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| I got to solve this Monday thing | Nov 30, 2015 9:47 PM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I'm tired and am going to bed. Yay! :D
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| Sometimes a sketch comes out pretty good :o | Nov 28, 2015 3:00 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I sent to a wonderful reader as their monthly reward (yes they get a real hand-drawn sketch from me each month :) for supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign!
Also if you are in need of more shopping this big holiday weekend, you could hit up my Supermassive Holiday Sale, where all my original A* art is half off for the holidays!
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| Off for a day but dig my sale! | Nov 26, 2015 6:34 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Okay, I'm taking a day off to celebrate Thanksgiving with the family, but I'll be to work on a new page on Friday—likely to be posted in the wee hours of Saturday, as usual!
If you need your shopping fix before then, fear not! Take advantage of the 50%-off savings of our very own Supermassive Holiday Sale to pick up any piece of original A* art for just half its regular price. Or just have fun doing what you're doing. See you in a few days!
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| Holiday plan! | Nov 25, 2015 5:01 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Man, it's late! Gotta stay somewhat on track so I can do the Turkey Day thing on Thursday. So I'll have one more page, probably getting to you in the wee hours of Thanksgiving Day, then I'm off for a day, then back to work and getting you the last page of the week probably in the early hours of Saturday. That's the plan, anyway!
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| An overcoat at the galactic core | Nov 24, 2015 12:03 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's an ink sketch I sent off to a reader as their monthly reward for supporting the A* Patreon campaign:
Thanks to everyone helping me out through Patreon, it really makes a big difference!!
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| Supermassive Holiday Sale sampler! | Nov 21, 2015 9:31 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Okay, I've just started the Supermassive Holiday Sale in which all original art here is 50% off—just $25!—so I thought I'd point out a recent piece that might interest you! Anyone could buy this at any moment directly through the site and then it'll be gone, but as of now at least the watercolor painting made for page 66 of this episode is still available for purchase:
Have a nice weekend! : D
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| Eeeep! A sketch! | Nov 20, 2015 10:00 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Want to help me keep bringing you this kooky comic? Patreon is a great way to do that! You can set it to send me even as little as $1 a month, but to me it makes a big difference! Here's a sketch I drew and mailed off to a reader some time back as their monthly reward for supporting the A* Patreon campaign:
Kind of creepy : oo But don't worry, it's just a sketch! ^_^
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| Gasp! It's The Supermassive Holiday Sale! | Nov 19, 2015 10:21 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I'm going to be taking Thanksgiving Day off, so I'd better get this rolling now: it's The Supermassive Holiday Sale! From now through the end of the holidays, all A* art available through this site is 50% off: that's just $25 for each unique painting or illustration! Look for the gold "original art" link at the lower left corner of the comic image as you flip though the comic pages—if it's there, that means the original artwork made for that page is still available, and you can click on that golden link to arrive at its purchasing page—with more details about that one-of-a-kind piece—and buy it instantly for just $25. You can even add multiple items to your shopping cart before checking out, to combine the shipping charges. Yes, it's a supermassive ho-ho-ho! And even though it seems way too soon, I say Happy Holidays! ^_^
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| A* on Instagram for real this time | Nov 18, 2015 7:19 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:You may have noticed that a cute little blue Instagram button made its way into the social media bar below the comic over the weekend. This is because I'm finally using my Instagram account regularly! (I finally found out about the value of using hash tags over there : p : D) So if you click this little guy
you'll find my Instagram account (I'm @smbhax over there—easy, right? : D), and if you follow it you'll get not only high-res (even moreso—although it is cropped into a square shape—than the "large comic" version here on smbhax.com!) art from each new A* page as it goes up, but also, earlier in the day, a photo of the pencils that will *become* that watercolor art! Also other sketches and things that don't necessarily make it into this blog. Oh! And sketches for Patreon supporters more or less as I do them, rather than the weeks or months later that I get around to showing them in this blog—so it could be spoilers for you if you're one of those wonderful folks who gets sent a sketch each month, *but* you probably still won't know which one will show up at your door, so I guess the surprise isn't entirely spoiled anyhow.
For instance, here's a shrunk-down version of the high-res photo of today's pencils that went up earlier today on my Instagram, at twice the resolution you see here:
And not least importantly, you can click the little heart icon on the pictures I post there that you like, which is a great way to encourage me to draw more of what you do like. ^_^
I've been finding too that there are tons and tons of other artists on Instagram; I started out looking mostly at watercolor painters and comic illustrators, but somewhat to my surprise, I've found that most of the stuff I'm most drawn to falls under the heading of fashion illustration—illustrators like David Downton (I mentioned him in my Drawing Tips blog post just over two years ago—and I still stand by what I wrote there, including also: "the most important drawing tools are time, an eraser, and sheer stubbornness" : ) and Anna Halarewicz can summon forth a unique character with what often *seems* like just a few lines and splashes of color; although I suppose they're mostly working from models or photographs of models, they aren't just copying photos (also very popular on Instagram), but thoroughly reinterpreting their subject in abstracted and expressive form; they can do a lot with a little, which I think would be a good trick, if I could learn it. Plus it just so happens that they work largely in watercolor! So I find that stuff very helpful and inspiring, along with the work of other artists you'll find in my "Following" list over there.
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| I just tripled my productivity! : p | Nov 17, 2015 5:38 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Hopefully it hasn't been too obvious, but for the past four pages now there's been a war going on in my head of pencils versus watercolors. Previously, I'd been resolved to erase all pencil marks in the course of laying down the watercolor; this could sometimes mean I'd lose the direction of my original line and subsequently spend a lot of time trying to rediscover it directly in watercolor, which could get pretty messy. Four pages ago, on page 65, I was fed up with that (after rather disastrous line loss in the course of doing page 64 : p), and also came up with a pencil sketch that was so spidery and intricate that I couldn't see how I would reproduce it in watercolor anyway, so I kept all the pencil lines, and just filled them in very carefully in watercolor. That worked decently, and on the next few pages I even managed to get the painting a little more dynamic while keeping the pencils beneath it; I was still a little worried that relying nearly entirely on the pencils for the linework would limit the potential impact of the painting, but the real, hidden problem with this approach—which snuck up and ambushed me today in a big way—is that I was now convinced that the pencil lines had to be final quality, so I was spending more and more time getting them just so.
Today I was so paranoid about getting the pencils down perfectly that I went through three major versions of the page; I could have saved myself a lot of time, for instance, if I had stuck with this mid-way version of the second one:
That minimalist, angular line approach is actually the style I would like to get to using more often—but, aside from the pose maybe not being quite the most appropriate one for this particular page, and me being unsure at that point how I would color that huge open area of face, hair, and neck, I thought I would just go in and tidy up some of the pencil lines here and there—so I could keep them in the final, painted version, you see—and in the course of fussing with them, rather sucked the life out and spoiled the whole thing, and ended up having scrap it and start over. : P
So what I *think* I've learned from today's marathon is that a) while I should make sure I've worked out things like proportions, eyeball positions, and so on, I don't have to tidy up all the pencil lines because b) a lot of the final polish should be left to the watercolor brush anyway—although c) it's still okay to leave pencil lines alongside the watercolor!
Whew! War over, for now—I hope. : o
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| A dress sketch | Nov 14, 2015 11:27 PM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sketch I sent off some time back to a reader as their monthly reward for supporting the A* Patreon campaign—you can use Patreon to send me a buck or two a month, which is a *big* help to me when it comes to making this webcomic! :^D
Thank you!
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| Who needs telepathy when you got flash anzan | Nov 13, 2015 7:51 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Apparently, those who attain sufficient mastery over the abacus can do without an actual physical adding machine altogether, and perform lighting-fast calculations in their head by means of a purely mental abacus—visualizing, in their mind, an abacus performing the required calculations. This art, also known as flash anzan, is the explanation given for how, earlier this year, a nine-year-old Japanese girl, Rinne Tsujikubo, shocked viewers of the Chinese brain game TV show "Super Brain" by performing the final calculation—"6,172,938 x 1,203,490," getting "7429069153620," "and double-checked her work — before her competitors, or teammate [Japanese flash anzan champ Takeo Sasano], had seemingly even finished writing their answers." You can see her cool demeanor, and the shock of her competitors—who visibly start as they realize she has buzzed in the answer while they were still working on the problem—right here; Tsujikubo performs the calculation, double checks it, and buzzes in in just 16 seconds : o.
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| New Furthest Object from Sun--and others | Nov 12, 2015 7:26 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Astronomers using Japan's Subaru telescope have spotted the most distant natural object yet known in our Solar System: catalog item V774104 "is some 500-1,000km across," and about 15.5 billion km from the Sun—about three times the distance of Pluto. "The previously recognised most distant object is the dwarf planet Eris. This body, which has a moon, Dysnomia, moves between 5.7 billion km and 14.6 billion km from the Sun. [...] The big question is whether V774104 sweeps inwards from its present location, like Eris, or outwards, like the objects known as 2012 VP113 and Sedna. These bodies are currently slightly closer in than Eris, but investigations of their orbits show they will reach far deeper into space, out to 66 billion km and 140 billion km, respectively."
But V774104 is still tops in the distance chart for the moment, in any case—although counting natural AND man-made objects, it's only #2: the Voyager 1 probe has reached 20 billion km (and counting)!
Other man-made objects expected to keep going outward include Voyager 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, ejected rocket boosters used to push these probes, the New Horizons probe that just passed Pluto, the third-stage booster from New Horizons (which actually passed Jupiter *ahead* of its own probe—but won't reach Pluto's orbit until later this year), and two yo-yo de-spin wired weights from New Horizons: these nifty devices are just weighted balls on wires, used to reduce a space ship's spin without any need of rockets: when the weighted ends of two of these weights, placed on opposite sides of a rotating ship, are released, the ship's spin flings them outward until they reach the end of their tether, where they hang briefly, rotating with the ship; the ship, though, is now rotating much more slowly than it had been before, because its angular momentum has spread out with the tethered weights—once the spin has been reduced to the desired speed, the wires holding the weights to the ship can be released. That's probably a confusing explanation—just see the elegant demonstration video on that Wikipedia page and it'll all make sense!
Oh yeah and there are long period comets whose calculated trajectories say they'll move outward to great distances, too—some can take millions of years in their round trip to the Sun and back. And they can even get shot out of the Solar System entirely if they get a gravitational boost from a large planet: comet C/1980 E1, for instance, was comfortably shooting along its elongated orbit, taking 7.1 million years for a round trip spanning a truly impressive 1.17 light years (that's just under 9.5 *trillion* kilometers!), which would make the orbits of the dwarf planets look like small potatoes indeed, when, in 1980, near the Sunward end of its trip, it happened to pass within about 34 million km of Jupiter: Jupiter's gravity gave the comet a boost as it passed by; when it passed the Sun two years later it was clocked at "23.3 km/s (52,000 mph)"; this speed apparently enabled it to break free of its orbit, and it is now "on an ejection trajectory going 8.6 km/s (19,000 mph)" away from the Sun; by 2008 it was already 7.5 billion km away, and "is leaving the Solar System on a hyperbolic trajectory with a higher velocity than any other natural object ever observed."
Meanwhile, we're not really going anywhere!
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| Can't get cooler than ice volcanoes, Pluto | Nov 11, 2015 3:58 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:New Horizons: Pluto may have ice volcanoes (BBC) - The NASA space probe's mission team has identified two mountains on the surface of the dwarf planet that, judging from their appearance, may possibly be cryovolcanoes: they are "several km high and tens of km across, and each has what appears to be a depression in the top. Unlike Earth volcanoes that spew molten rock, Pluto's volcanoes - if that is what they are - would likely erupt an icy slush of substances such as water, nitrogen, ammonia or methane."
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The image of Selenis you see in today's A* page was the second one I drew—couldn't quite work out the eyes on the first one, although who knows, maybe I was just being overly picky. : P Anyway if you're curious, you can see me drawing the first one right here (and the second one here, for that matter).
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| Stuff I shouldn't talk about yet : P | Nov 09, 2015 11:49 PM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I suppose I shouldn't show it to you, but anyway I'm getting closer to the design for Selenis' look for the next episode, I think—and come to think of it, I've been streaming those drawings here and there on Twitch—there was one today, for instance, and I'll probably do a little more work on it tomorrow.
We *are* entering the climactic act of this current episode here—but it'll be a good long one, chock-full of action and mayhem, I think. So I've still got lots of time to figure out stuff for the next episode, whew. ^_^
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| Genetic engineering saves cancer patient | Nov 07, 2015 8:45 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Layla Richards, a one-year old London girl, is not only the first person to receive genetically edited immune cells, but now the treatment has reversed what had been pronounced to be her incurable and terminal leukemia. Doctors and scientists used specially engineered proteins to edit the DNA of a donor's white blood cells, reprogramming their genetic sequence to resist the cancer-fighting drugs the girl was being given, and "a virus was used to insert a new gene that would make it attack leukaemia cells." The genetically modified white blood cells eliminated all traces of leukemia from the girl's body.
While a similar process was attempted in the 90's, on people with a gene defect that effectively left them without an immune system—"the so-called bubble boy syndrome"—the manipulation of the genetic material was rather unspecific, with the missing gene being placed "almost at random" in subject DNA; the treatment fixed the syndrome in the subjects, restoring immune system function, but ended up *giving* them leukemia.
Since then, new generations of biochemical tools have been developed to editing and splicing of genetic material much more precise; now, engineered protein tool kits with names like CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), TALENs (Transcription Activator-Like Effector Nucleases), and zinc fingers can be configured to rewrite exact gene sequences in specific locations in DNA, and viral agents now available "can place DNA into safer sites in the genome." These genetic engineering techniques are being developed to combat not only cancer, but many inherited diseases as well. While still early, the initial results with Layla Richards are very promising.
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| But at least it looked cool | Nov 06, 2015 8:14 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Just over a year later, NASA has posted fiery photos of the Antares rocket explosion that seemed to kick off an accident-prone year for their fledgling commercial spaceflight initiative.
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| It was amazing, I swear! | Nov 05, 2015 4:19 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:
^ Insisted on watching me and would not go back to dangling amusingly upside-down under the branch once I was spotted in the window with the camera. : P
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| Overdoing the underlighting | Nov 04, 2015 3:08 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I was frustrated with the result of painting this page, and spent a long time trying to decide if I should rewind and use—as today's page—a video grab from about halfway through the creation process:
It was tempting to halt my policy of thoroughly erasing the pencils and forging on from there with just watercolor, because sticking with the pencils is way easier—it would have taken me just half an hour to paint the page, instead of closer to two. And of course it will always preserve the original structures of the drawing better. BUT you can't get as dark a mark with it, and it can't get all watercolory and crazy—there's less potential for a radical painting there. The frustrating thing is trying for and not quite hitting whatever potential you imagined was to be had there, of course—but I think what's really frustrating me here is the underlighting of Selenis' face required by the lighting in this cockpit; notice that the pencils cheated and really were just regular lighting from above, for the most part. Darn pencils. Anyway maybe the next time she's in a ship for a long time she'll have a different lighting arrangement. >_> Fortunately for now she's probably going to get out of her seat here pretty soon.
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| Less time = more space? Wait... | Nov 03, 2015 12:31 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Well I'm already behind on time for the week (how can this happen); I guess on the plus side I've got the week's script all worked out. Take that, ...universe!
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