comic | episodes & e-books | store | about
< previous post | next post > | all news from Apr. 2012 News archive | News search | RSS
 
  Subscription mode progress, floor paintingApr 10, 2012 6:15 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:On Saturday I finally sat myself down and got in a good day's work on the long-promised A* subscription system; here are some screenshots from development pages that I tweeted over the weekend:
 
Image
 
So hopefully I'll be getting some more weekends here to work on the rest of it, and if that happens, then in a month or so it might be ready to roll out. Although I've had the "subscription preview mode" going for a while now (that link in the bottom right corner of the comics), it doesn't save your settings like this one will: with the subscription system, once you've logged in and—optionally—selected HD comic viewing mode, every time you come back to the site, if you haven't cleared your cookies or whatnot—it'll pop right up in subscription mode with your desired comic size, instead of you having to click something first.
 
~~~~~~~~
 
Also over the weekend I jumped on the week's new Drawing a Blank sketch challenge, which this week is Mario, the video game plumber. I know drawing popular characters is big on the Internet, but I wasn't sure I wanted to put yet another cartoon Mario into the mix, so I tried a different approach which I wasn't sure I was satisfied with in the end anyway—there's a ink version and a cleaner and extra-soulless digital version; the ink one at least was interesting because I decided to make the "pixels" by carving a two-headed stamp out of an old eraser, which you can see in the upper right corner here:
 
Image
 
But I still couldn't really get into it; I used my less-favorite Higgins ink, for instance, and didn't even bother scanning it very tidily. Maybe I'm just not that big on drawing other people's copywritten characters, at least not without their permission; I suppose I'll probably avoid such sketch topics in the future. :P
 
~~~~~~~~
 
A fussy muscle in my drawing forearm, near the base of the elbow, has been making itself heard of late as I've been trying to draw at my drawing table, and today, as I felt it start to get sore as soon as I sat down and picked up a brush, it occurred to me that painting with a brush is very different, muscularly, than drawing with a pencil or pen, and I've been kind of trying to sit...well actually it's been a sort of halfway position that hasn't been quite pen/pencil sketching mode—forward, leaning on elbows, tight grasp of the drawing tool—or brush painting mode, but rather some mixed-up compromise position that neither is happy with.
 
I guess an easel wouldn't work well with ink wash—unless I wanted all my washes to head straight down—so I went back to using what I used for the very first few ink sketches I did as tests of the process: just using a board balanced on my legs. I conveniently have one that's just a little larger than the pages I make for A*, and this way I can sit—cross-legged, straight on a chair, whatever—and move the brush across the paper with my arm completely free of encumbrances. So I think that helped get the looser, more fluid brush strokes in today's page, which seemed to come out with unaccustomed fluency. Afterwards my shoulder was tired from holding my arm up all on its own, but I think I may have been tensing it a bit more than I needed to—still expecting a high desk support, maybe—instead of relaxing it. So hopefully that's something that can be worked out with a little practice.
 
And actually what in a way worked even better was when I moved to putting on some washes, and just put the board and page down on the floor, and worked on it in a variety of sitting or crouching positions; I've been thinking about trying that since I saw a movie of a local artist painting that way last week, and I thought it might be tough on the back or who knows what else, but actually—and my back has been sore the past few days, in fact, after I spent what felt like all of the non-working parts of the weekend out and about sitting in awful seats ;P—being able to work from a variety of positions was quite refreshing, and getting up from work afterwards, I'll be darned if I didn't feel raring to go. So maybe there's something to that! And if I end up not using my drawing table much, it's a folding model, so I can just pack it up and like double the free space in my little apartment. :D
 
See how much fun working from home can be?
 
~~~~~~
 
Some time ago now I posted about Saturn's two-tone, "walnut-shaped" moon Iapetus, one of the most unique moons in our solar system; its "walnut" shape comes in part from a 20-km-high ridge running all the way around the moon!
 
A new space.com article describes a new theory of how the moon-ringing ridge could have formed:
 

Now investigators suggest this ridge could be the remains of a dead moon. Their model proposes that a giant impact blasted chunks of debris off Iapetus at the tail end of the planetary growth period more than 4.5 billion years ago. This rubble could have coalesced around Iapetus, making it a "sub-satellite," a moon of a moon.
 
Under this scenario, the gravitational pull Iapetus exerted on this sub-satellite eventually tore it back into pieces, forming an orbiting ring of debris around the moon. Matter from this debris ring then rained down, building the ridge Iapetus now sports along its equator fairly quickly, "probably on a scale of centuries," Dombard said.
 
The researchers suggest that, of all the planets and moons in our solar system, only Iapetus has this kind of ridge because of its unique orbit so far away from Saturn. This made it easier to have a moon of its own — if Iapetus was closer in, Saturn might have tugged Iapetus' moon away, Dombard said.
 
 
 
 
·····
 
 
 
 
 
< previous post | next post > | all news from Apr. 2012 News archive | News search | RSS
 
© Copyright 2024 Ben Chamberlain. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy