Radiant Comics

“Decision Four”

Watercolor is my worst medium. I’m not as good at it as I am with oils, acrylic, markers, pencils, or ink. I don’t know why. I just have never found my place with it. But I seem to be always trying it every now and again. It has an appeal to me.

I especially like watercolor in pans. That’s the kind you always see in random stores for kids. It’s a tiny little round or rectangular container filled with dry paint that you then wet and the paint comes to life. You have to keep rewetting the paint as you work and depending on how much water you add the paint is lighter or darker. A lot of water and it’s pretty transparent without much pigment in it. It also comes in tubes but I prefer the pans.

Over the last year and a half or so I bought a bunch of new watercolor pan sets. I bought one main set that has twenty four colors in it and then four smaller six to eight color sets that are more gimmicky specialty sets. One set is “Graphite” colors. They look like the color of a graphite pencil with a little bit of red, blue, or yellow thrown in. I think the other three sets are all a little shiny. There are flakes of stuff in them to make them iridescent.

I made some small 2.5×3.5 inch art cards with these sets last year but they were nothing special. I could have just as easily used my markers for them but I wanted to try the new watercolor sets. I don’t think I did anything of note with them except those small cards.

One thing I did do with the sets is to swatch them. Since they are small sets I took a sheet of 5×7 inch watercolor paper (one piece per set) and put down a sample of each color. Some of the iridescent sets were made to work on a dark background so for those I put down some India ink on half the paper and swatched the color on both black and white.

By the way I love the way these swatches look. Sometimes I think the swatches are the best watercolor art that I’ve made. All the various colors lined up and easily seen on a piece of paper. There is something simple and appealing to me about a set of swatches.

What got me going again with the watercolors is my 5×7 inch talking superhero cartoon art cards. There are the cartoons that I’m doing that I’m going to post next year. It’s the head and shoulders of a superhero with a word balloon above him. I’ve been doing a bunch of these lately. I’ve been drawing them on the iPad, printing them out in blue line, and then inking them on a 5×7 inch piece of paper. The final step is to color them and for that I’ve been using my markers.

The problem was that after about thirty of them I was getting bored with the markers. Since I’ve been getting one “Dreams of Things” cover done a week in marker I was growing tired of the medium and wanted to change things up. So that’s when I decided to pull out one of my watercolor sets.

Though I knew I would be using the main twenty four color watercolor set I pulled out the graphite set first. Usually the first thing I do with these art cards is to color the background. For the marker ones I chose a dark and light marker of a single color and color the top light and the bottom dark and then scumble them together in the middle. For these I wanted the backgrounds to be a single graphite color.

One of the advantages of watercolor is that I can get dark and light out of a single pan of color. I add more water for light and more paint for dark. With watercolor you can get a lot of cool effects just by how you put the paint on the paper. I’m not particularly skilled at doing that but I thought I could make a nice background with the graphite ones and I think I did.

I was working four faces at a time on four different pieces of paper. I find this to be an advantage for me because when using watercolor you often have to wait for the water in the paint to dry. During that time I can just switch to another face. This keeps me going and I’m always up for less waiting.

I’m better with the medium of gouache (also a watercolor) than regular watercolor because gouache allows me some opacity while watercolor is all transparent. Gouache takes longer for me to finish a painting in though. So I said to myself that these heads would have no gouache in them and I’d work only with transparency. So that’s what I set out to do.

Markers are also a transparent medium and I had been coloring these faces with marker for a while. So I ended up following my marker technique except with the watercolors. First I laid down big chunks of transparent color and then I added more pigment to my brush and put down some darker color. I blended the darks and lights together and repeated the process until I got what I was looking for.

In the end I managed to get all four faces done in about the same amount of time that it would have taken me if I had used markers. This surprised me a little because I thought it would take me a lot longer since it was a less familiar medium. But since it was such a familiar task it really didn’t.

The next step is to do something less familiar with the watercolors. The problem is that I’m not sure what that is exactly. I have some vague ideas in my head to paint something at 11×17 inches but scaling up isn’t always easy. I also have some vague ideas about seeing the drawing I make simple but I still have no idea what the image should be. I’m going to have to look through some of my inkbooks with all my little drawings in them and pick one. Or I could possibly look through my scans of finished but unused drawings. I’ll let you know.

I like making prints out of some of my art. Some of my art is also made to be a print. These are the pieces that I digitally color and then make a print of. They are not finished until they come out of my printer. Unlike my stuff made with paint or marker there is no color except digital color with these prints. Though I like the way they come out I find the process of coloring digitally a bit tedious.

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a print series that’s called, “Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love.” It’s a series of very colorful female figures with the title as type worked into them. I like type and images. I created the series last year (2024) but only finished a few prints in the series so I decided to work on getting more of them done.

They start, as most of my art does, on paper. I look through one of my Inkbooks (which are filled with small ink thumbnail drawings) and find some images that I want to work with. I blow them up to 6×9 inches and print them out in blue line. I then draw over the blue line and make a finished pencil drawing and scan it in. This pencil drawing is blown up and printed out on an 11×17 inch piece of Bristol board. I ink over that blue line and make a finished ink drawing. I scan that ink drawing in to be digitally colored.

When I know a drawing is going to be digitally colored I make it slightly differently than normal. I make sure all the shapes are closed off. Sometimes when making a regular drawing some of the lines stop before they hit another line in the drawing. There is a small gap that can let the line breathe. This gap can cause problems depending on the digital coloring method. I’m going to color my prints in Illustrator so closing all the gaps will make things a lot easier. So I make sure that I do.

Sometimes I scan in Bitmapped mode and sometimes I scan in Greyscale mode and then convert it to Bitmapped mode in Photoshop. I scanned in greyscale this time so that I could play with the threshold in Photoshop to get just the conversion to Bitmap that I wanted. After that I bring it into Illustrator and image trace it using only two colors. This converts the drawing into a vector drawing. Once it’s a vector I put all the black lines on one layer and the white shapes to be colored on another layer. Now I’m ready to color.

Now comes the part where I start thinking about color. Nothing is tedious yet so this part is okay. These drawings have a lot of shapes in them. I have to figure out what color each of these shapes is going to be. It’s not based on realism either so it’s not just that leaves are green, the sky is blue, and fire is red. I can make anything any color and with that freedom comes a lot of choices.

Usually I start like artists have started for hundreds of years. I figure out the values before the color. The values are how dark or light something is. Sometimes I do this in greys and sometimes I do this with different shades of a single color. I did this one with a single color. I think it was red. I made swatches of eight other ten different dark, medium, and light reds and used these colors to fill in the drawing.

Using this method I get my darks and lights on point. After I have that figured out I group the same color together so I can change them all at once. Everything that is Red #4 gets chosen and grouped. Now if I want to change everything that is Red #4 to yellow all I have to do is click on one Red #4 shape and it chooses all of them. Then I click on yellow.

Now is when I figure out the base colors. With all the values chosen it’s a lot easier to do. And it’s easier to try out different things. This part takes a while but it’s not tedious. Anytime I’m using my brain is a good time.

The next step is when things start to get a bit tedious. Now is when I start the shading. It’s not even your typical dark to light shading because I’m using shapes of cut color with no blending. What I do is set up a shading layer and do the shading on that.

The shading on these pieces is done by drawing a shape over top of the shape that’s there. Of course not the exact same size but smaller where I want the color darker. I use the pen tool to draw the shape and it’s a very exacting process. Each little shape in the drawing has to have its own shading.

A note on the color of the shading. Here is where I do something that I would never do with real life paint. I use grey to shade the color. With real life paint this would mess up the color. With a digital print and this limited color it works fine. The shapes I put down are either a 25% grey set to multiply (a way to blend it in with the color beneath it) or a trio of light colors that look grey (also set to multiply). With this method I can change the base color without having to change the shadows. They just blend in with the new color.

After the shadows are in place I put in some highlights. There are fewer of these and they are in color, not grey, and depend on the color below them. If I change the color below them then I have to change them too. That’s why I usually save the highlights for last.

Shadows and highlights are the tedious part of this method. Plus they take a while. I spent a day doing the base color and then a day and a half more day on the shadows and highlights. That’s the tough part. All that figuring out and drawing of the shapes takes time and not a lot of brain power. It’s a lot of reacting rather than acting.

The last thing that I do is add textures to the background colors. This doesn’t take a ton of time. I have made a lot of textures and they are set up to easily be dropped in. I choose my shapes where I want the textures to go and then use those shapes to make a clipping mask. That mask blocks the texture outside of the shape. So all the textures are in the right places. Preparation of the textures ahead of time makes this part easy.

The textures not only add visual interest to the piece but they take the edge off the tedious part I just finished. That’s always a good thing.

It’s early on a Saturday morning right now and I’m contemplating which books I want to buy. Of course by “Books” I mean collected editions of comics and graphic novels. I do buy (and borrow from the library with Hoopla) regular (prose) books but I went digital with regular books (prose) a long time ago. I have an overabundance of comics around here and I don’t need to add even more books to them.

One of my all time favorite comics is “Hate” by Peter Bagge. Most of its issues were made in the 1990s and I bought them off the rack at the time. Volume one of “Hate” was thirty issues and after that came “Hate Annual” which ran nine issues. I didn’t get the nine issues of the Annual for some reason but bought the collected edition of them “Buddy Buys a Dump” when it came out many years latter (2014).

A few years ago (2016) another comic of Bagge’s “Neat Stuff” was collected into an oversized, slipcased, hardcover edition. That’s the series where Buddy Bradley (the star of “Hate”) first appeared and, though I had many of them, I don’t have all of the issues. It was an expensive book. It was in two volumes and was about $80 (if memory serves). I kept my eye on it and eventually bought it on sale (in December 2019) for $32.50. A nice pickup. The book is now out of print and expensive.

“The Complete Hate” which collects all of “Hate” and “The Hate Annual” came out in December 2020 and is three hardcover volumes in a slipcase. It’s been on my wish list since then but it has a retail price of $120 and is currently available online at about $90. I’ve had my eye on it all these years and it’s never gone down cheaper than $85. It even went out of print and raised in price before going back into print.

In September of 2022 as I was, once again, contemplating buying “The Complete Hate” I decided to check out the softcover versions available for the book. The whole thing was printed in three volumes: “Buddy Does Seattle,” “Buddy Does New Jersey,” and “Buddy Buys a Dump.” I already had “Dump” and the first two I already had in their original issues. But sometimes it’s nice to have them in collected editions too.

The main problem I had with these collected edition was that they were a bit smaller in size than a regular comic. Around 6×9 inches compared to about 7×10 inches. I like the bigger size. But in the end I bought them because they were much cheaper. I bought them used online for about $25 for the pair. Boom. Done. I had the whole series in collected editions. But they still weren’t the big oversized hardcovers.

Over the last two years I’ve still kept my eye on those box sets. What I decided to do was to save up credit card points and make the purchase with them. That way I wouldn’t have to spend actual money. I’ve saved up the points three times in the last two years but have always ended up using them on something else. Last year I used them when I bought a camera. My DJI Pocket 3.

This year as I was contemplating finally getting that box set I decided on getting something else. Some Richard Corben books. Despite having some Richard Corben comics since the 1980s I didn’t really become a big Corben fan until the early 2000s. For some reason that’s when his work really clicked with me and I’ve been buying all of his stuff since then. But, of course, I missed a lot of it from the 1970s-2000s.

Richard Corben died in 2020 and since 2022 Dark Horse comics has been publishing a lot of his work in hardcover editions. I’ve had my eye on them but hadn’t bought any yet. They start out at about $40 but like most books they drop in price after a while. After they go out of print they can sometimes shoot up in price so it’s good to find the sweet spot before that happens.

I saw that the first four volumes of the Corben stuff was available from between $20-$25 a piece. This was fairly cheap and the first volume was the cheapest at $20 and it had been out for a couple of years. I didn’t think it was going to get any cheaper than that and enough time had gone by that it might go out of print.

I had around $100 worth of credit card points saved up and that would be enough to get all four volumes. A fifth volume had just came out but that one was still at full price. So I abandoned my idea of getting the “Complete Hate” and bought the Corben books. Why buy another copy of stuff I already had when I could get stuff I’ve never read before?

Another funny thing happened in these four years that I’ve been thinking about buying “The Complete Hate.” It’s not complete anymore! In 2024 Peter Bagge did four more issues of “Hate”. It was called “Hate: Revisited” and it was terrific. I have no idea if there are any plans to put it in a new volume but it’s sure not in the old one.

I also just saw that this year they are coming out with softcover editions of “The Complete Hate.” No box set and the three volumes are comic out individually over time. Volume One is set for August and the list price is $30. I wonder if the new Volume Three will have “Hate: Revisited” in it?

Meanwhile “Hate: Revisited” will be getting its own collected edition in July. The list price on that one is around $20. Maybe I’ll pick it up or maybe I won’t.

All this contemplating about buying “The Complete Hate” is really a little bit silly in the end. It’s not like I have been so broke over the last four years that I haven’t had a spare $100. I’ve probably spent $100 on dumb stuff that I shouldn’t have in that time but in smaller increments. Somehow spending $20 on something silly and impulsive five times over time is easier than spending $100 on something I already have in another form. I want to go read some comics now.

I think that January is the toughest month for me in terms of creativity. I get stuff done eventually but it’s harder to start than normal and harder to get going. I’m not sure why. It could be that winter has started and it’s cold outside or it could be that the end of the year holidays were such a disruption that I have to get the old habits going again. It could also be that January starts a new year and that’s when I contemplate what I want to get done in the coming year. Even if it’s all pie in the sky I still think about it a bit.

Of course I also tend to not take a holiday during the end of the year when it comes to my own creative stuff so I was working on things on New Year’s Eve day and on new Year’s Day. Not that I got a ton of stuff done on those days but I did get a couple of “Dreams of Things” drawing done.

One New Year’s Day tradition I have is to start a new Inkbook/Sketchbook. I’ve mentioned my Inkbooks before. They’re the ones I fill up with small ink drawings all year and then I will use those small ink drawings as my starting point for a lot of my work. Those inkbooks are where I work on a lot of my basic visual ideas. I randomly name them by closing my eyes and picking a word out of a dictionary. This year’s Inkbook is called “Paregoric” and is number 26. That means I’ve been filling up one of these a year for 25 years. That’s a long time.

One of the things I decided to do this week was to make some more ink textures to be scanned in and used digitally. Like a lot of artists I like sketchbooks and end up buying more of them than I need. So I usually have a handful of blank ones lying around. A few years ago I had a Strathmore multi media 5.5×8.5 inch one that I decided to use for making textures. Because it’s “Multimedia” it has thick paper that won’t buckle with a lot of ink and I can use both sides of the paper.

I ended up filling up that sketchbook (about 80 pages) with textures made from ink and I even filled up a second sketchbook the following year. So now I have about 160 textures scanned in and ready to go when I need them. I used them in the design for my “The Great Gatsby” illustrated book that I’ve been working on. I think this is the beginning of year three working on that Gatsby project.

So on Monday the 30th of December I decided to start working on textures in a new Strathmore multi media sketchbook. Something like that is more of a task than a creative endeavor and this is a time when I find it easier to get tasks done than to be creative. So I threw down an old towel on the surface of my drawing table and put the book on top of it. I’ve learned that when making these textures ink can fly around so it’s best to have a rag under the book rather than try and clean up later. There is also a lot of hand washing going on as the ink can get all over my hands.

The hardest part of making ink textures if thinking of different ways to make them. Especially after filling two books with textures already. I had gotten it in my head a few days earlier to try and use a dryer sheet to make a texture. A used dryer sheet has an interesting texture and maybe that would help. I dipped the dryer sheet in some ink and dabbed it on the paper. It was really tough to work with and mostly made a mess so I only got two pages out of the dryer sheet.

Trying not to make such a mess did lead me to using a sports card penny sleeve next. Those are the little bags that baseball cards slip into to protect them. I put my fingers into the bag, brushed ink onto the outside of the bag, and then touched the paper. This was less messy on my fingers but I was only so-so in making textures with the bag.

My most versatile tool for making these textures was a medium size bamboo brush. I could load the brush up with ink, smash the brush tip down on an ink stone, and then use the busted-up-many-tipped brush to dab different textures. Or I could spin the brush or drag it across the paper. There were a few different ways to use the brush. I also used it to put ink on different things like the dryer sheet and penny sleeve.

I could use the brush to fill up the whole book but I wanted more variety so I kept trying out new things. One of my favorite things turned out to be the round plastic container that Ice Breaker mints come in. For a couple of pages I brushed ink onto the lip of the circular container and used that like a stamp to leave ink on the page. I built up the texture over many stamps of the partial circle. I also put ink on the bottom of the container for a couple of pages of textures made from bigger circle parts. It’s kind of like drawing with coffee cup ring stains. Those ones were fun.

I also made some textures with actual stamps. Back in the 1990s I bought these stamps that were used with stamp pads. Two were of famous paintings and two were of textures. I brushed ink onto the stamps and used them over and over to fill a page with a texture. I used these in the previous two books but the textures are different every time so I used them again.

One of favorite tools this time around was the end of a piece of scrap wood. It was a four inch piece of one by two pine. I took the brush and brushed a lot of ink onto the one by two end. The end was pretty rough and absorbed a lot of ink. I then used that end as a rectangular stamp. It left some nice texture behind and I was able to fill about six pages that way. Some good textures.

It took about three days to fill the whole book. Just parts of days really. I would get something small and creative done in the morning and then I’d spend an hour or two working on the task of textures. I could put it down or pick it up at any time.

The final thing I had to do was to scan in the textures and set them up to be used. Photoshop and Illustrator actions help a lot with this next part. I scanned them in grayscale and then had to straighten and crop them. After that I copied them and turned the greyscale documents into bitmapped ones. Finally I image traced those bitmapped files into vector graphics in Adobe Illustrator. Then they were ready to use in three different formats.

Now I’m ready to go in 2025 with a whole bunch of new textures at the ready!

I’m a camera guy. I like taking photos and I’ve been taking them for long time. Back in the days of film cameras, which for me were from 1984 to 2001, I owned about six cameras. That was over that whole stretch. At any one time I probably had three cameras that I used regularly. A 35mm SLR with interchangeable lenses, a small pocketable 35mm point and shoot, and the third camera was some weird fun thing I was trying out. A small Olympus XA rangefinder camera is one example, an Advanced Photo System (APS) camera another, a Polaroid instant camera a third, and even a Gameboy Digital camera.

Now, in the digital age (for me from 2001 until now) I use even more cameras regularly. Of course I have a camera on my phone plus I have one on my iPad. Those are almost incidental cameras but I do use them all the time. Then I have a super zoom camera and also a smaller super zoom camera that I carry with me on my commutes. Lastly I have my DJI 3 stabilized video camera that I film my Walks in NYC with.

I also spend some time looking at new cameras on the internet. I like seeing what’s out there and shopping around for whatever the latest thing is. I’m often checking out micro four thirds cameras which I’ve always wanted one of but have never bought. I guess it’s not that important to me but I like looking at them online.

I tell you all of this to explain the latest camera that I got. The two primary places online that I look at cameras are Amazon and eBay. If I’m just looking for prices of cameras in general I go to Amazon but if I want a bigger range of prices, such as for used stuff, I go to eBay.

One camera that always pops up on my searches is this cheap “Vlogging Camera.” It’s called that because it has an LCD that swivels around and can face the front of the camera (I love a swivel LCD by the way). It is a 48 megapixel camera and also shoots video.

I’ve seen this camera branded various ways but they all seem to be the same basic model. That happens a lot with stuff these days. I’ve noticed it a lot with mens’ shoes too. I think a Chinese factory makes a lot of a product for cheap and another company buys that product, brands it, and then sells it cheap.

A lot of companies do this and we end up with a lot of identical stuff with different branding. It’s probably why I always see complaints on Amazon that the product pictured isn’t the one sent to the customer. I think companies are just selling whatever the factory sends them. I think a lot of drop shipping is involved too. This is when the company branding and selling the product never even has the product in their hands. I’d shipped right from the factory’s warehouse to the customer.

These 48 megapixel vlogging cameras are usually priced from $50 to $100. I don’t know if there is a difference between the cameras on those two ends of the price but if there is I haven’t noticed it. I’ve always been curious what a $50 camera could possibly be like but I never wanted to pay $50 to find out.

So there I was a couple of weeks ago looking at Micro Four Thirds cameras, yet again, on Amazon and, yet again, these $50 48 megapixel camera pop up. But this time I decide to go to eBay and see if they are there too. Sure enough they are except I see one for $13. That’s kind of a crazy price. That included shipping too. With tax the price ended up being $14 and change so let’s just call it $15. I ended up buying that $15 camera.

When the camera came the first thing I noticed, that I hadn’t even thought of, was that it didn’t come with a Micro SD card. Of course it didn’t. What would a $15 camera came with a Micro SD card? So I pulled one out of a Ambernic hand held device that I wasn’t using and put it in the $15 camera and got to testing it.

The first thing I noticed was that it wouldn’t save a photo. I had the resolution set to 48 megapixels and it would go through the motions of saving a photo but nothing would end up on the card. I turned the resolution down to 44 megapixels and it saved a couple of photos. I thought things were fine but then it stopped saving photos again.

I also shot video with the camera and it saved that (unless it didn’t) but the video was choppy and was unwatchable. Don’t know how many frames a second it was recording but it wasn’t enough.

After all these troubles with the camera the idea struck me that maybe I had the wrong Micro SD card for the camera. Sometimes devices have an upper limit on how big a Micro SD card can be. I dug out the camera manual and found the info I needed. A 128 gig SD card was the upper limit and I had an 256 gig Micro SD card in there. I went online and spent $10 on a new Micro SD card that had the specs that they asked for. I now own a $25 “$15 camera!”

Guess what? It didn’t matter. I turned the resolution up to 48 megapixels again and it saved one photo and then stopped saving anything. I turned the resolution down to 44 megapixels and it saved three photos and then stopped saving anything. It wouldn’t save video either. I put the frustrating camera down and left it.

It wasn’t until a week later when I was telling the story of this camera to someone that it struck me to turn the resolution down to 24 megapixels. It never occurred to me because who wants to shoot with a camera on half resolution? But all my other cameras have less than 20 megapixels anyway. 48 megapixels is crazy large. That was one of the reasons I was always curious about these cameras. How can such a cheap camera have such a large megapixel count? It turns out that it can’t.

Anyway it was just this morning that I tried the camera out on 24 megapixels. Everything worked fine. It saved all the photos I took. I guess it’s not a 48 megapixel camera at all. And the picture quality was not particularly good. Lots of grain. About what you’d expect from a $15 camera.