Added 1 new A* page:It looks like I'm going to have back-to-back art shows at a neat little chocolate/coffee/tea shop in my neighborhood, Chocolat Vitale (I hope they don't mind my borrowing their logo for promotional/linking purposes)  : first with one A* and one Princess and the Giant print in a group show opening on May 11th, and then with a bunch of stuff, mostly A* art, in a solo show that opens on June 8th--both opening shindigs falling on the second Friday of their respective months, and running from 6-9 pm. Each show will run about a month.
Ooh! Thanks as ever to my dad for chatting up nice people at the local coffee houses. :) If you're in the region with nothing better to do at those times, consider dropping by and saying hi! Also this place has some really amazing European drinking chocolates. =o
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As with yesterday's page, I did this one straight in ink--starting with big markers--with no preliminary penciling, and somehow it mostly worked out. And then like the one two pages ago I did some spatter stars with white ink, cutting out a paper "mask" to guard the non-space black parts I didn't want getting spattered. Here are some preliminary stages:
And the (sorta) final version, with stars:
I say "sorta" 'cause you'll notice in the actual A* page version, a couple of the larger stars are squooshed a bit--I guess they were still a little wet inside when I flattened the thing onto my scanner glass. Oops. :o Curious how they came out that sorta gray color in the scan.
Of course I hadn't even meant to make stars that big, but I was working without the #22B nib I used (and broke) on page 28--the replacements not having arrived in the mail yet. I tested the spatter ability of my remaining nibs, and the standard #102 "Crow Quill" was the best, so most of the stars you see here were done with that; but you can see they're a little smaller and not as widely distributed as I was able to get with the #22B.
Eventually, the #102 broke, one tine tip zinging off to goodness knows where--I was wearing safety goggles this time, though (although they smelled like chemical heck, blah). So I moved to the next best backup I had within arm's reach, a #103 flexible "Mapping" nib, which kind of did similar spatters, only weaker, and this one bent almost immediately. So I reached for the third backup type in easy reach, a #B6 round nib, and that did even worse than it had in my tests, mostly only popping up that huge star that landed on the left--although it was kind of neat and perfectly round until I squished it on the scanner.
For some reason it never occurred to me to go get, say, one of my remaining #102s from my pantry shelf in the other room, so at that point I kind of gave up. I think it was probably just as well, though, as more weak stars wouldn't necessarily have been improving things in a big way. By the time we get to the next space scene I should have plenty of #22B nibs for making more robust star stuff.
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The #B6 is the smallest of the round-tipped nibs Speedball makes--and curiously, this one has a "Speedball" log on it--but no "HUNT." Anyway here is a test I did with it (upper left) back when I first got it, maybe a month or two ago now:
The ink I was using with it was Higgins Black Magic, and as far as I've been able to tell, as an ink it's pretty much just like the Yasutomo waterproof black "Sumi" ink I've been using for A*; that rectangular section on the eh black rooty bit next to the nib (that was a drop of ink that came off the nib and landed on the paper; I held the paper and kinda let the drop of ink roll around a bit) is a test patch of the Sumi for comparison; the Black Magic may be just a fraction of a shade darker, but actually other tests I've done have been pretty much inconclusive in that regard.
I was testing the #B6 round nib because it's the smallest round nib Speedball makes, and I had some hope of being able to use it for lines in A*, without threatening to gouge up the surface of the paper like the other, pointier dip pen nibs do. But I found that it's still way too big for making fine lines, and it still roughed up the paper when going over wet areas.
The other stuff on that test sheet is mostly from Copic Multiliner markers, back when I first got them: you can see the increasing line width test I did down the middle, throwing out some lines with each of the successively larger Multiliners in the set I'd bought; although there's one, labeled doodle head in the lower middle done with the 0.25 mm Rotring Rapidograph, for the sake of comparison.
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