Radiant Comics

I added a new type of drawing to my workflow this week. The “Tiny Drawing.” I’ve drawn small before. In my “Gatsby” sketchbook I made tiny figure drawings to get down ideas for things. Then there are my Inkbooks. They are filled with small thumbnail drawings that are only two or three inches a side. I have drawn a lot of Art Cards that are baseball card size. I even occasionally draw small things on various pieces of scrap paper. But these new Tiny Drawings are one inch by one and a half inches. That’s pretty small.

It all started when I bought some new paper. I usually work on 11×17 inch paper. That’s a standard paper size and the correct proportions for making comic book art. I also usually work on Bristol Board (paper) that comes in 14×17 inch pads. So I cut off three inches from the width and then cut up that 3×17 inch strip into four 2.5×3.5 inch pieces of art card paper. I’ve got a nice paper cutter to handle the job.

This new pad of paper that I bought was a pad of 140lb watercolor paper. That’s a thick piece of paper that can stand up to being soaked with water. Good stuff. It came in a 12×18 inch pad so I decided that I should cut it down to my normal 11×17 inches. I’m a creature of habit and that makes things easier for me. So I got out my paper cutter and trimmed an inch off the width and then the height of the paper.

That left me with two long pieces of paper an inch wide. It was nice paper too! As I stood there looking at those two pieces of paper I wondered what I could do with them. I didn’t want to throw them out but I also had no use for them. So I let them sit on my drawing table for the afternoon.

Sometime as they were sitting there and I was going about my business doing whatever (it was a Sunday afternoon) it struck me what I could do with them. Or at least it struck me how to cut them up. They were already an inch wide so if I cut them to an inch and a half long I could have the proportions I usually work at. On the 11×17 inch paper I usually work at 10×15 inches. That’s a 2:3 proportion just like the 1:1.5 paper is.

I think it was after I cut the paper to size that the idea of what to draw came to me. A small face with a word balloon and a word in the balloon.

Just a few weeks ago I had ordered some new art supplies. That’s where this new pad of paper came from. Along with the paper I ordered a few new small black markers. I love small black markers and I love to try out new ones. One of them that I bought was a Dick Blick house brand marker with archival pigment ink. Its size was 1.0mm. That’s actually big for a small black marker. Most of them have a tip that’s under one millimeter. But I like the larger small tips.

I got at it and first drew all four borders on the small piece of paper and then the empty word balloon. At first when I was drawing these I’d come up with a word to put in the balloon and then draw the face. Somewhere after the first thirty or so of them I switched and now I draw the face first and then put the word in. And the word was whatever came into my head in the moment.

At first I was using the same 1.0mm pen for the drawing and the lettering. But I found that pen was a little too big for the lettering. I switched over to a 0.8mm little black marker and that worked better. It was also why I switched up the order I put the word in. At first I would draw the borders, switch pens to letter, switch pens to draw the face, and then switch the pen again to title and sign the back. That was a lot of pen switching. Now I draw the borders, draw the face, switch pens, letter the word and the back. A much more efficient work flow.

I also decided that I was going to give these drawings away. They’re tiny and ephemeral. I’ll give them away to my students or anyone else I saw who wanted one (I’ve learned no to give art away to people who don’t really want it). Maybe they’d keep track of them of maybe they’d disappear over the years. Who knows?

I like the way the drawings came out. They’re stripped down to the very basic thing that a comic is. A character, a word balloon, and a word. Nothing more. I also think that there is an appealing cuteness to them. I made almost all of the faces with big smiles on them and the words are generally pleasant and that plus the small size makes them appealing. I like the basicness of them.

I’ve already given some of them away and everybody seems to like them. One question I got asked about them is how long it takes to draw one of them. I find that a hard question to answer because sometimes they can go really fast and at other times slower. And even if they go really fast it’s usually for a short time. I can draw ten of them in about twenty minutes but I sure can’t do that every twenty minutes.

The last couple of nights I drew some of them while watching TV. I drew ten of them over about the span of a forty minute TV show. Maybe that’s a more realistic time for how long it takes to draw one of these. Four minutes a piece is still quick but, once again, I probably could do that through every TV show.

So far I’ve made a hundred of these tiny drawings. That’s over six days. Not a bad pace but probably not one I’ll keep up. I can’t even give away that many over a week’s time. But I’m enjoying drawing them so I’ll make more.

Bunny 21 Cover Scans Put Together

Last year (January of 2024) I wrote about buying some comic book production art off eBay. I bought the production negatives from a comic book cover published in the mid 1970s. The cover of Bunny #21 from Harvey comics. (http://radiantcomics.com/art-writing-bunny-21-production-negatives/). I am revisiting the subject with a new theme in mind. The new theme is “The right tool for the right job really makes a difference.”

These production negatives are what they used to make the four printing plates with which they would print the covers. There is a blue (cyan) plate, a red (magenta) plate, a yellow plate, and a black plate. There is a negative that corresponds with each one of these plates.

These negatives are also called “Transparencies.” That’s because they are see through. There is no white on them. Any place in the color scheme where the white of the paper is supposed to show through is transparent instead. Since the printing of comic books was done by printing little dots of color (especially for the lighter colors) the space between the dots is also transparent. Any white on any printed page is the white color of the paper rather than a white ink.

This transparency part is important because in order to scan it well you need a part on your scanner called a “Transparency Adaptor.” My scanner doesn’t have this part. I have two other scanners that can scan photographic negatives and slides, technically they are transparencies too, but the production negatives are 8.5×11 inches and that’s too big for my slide/film scanners.

The Yellow Plate. Yes, It’s in black and white.

Last year when I originally scanned these production negatives I did my best using my flatbed scanner. Its scanned it pretty well but not great. I’d give the scans a solid B to B minus. I’d say they captured about 80% of what was there. It was enough for me to make a good but not great print out of the cover. It took a lot of adjusting. I can also tell by my original blog that I had trouble making my own positive transparency of the art. That all changed this week.

The quality of my scans changed because I finally brought the production negatives into the school where I teach and they have a transparency adaptor on their scanner. Y’see, one of the things that I show the students how to do is to scan. There are a couple of scanners that they can use and one of them is an 11×17 inch scanner with the transparency adaptor. So I figured that it was about time I scanned in those negatives the right way.

What a difference in quality the right tool made. Most of the background color in the top of the comic is about a 50% magenta. They used what’s called a “Screen” to turn a 100% magenta ink into a series of dots that looks like a 50% magenta. They used a literal screen which was 50% screen to block out the color and 50% holes in the screen. So in any square inch on that part of the cover half the inch is covered with dots and the other half is the white paper between the dots. If it was a 100% magenta the whole square inch would be covered in ink. No paper would show through.

I mention all that because with a flatbed scanner all those dots are hard to scan. At least they’re hard to scan evenly. And the whole point of the dots is that they’re even. So in my original scans the dots weren’t as solid and even as they should have been. They were okay but I could see they weren’t anywhere near perfect.

Since the production negatives are in black and white after I scan them I have to turn them into color. I did this in Photoshop and lined up all four negatives. They lined up perfectly and looked really good. If my flatbed scans were 80% these ones were as close to 100% as I was going to get. The screens were all even and so the color looked even.

The color looked bright and vibrant too. After comparing the printouts I made from the flatbed scans to the new ones the old printout looked washed out. The color wasn’t nearly as bright as it was supposed to be. Side by side I might even move the score of the flatbed scanner files down to 70%.

The main area that I could really tell was improved was the distinction between the skin tone of the main character, Bunny, and the pink background. In my original scans the two colors were more similar than they should have been. That always bothered me. Now it doesn’t.

A place where the new scans really made a difference is on the transparencies that I printed. Back in the day the printer would give you a “Proof” to look at which was each individual plate (Cyan. Magenta, Yellow, and Black) printed on transparent paper that would be sandwiched together but you could separate them (they were hinged with tape) to look at what each printing plate looked like.

I can see by my old blog that I struggled to print the individual plates on transparencies and thought I didn’t have the correct settings for my printer. Turned out the scans just weren’t good enough. With these new scans I had no trouble printing my own transparencies.

These new scans with the transparency adaptor also took very little cleanup or adjusting. I can remember working on the old flatbed scans for a couple of hours trying to get them to bee good enough to print. With these new scans it was more minutes than hours. I had to adjust the color slightly but since the color of the dots were so even it was easy. I also had to fix a few small areas where the dots were messed up but that didn’t take long. It was so much less work this time around.

So that’s today’s lesson. The correct tool means a lot less work and a better result.

I put in a big order for art supplies last week (February 22). I do this every now and again as I’m an artist and need supplies. Usually what prompts a big order is that I need to refill some necessities or have some sort of new project in mind.

For example a few years ago (maybe 2021) I decided that I wanted to make some 24×36 inch paintings over the summer. I hadn’t made any in years so I had to buy half a dozen canvases that size and restock some of my paints. That was a big order.

Or maybe, as back in around 2010, I wanted to try a new medium entirely. That’s when I decided to learn to use markers in a finished way. At first I just ordered a few markers but in the following years I built up my marker collection and had a few big orders with a lot of markers in them.

I think it was around 2022 when I decided I wanted to develop a new technique using color inks. I now have about thirty color inks over on my side table but I bought all those in about two big orders. I had to buy thirty plastic cubbies to store the ink in since I don’t like working out of the ink bottles they come in.

Then there are the necessities. One of them being paper. The paper that I usually work on is called Bristol Board. It’s a two-ply drawing paper that’s got some thickness to it and holds up well. It’s more expensive than regular drawing paper but I like it a lot better. So I almost always draw on Bristol Board.

There are two sizes of pads of Bristol Board that I normally buy. First is a 9×12 inch pad. I use this at that size but I also use it at a smaller size. I often cut a piece in half and get two 6×9 inch pieces of paper out of it. This is the size that I do a lot of my preliminary drawings. So I always need a stock of 9×12 inch pads.

The second size pad that I but is 14×17 inches but I almost never work on a 14×17 inch drawing. Since the standard size of comic book original art is 11×17 inches I got used to working at that size and so I cut down a piece of 14×17 inch paper to 11×17 inches.

The cutting down of this paper gives me another size to work at. Art card size. 2.5×3.5 inches. I can cut the 3×17 inch strip of paper that’s left over from the 14×17 inch paper into four art card size pieces. I do that every time I cut the paper down. I have a line drawn on my paper cutter so I can easily measure and cut three inches off the side and then another line for cutting off half an inch. Then there are rulers on the side of the cutter to cut to 3.5 inch pieces. It’s almost automatic for me these days.

The kind of Bristol Board that I normally work on has a smooth surface. There is also a slightly rougher surface called a vellum surface. I bought three pads of 14×17 inch smooth and a single pad of vellum. I wanted a change of pace pad. I also bought three pads of the 9×12 Bristol Board. They were all smooth.

Lately I’ve also been working on my “Superheroes talking” comic. Those are ink and watercolor (or marker) drawings done on 5×7 inch watercolor paper. That’s another size that I work at but I almost never buy 5×7 inch paper. I usually cut paper down to that size. But since these are done on watercolor paper and not my usual Bristol Board it was easier to buy the smaller paper. So I did.

Smaller paper is usually more expensive per inch than larger sheet of paper. I sure have an example of that. I decided that I wanted to try out some new watercolor paper. I usually buy watercolor paper in big sheets and cut it to size. But I saw a pad of 12×18 inch watercolor paper that looked pretty good. And cheap. It was $17 for thirty sheets of cold press (rough surface) 140lb paper. I bought one. Or maybe two.

I actually did buy two pads of the 12×18 inch paper but, upon reflection, I don’t think I actually meant to. In my memory I ordered two of the 5×7 inch paper and one of the 12×18 inch paper. But when I looked at my email receipt it was the opposite. I don’t know if my memory was wrong or not but either way it was a good idea.

Both sizes were around the same price ($13 vs $17) and 12×18 inches give me a lot more paper. According to the math I can cut six pieces of 5×7 paper out of a 12×18 inch piece. Six times thirty is one hundred and eighty pieces. The $13 5×7 inch pad has twenty five sheets in it. That’s quite the difference.

The papers were the necessities and the rest of the order was stocking up on things to try out or to add to collections. I bought a set of Dick Blick grey markers and refill inks for them. These get added to my marker collection. I hesitated to call it a collection because I actually use them. They don’t just sit there getting looked at occasionally like a collection of objects.

I also got a variety of synthetic brushes to try out. I’m always looking for a good new brush to ink with and so I ordered four of them this time. It’s the same for little black markers. I use them all the time and I enjoy trying out new ones. I ordered three new ones to try.

There was also marker refill ink in my order. Three different colors that I was running low on and had to order more. I also ordered a new pint bottle of India ink. I have plenty of ink still around but this was the Dick Blick house brand that I was running low on.

The last thing I bought was a Pantone Process Blue marker and a bottle of refill ink for it. It wasn’t cheap. The marker was $8.50 and the refill ink was $13. I paid $6 for one Copic marker and $5.40 for the refill ink. That’s a big price difference and the reason that I’l probably not buy anymore Pantone markers. But we’ll see.

The last thing I got was a freebie. Since I bought over $30 worth of Dick Blick markers they drew in a free marker bag. It’s an okay bag.

Tiki Barber

I’m a fan of NFL football and the New York Giants. I watch the game every week despite how terrible the Giants have been for about twelve years. Back in the early 1990s, when the Giants were better, for a brief time I collected football cards. It was a boom time in the sports card business, card stores were everywhere, and packs of cards were cheap. I would buy packs, rip them open, and sort them into their teams. I got bored with them after a couple of years and stopped. Packs of random football cards can also build up pretty quickly and take up too much room. That was another reason for stopping.

I mention this because last year (2024) I started buying some football cards again. But not random packs. Since the early 1990s the whole sports card and non-sports card world has changed. Now it’s all about finding the special “Chase Cards” that are in packs. Those are the cards they do a little extra with to get you to buy more packs.

It was last year I found out (on eBay) that there was such a thing as “Relic” football cards. Those are chase cards that have a piece of football jersey mounted in them. Some of them are made from a jersey that the player wore in a game. Some are made from a jersey the player just wore, and I think some are just a random piece of material that no one ever wore. You really have to read the fine print.

Since the Giants have been terrible for so long they don’t have a lot of players whose cards are in high demand. A KC Chiefs Patrick Mahomes relic card might run you anywhere from $40 to $200 but a NY Giants Reuben Randle relic card is only $3. That’s a lot more of an impulse purchase.

So that’s what I did over the last year or so. I made impulse purchases of NY Giants jersey relic cards. Purely out of nostalgia for NY Giants players of the past. I even paid $4.32 for a Saquon Barkley relic card. He went to the Eagles this year and is in the Giants’ past.

Jeremy Shockey

These jersey cards are also extra thick. They are really two cards with the small piece of jersey sandwiched in between them and a window in the front card so you can see the jersey. The window is usually only about an inch square. I had to buy some extra thick hard shelled card holders to put the cards in. They’re too thick for regular card holders.

I’m not even sure (besides nostalgia) why I like these jersey cards more than other chase cards. There is something about the fabric being a physical textile and somehow more real to me than other chase cards. It’s also a completely different look for a card. It’s a regular looking card with a window to another reality in it.

What that other reality is doesn’t even matter to me. As I wrote above you have to pay attention to the fine print on the card as to if it has been anywhere near the player or not but I kind of like all of them equally. I’ll never really know if the jersey was game worn or not but I find it fun to contemplate. It could be fake, it could be real, it could be something in between. Looking into that window on the card is looking into different realities.

I have about twenty five of these jersey cards right now and I enjoy looking at them. I paid anywhere between $2 and $6 (tax and shipping included) a piece for them with just a few of the more popular players being about $8.

Buying these football cards brought me to buying a couple of non-sports cards that were even more nostalgic. There was a movie that came out back in 1994 called “Clerks” that I really enjoyed. It was a low budget black and white movie by director Kevin Smith. He has since gone on to become much more famous and make more movies. But back in 1994 he was an unknown who came out of nowhere to make a cool movie.

Malik Nabers

Kevin Smith is four years younger than me and we’re both considered Generation X. His movie “Clerks” was one of the first movies made by a GenXer for GenXers. It was a lot of fun when it came out, became a cult hit, and I still like it today. It is also one of those movies that became so influential that younger people who see it today for the first time might ask, “What’s the big deal? It’s a movie just like a lot of other movies?” That may be true now but in 1994 there were not many movies like it. Its sense of humor has gone on to become more mainstream but it wasn’t back then.

So now that I’ve establish how much I like the movie “Clerks” you can understand my nostalgia for it and the early 1990s. As I was looking for random football cards to buy I decided to look at non-sports cards too. I found some cards from the movie “Clerks.” The cards certainly aren’t from 1994, they’re from 2014 to 2016, but the pictures on them are from 1994.

One card could my eye. A chase card with an autograph on it from Marilyn Ghigliotti. She’s an actress from the movie and the card had two pictures of her on it. In one she has her hair up and on the other her hair down. Beneath the two pictures is her autograph. Its design motif is that it’s a hand made card and you can see the tape on it that holds all the elements in place.

I’m not an autograph person. I don’t collect autographs and I generally don’t care about them. I don’t know why but they don’t do a lot for me. But this card looked really cool. A big part of it is nostalgia. A love for the good parts of the past. I ended up paying $17 for the card. That’s an expensive one for me but I like looking at the card. Worth every penny.

Marilyn Ghigliotti

That brings me to one final nostalgia card. There was another actress in the movie named Lisa Spoonauer. Unfortunately she died back in 2017 when she was still in her mid-40s. I saw they had a card with her autograph on it that came out back in 2014. I decided to get it too.

This card is made to look like a video store membership card. I don’t think the card is as well designed as the other one but it’s still pretty cool. The all yellow look of the card contrasts well with the light blues of the first card.

Lots of nostalgia with both the football cards and the Clerks cards. But that Lisa Spoonauer card also reminds me of the fragility of life. Let’s keep remembering the good times.

Recently I took on the task of filling out a survey for the school that I work for. One of the things that they wanted to know was what art groups and such I might belong to. Shows, publications, and things like that. Stuff they can use to brag about their professors. That makes sense. Plus I’ve noticed that groups like groups and organizations like organizations. The problem is that artists are famously not very good joiners but that’s also because no one wants us to join. Most artists rely on individual effort rather than groups blessing them.

I saw a video on social media a couple years ago in which a woman referred to “Art with no destination.” This is art made with individual effort and there is no end place for the art. Most art is made that way. There is no big show sponsored by some big corporation at the end of the project. There is just the next project to work on. No one applauds you and there is no group to motivate you to do more. You’re on your own and have to put in the effort to get anything done yourself.

I write this all as a praise for individual effort and to brag on some of the stuff I’ve gotten done over the years. No one told me to do any of this stuff, I belong to no group that backs me, not many people ever care to buy anything I make, hardly anyone actually even sees it, but still I go on putting in the individual effort.

Let’s start with this very blog. 2025 is my twentieth year posting a piece of writing once a week. I think it was around year two or three that I decided to make each one about a thousand words. I think I just passed one thousand of these blog posts. That’s a lot. How many people have done that? Probably most of them who have did it on their own.

I started the web comic that goes on this site in January of 2010. That means that it is now my sixteenth year of posting “Four Talking Boxes” five days a week. No one pays me to do it. I do it because I want to make a comic strip. Within a few years of 2010 I added “Message Tee” and “Drifting and Dreaming” on the weekends. That’s a new comic everyday for over a decade. That’s an accomplishment that very few people have ever achieved.

But without a group it’s just, “Jared has been posting a comic a day for ten years.” With a group it would be, “Jared had been making comics for Big Comic Book Company for ten years.” People are more impressed with a Big Comic Book Company involved. People are impressed by work but don’t see anything without money involved as work. Individual effort is not always respected unless it comes with a payday.

I just finished inking “Dreams of Things” #276. That is the 276th cover in my “Covers to Comics That Don’t Exist” series. That’s a big number. I’ve done a lot of these and I will probably be reaching #300 sometime this year. I think that’s an impressive bit of individual effort. I don’t even have a spot where I could possibly display all 276 of these covers. At 11×17 inches each that’s a lot of real estate.

Of course people would be more impressed if I worked for Marvel Comics and drew 276 Spider-Man covers. People know and love Spider-Man because a big corporation has spent a lot of time and money getting them to love Spider-Man. All of my covers are individual pieces that you can love or not on their own. But I only have individual effort. It’s tough to compete with a company that has paid artists to make Spider-Man covers for sixty years. But I still put in the effort.

Another thing I put in the effort with over the last ten years have been my Big Ink Drawings. They are 22×30 inch drawings made with black ink. Each one is individual and each one is a unique picture. I’m not ever sure how many of them I’ve made but it’s over fifty. Once again that’s a lot of real estate. A lot of square feet of art. I think it’s an impressive bit of individual effort.

Back in 2019 I developed my three marker technique for drawing 6×9 inch ink drawings. It was just something new I came up with so that I could create drawings and work on images. I like to create new and unique images. At some point after I had a bunch of them done I dedicated to keep going with them and someday make a deck of cards with the images. I now have 340 of these drawing and can make multiple decks if I want to. That is a lot of individual effort over the years.

There is also the “Great Gatsby” illustrations that I’ve been working on. This is my third year that I’ve been working on it and it’s close to being finished. I’ve made more than a hundred drawings for it and it has been a lot of work. If it was being published by a big book company people would be impressed. That’s something they could wrap their heads around but for me it’s been all about the individual effort. I’ve been doing it because I want to do it.

I’ve been making art with individual effort since the late 1980s. You’d be hard pressed to meet an artist who has made more art than I have. There are plenty of things that I haven’t even mentioned here. I have made about a hundred small 8×10 inch acrylic on canvas paintings. I have about as many larger (various sizes) oil or acrylic on canvas paintings from my decades of painting. I have a couple of thousand small art card sized pieces. I have a lot of gouache and watercolor paintings. I have twenty five sketchbooks (my Inkbooks) on my shelf that are filled with small drawings. I have a lot of pages of comics that I have drawn. I’m still forgetting a lot of stuff.

So there you go. I try to practice the art of humility but sometimes I have to brag about myself. In this world that likes groups I wanted to put in a good word for individual effort.