Radiant Comics

John Romita Testing Paper

Recently I was asked by artist Rick Parker if I wanted to contribute a page to a comic he wanted to make about working at Marvel Comics. The idea is to get a whole bunch of cartoonists to contribute a singe page story about our days working in the Marvel offices. I know Rick from my days in the 1990s working in the Marvel Bullpen. Rick had worked in the marvel Bullpen before me but when I knew him he was a freelance letterer for Marvel and the artist on Bevis and Butthead comic book that Marvel published in the 1990s. I said I would do a page.

The first thing I had to do was to figure out which Marvel story I wanted to tell. A few of them came to mind but the main one I wanted to tell was the story of my geekiest moment at Marvel. I wrote about this moment here on this blog about a years ago. Marvel- Memories Summer 1992 I had a few other ideas but that seemed like the most interesting one. It has to do with me getting a piece of art from John Romita that he threw in the trash can.

Even though I wanted to do the John Romita story I thought about other stories I could do for a few weeks. I think I was trying to avoid the John Romita one. The main problem I had with that story was that I would have to draw 1992 John Romita. We’re the only two characters in the story.

Some artists are better than others at drawing what is called a “likeness” of someone. A likeness is just a drawing of a person that a viewer can immediately tell is that person. A drawing of Elvis that people can’t tell is Elvis can be a problem. Any artist worth his or her salt can get a likeness but it takes time and reference photos. If you want to draw Elvis it’s good to have photos of Elvis to look at.

I’m not particularly strong at likenesses. I knew it would take me a lot of time to get my drawings of John Romita right. I also knew that if I didn’t get them right it would turn people off. No one would care if I didn’t get a drawing of me wrong but everyone would care if I failed at drawing John Romita properly.

The first thing I did was to use the internet to find some photos of John. Most of the photos of him that I found were from a period later than 1992. He was clean shaven in 1992 but bearded after he retired in 1996. Most of the photos I found were with the beard. After some looking I found a couple of them that reminded me of my memory of how he looked in 1992.

After finding reference photos I started doing sketches to see if I could get a good likeness. It took a while and with my simplified drawing style it took quite a bit of work but eventually I got comfortable with it. That gave me the confidence to move onto doing some layouts for the story. Since it was only one page I needed to put a lot of panels on that one page. Twelve panels.

Next I drew the small layouts I blew them up and printed out the page on a 9×12 inch sheet of paper. Usually a comic book page is drawn on a 11×17 inch piece of paper but sometimes I like to start small. Not this time though. As I was drawing the first panel I got frustrated at the small size and abandoned it.

I decided to draw each panel individually on a 6×9 inch pieces of paper. First I was going to tackle the John Romita likenesses. That took me forever. There were four main panels he was in and it took me a few days, on and off, to draw those panels. I drew them a few times each. I would draw one, scan it in, and then draw it again. I didn’t have nearly as much trouble drawing myself.

I was also trying to decide if I was going to assemble all the pencil drawings into a page and ink the page as a whole or ink the panels on the individual 6×9 inch pieces of paper. At first I wanted to ink them as a single page but then since I was struggling so much I decided on the individual panels.

Once again I started with the John Romita faces. It took me a long time to ink them and get them right. As I finished the inking I scanned them in and set them up digitally as a single page.

I this point in time none of the pages had backgrounds in them. The background to the story was John Romita’s office in 1992 which I had no reference for so I knew I was going to have to make that up. The problem is that offices are boring so the Will Elder idea of “Chicken Fat” kept entering my mind. That is what Elder called it when he was drawing early issues of Mad Magazine in the 1950s and he’d add visual gags into the background. But what type of visual gags?

I’m not a gag writer nor a gag artist. That’s a whole specialized world of cartooning. But the concept kept entering my head and I couldn’t escape it. I though about what type of drawings John might have around his office and what type of gags I could make out of them but I kept coming up with nothing. It was take days of research fo me to pull something like that off. I wasn’t interested in doing that and knew my failure rate would be high with it so I got a little frozen with the page. And I hated the pages with no backgrounds on them. They just weren’t rich enough.

I wasn’t until I came to the conclusion that I should make the “Chicken Fat” my own that I got to work again. It would be impossible for me to make interesting John Romita drawing but I could make interesting Jared Osborn drawings. So I went about filling the backgrounds of John’s office with tiny little drawings of my own. Spontaneous things that could give the panels some visual interest. It took a couple of days to do since I made a lot of drawings but I finally was enjoying making the backgrounds.

After finishing the background inks I scanned them all in and arranged them onto a page. I still have one small panel of a hand holding a piece of paper that I have to draw but the rest of it is done. I have to script it now and color the page. There is still a lot of work to be done but none of it is going to take me nearly as long as the pencils and inks. That’s a good thing.

I’m at a loss right now. I’m not sure what art project I should start. What I should make or do. Life is like that sometimes. These are the times I rely on my good habits to get stuff done. A lot of artists have a hard time getting anything done. That’s because when an artist can’t figure out exactly what they want to do they often do nothing. I can understand why but I find doing nothing to be counterproductive in the long run. I try and get a little something done.

My artistic skill set and interests are broad. That helps. I have a long list of different types of art I like to make and I can switch between them as the mood suits me. There is even some stuff that I can do that takes less energy and concentration than usual. I often will grab one of those projects on days where I am at a loss.

Last week I finished a big acrylic on canvas painting and it took a lot out of me. It took more energy than I thought it would. In the days after I finished it my concentration was not at its height. So I worked on some of my faux comic book covers. I have a bunch of them worked up to various stages so I took one that was at the marker coloring stage and worked on it. That one had some complicated color to be done and it took about five hours to do.

After that one was concentration was still not up to snuff so the next time I started something it was some inking. I had another cover pencilled and ready to be inked so I grabbed that one. With just black ink to worry about rather than color I was able to get this one done faster but I still took my time. I didn’t want to rush through. It took four or five hours to ink.

As I was doing this inking and coloring I was also thinking about doing some more paintings over the summer. I got it in my head that I should buy some stretched canvases. In my younger days I used to stretch all my own canvases. I would buy lumber, cut it to length, add molding, put the four pieces of wood together into a rectangle, stretch and staple raw canvas over the wood stretchers, and then prime the canvas with gesso. That’s a lot of work. I used to enjoy it though. Nowadays I buy pre-stretched canvas. It’s more expensive but also more convenient.

The painting I just finished was 26×40 inches. I decided to get some canvases that were 24×36 inches. That’s a standard size. Since the painting I just finished was one I started 20 years ago it was an odd size that I stretched myself. I looked around for the best price I could find which was about $16 a canvas. For some reason I wanted to get ten of them but $160 wasn’t quite in the budget for the month. Plus ten paintings would be a lot to get done over just the summer.

As I was inking, coloring, and contemplating painting I also started contemplating photography. One of the things I like to do is occasionally look at Ebay to try and find old nude negatives to buy. After I buy a negative I scan it in and digitally manipulate it into a new composition that’s my own. Sometimes I draw colorful masks on the models in the photos.

I found and ordered a couple of new negatives but also realized I had bought one a couple of months ago yet had done nothing with it. So I took a day and did something with it. Once again it took me a longer time to make something than I thought it would. I started working on the photo early Saturday morning. I drew a mask on paper, and then scanned it in to put on the face in the photo. After that I made a 10×15 inch photo that took all of Saturday to make. I probably spent twice as much time on it as I thought it would take.

In recent years when I make one of these photos I actually make two of them. I make a 10×15 inch version and an 8×10 inch version. The smaller version has a little of the top and bottom trimmed off so both compositions have to work. I think I developed this method of working because I thought the smaller version would be easier to sell online. Turns out no one buys either version but I still decided to work that way.

I mention the two versions because that brings me to the next thing I got done. As part of getting the photo done I print out test prints on 8.5×11 inch paper until I get it right. After about half a dozen test prints I usually get it correct and then print out an 11×17 inch one. I checked my boxes of inkjet photo paper to print on and didn’t find any. I then looked online to buy some new photo paper but could have sworn I already had the paper I was shopping for. I got offline and searched my studio for half an hour to find the paper I was looking for. There it was, in a cabinet, not with all my other inkjet paper.

One of the things about printing out 11×17 inch photos or prints is that you need a place to put them. Some place convenient. I’ve put them in boxes, mylar sleeves, or sleeves in portfolio books. But I ran out of all of those things. A while ago.

After printing out the new masked photo at 11×17 inches and not having a convenient place to put it I noticed I hadn’t printed out a dozen other masked photos I finished over the years. I printed them at 8.5×11 but I guess with no place to put the 11×17 inch ones I never printed them. So I took a day and printed a dozen of them. It takes a while to make that many prints.

After printing I still had no good place to the photos so I decided to look for some portfolio books. I found some Dick Blick house brand ones that looked good and were only $10. That was a lot cheaper than the name brand $16 ones. That was also where I ws buying the canvases from so I cut the number of canvases down to five and put in the order.

I was going to order some new tubes of paint with the canvas but I didn’t have the money in the budget. That and I have to inventory my acrylic paint. I still have a lot of tubes of paint to use but I not sure what I have and what I need. No sense in ordering more just yet. I’ll save that task to do another day.

In the first four months of 2021 I’ve been working on my comic strips for 2022. My weekend strips that is. “Drifting and Dreaming” and “Message Tee.” A lot of the D&D strips are for this year since I was going to run out of them in June but I made 60 of them to stretch into next year. The MT strips I’ve worked on so far (and haven’t finished yet) are all for 2022. I don’t expect to finish them until fall. Or maybe earlier. We’ll see.

It was last year, 2020 pre-Covid, that I started making a years worth of “Drifting and Dreaming” strips at a time. I decided that I would work on them during my commute to NYC. I had some time when I was waiting for a train where I could sit in the station and draw. Over the course of January to whenever we shut down because of Covid I managed to get a lot of work done. It was in April or May 2020 that I finished up 52 D&D strips.

My “Message Tee” comic is made up of a drawing of a person with a message on their T-Shirt. I originally planned to do 52 drawings and then repeat them with new messages on them. Instead I ended up making about 200 drawings over the first four years of the strip. Then I went back to my original plan and recolored those 200 drawings and put new sayings on the shirts over the following four years. Then last summer I got the itch to make new ones.

Fresh off making a years worth of “Drifting and Dreaming” strips and with the Covid Summer of 2020 in front of me I decided to make some new “Message Tee” drawings. By the end of the summer I had 52 new drawings ready to be made into comics. It took part of the Fall to write and finish them.

One of the ways I managed to get 52 new drawings of people in t-shirts done was to keep them simple. For the first 200 drawing I made I mostly didn’t keep it simple. I drew them on 9×12 inch Bristol board and inked them with a brush. That’s how I normally do things but it’s time consuming and maybe too much work for this strip now.

Part of my simplicity scheme was to work small and in a sketchbook. I had a couple of 5×8 inch sketchbooks that I got as party favors at a friend’s Bar Mitzvah. The paper in this sketchbook was not the same as high quality Bristol so I couldn’t use my brush and ink in it but it was good for my black Sign Pen marker. That’s a simpler tool and just what I needed.

This year, since I was working remotely, I decided to get done those two strips that I got done last year during my commute. I wanted to get “Drifting and Dreaming” done over the first third of the year and then work on “Message Tee.” I’d work on Monday mornings when I’d be commuting and on Tuesday nights since I set up a Zoom Drawing Club for that night. Some friends and I would gather remotely and hang out, talk, and maybe draw for a few hours. That was fun.

I make my “Drifting and Dreaming” strip from individual art cards that I draw. Each strip is three cards so I have to draw 156 art cards. 104 cartoon art cards and 52 regular art cards with no word balloons on them. That takes a while.

When I’ve finished the cards I have to write “The Middle Story.” A short two or three sentence story that runs along the bottom of each strip. It took me a couple of weeks to get all those done. Then I have to assemble the digital files of all the art and Middle Story into the final cartoon. I think I finished them in April. Except I made 60 of them rather than 52. I don’t know why. I just wanted some extras.

After I let those D&D strips rest for a while I started on the “Message Tee” drawings. I looked back at last years sketchbook and was surprised at how fast I got the initial black and white drawings done. The first one is dated 5/27/2020 and the last one 6/1/2020. That’s less than a week for 52 drawings. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to duplicate that pace and didn’t even want to try. So far I’ve drawn 38 people standing in t-shirts in seven days and that seems fast enough to me.

I’m keeping it simple again this year. A new thing I’m doing is to divide the paper. I draw a line on the bottom of the paper, a line for the left edge (the spiral binding side), and then a line down the middle of the page. That center line really speeds up figuring out proportions and keeping things symmetrical. I don’t know why I’ve never done it before. Or maybe I do. I’m quickly doing it with my new gridded ruler. I never thought of it before buying that ruler. New tools can help you see new things.

I rough out the figure with a soft 4B pencil that’s pretty blunt. That way I don’t get caught up in details. Most of the bodies are similar so I mix up the faces and hair. I like to keep the faces simple so I use various circles, dots, and lines for the eyes and mix up noses and mouths too. I try not to take more than ten minutes with this part. I can even go faster if I’m into it.

After that I get out my Sign Pen black marker. It makes a single weight dark black line. Here is when I make the finished drawing. I work out all the final detail. After that I get a thicker black marker and add line weight to the drawing. Nothing fancy. I’m just looking to give it a little bit of depth.

After I did the first 26 drawings I scanned them in and set them up in Adobe Illustrator to be colored later. That was a lot of them to do in a row so I did the next set of scans after 10 more drawings. That seemed more doable. I have yet to start coloring any of them. I’ll do that after all 52 are drawn. I’ll write pithy sayings for the shirts after they’re colored.

Keeping it simple is the only way I’m getting these drawings done. Some things don’t demand complexity and trying to make them complex only gets in the way of getting them done. Getting things done is the end goal so clear a path for yourself. I find that’s the only way to get things done.

I like sketchbooks and I like notebooks. I haven’t bought any new ones in a while but I still have a pile of unused ones ready to go. That’s because I bought them faster than I can use them. Not an unusual situation for a fan of such books. They’re far easier to buy than to fill up.

Just the other day I was looking at a pen carrying case that I bought recently. I’ve been keeping it on the side of my drawing table and filling it with the various black markers I’ve been buying. Since I got my last vaccine shot I’ve been contemplating my art go-bag. This marker case (or one like it) will go in my art go-bag. There is one section of the case for a small sketchbook. I was about to go online and look for a sketchbook to fit it when it struck me that I should look on my shelf first. Sure enough I had one to fit it perfectly.

My most used sketchbook is my inkbook. A 5.5×8.5 inch wire bound Strathmore sketchbook. It has a hundred pages and I fill up one book a year with small ink drawings. I’m on book 22 so I always know I’m going to need one and fill one up every year. Every other sketchbook is catch as catch can. Maybe it’ll fill up with something this year or maybe it’ll hang around for a decade. Who knows?

Last year I filled up a fifty page 5×8 inch sketchbook that I got from a friend’s Bar Mitzvah with new Message Tee drawings. That one only took a month or two to fill up because I used it for that specific project that I had to get done in a timely manner. I might fill another this year that way too. We’ll see.

What brings the topic of notebooks and sketchbooks to mind today is me trying to figure out some direction for myself. At times I have no idea what art or art project I want to work on next. Not an uncommon feeling for any creative. I’ve been trying for the last few days to remedy that and today I turned to my bullet point journal for help.

I only heard about a bullet point journal at the end of 2019. The idea is that you write things down in it in the form of bullet points. Write down thoughts, ideas, random words, whatever you’ve got going on, or want to get done. Then at the end of the month you look back at the bullet points and pull out the best ones to take action on. It sounded good to me and I wanted a new little notebook anyway. So I got one.

It turns out that I don’t really need a bullet point journal because I’m good at getting things done. I was before I had the journal and I still am. But I still like it. I’ve been using the little notebook for a year and four months but I have only filled up 22 pages. And they’re 3×5 inch pages. Yet, I still like writing the occasional bullet point in it. Do you know what today’s bullet point was? “I need a plan.” It’s not an especially helpful bullet point but sometimes it’s good to write the obvious down.

After that I started to work in my “Crazy Idea Art Project” sketchbook. It’s not a sketchbook that’s about crazy idea art projects. The sketchbook itself is the crazy idea art project. Whenever I can’t get anything going I work in this book. I write in it, glue photos in it, maybe draw on the photos, and mix drawing in with the writing. It’s a sketchbook that looks good. It looks like a sketchbook from a movie that’s filled with crazy ideas. Really it’s filled with fragments of ideas when I can’t think of a plan. It’s chaos disguised as order.

As I wrote before I’m generally good at figuring out what I want to do creatively and as a consequence I don’t work in my crazy idea book a whole lot. It’s a 6×9 inch spiral bound sketchbook and I’ve filled up sixty pages in it. Thirty pages front and back. That’s about a third of the book. I date the pages and the earliest date is 5/23/2011. It’s 4/25/2021 as I write this so my crazy idea book is about to hit its tenth birthday. It might be my longest lived sketchbook that I still draw in. Abandoned ones don’t count.

All my sketchbooks are small these days. They have been for the last 20 years. In my school days in the mid 1980s and all through the 1990s I used 8.5×11 inch hardbound sketchbooks. I used to carry one with me all the time and the hardcover was nice for keeping it in good shape. I’d have it with me and use it as my friends and I hung out in dive bars in NYC. That’s tough on a sketchbook.

Back in those 1990s days I still hadn’t found my way, that I use now, to draw in sketchbooks so I didn’t fill them up very fast. That and I made mostly mediocre drawings in them. It was in the year 2000 that I discovered I liked spiral bound sketchbooks best and at the same time started doing spontaneous ink drawings. That’s how my first inkbook was born. It changed the way I work.

Since I dedicated that first 5.5×8.5 spiral bound sketchbook to be an inkbook I slowly started using individual sketchbooks for individual projects. That works best for me. When I was drawing my Oracle Deck I had a small sketchbook in which I drew pencil drawings for all the cards. That’s the only place they were drawn. At least the first draft of them. Then I scanned in the drawings and redrew them bigger and more finished. But that book is filled with only Oracle Deck pencil drawings.

I have another sketchbook filled with ink drawings but not ink drawings like the ones in my inkbook. Instead of being done with a marker they’re done with a brush and ink. Lots of ink. The pages are all warped in this book. Though I don’t think I’ve worked in that book for a while.

I have another book that I started that has only super hero faces in it. I needed to draw some faces for some sketch covers that I was drawing so I decided to dedicate a new sketchbook to it. That one only has about ten faces in it since I got bored of the whole project. That’s the way life is sometimes. What seems like a good idea turns out not to be. Then you need another new good idea. That’s what I need right now.