets that have dual-lobed shapes similar to 67P's "rubber duck" shape, and speculates that they might be the products of similar comet mergings.
 
 
 
 
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