Hypno-Powers in the middle of being painted.
Just last week I wrote about eleven drawings that I made so that I can use one of them for my next painting. It would be my third painting that I’ve made since the beginning of June. I’m trying to get some painting done this summer before my teaching semester starts in the end of August.
So what did I do after I made those eleven drawings? Did I pick my favorite and get started on a new painting? Nope. I didn’t use any of them at all and went in a completely different direction with the painting. It was kind of a weird swerve for me but it was the way things worked out.
One of the things I’ve mentioned before is that I like words and pictures together. Since I’m a cartoonist and comic book fan that’s not a big surprise. I make a lot of prints that have words, slogans, or sayings in them and the occasional painting with words in it too. The last painting I made was called “Mister Sleep” and it had the word “Sleep” painted in it. It was a simple use of type but I like to keep type in a painting simple. Painting letters is nowhere near as easy as typing them on a computer.
The different direction I went in was an idea from before I did the first painting of the summer when I was originally thinking about what I should paint. One of the ideas I had was to take one of my cartoon art cards and blow it up into a painting. My cartoon art cards are when I make a 2.5×3.5 inch drawing of a person’s face with a word balloon over their head. I thought it would be cool to make a 24×36 inch painting out of one. Then I moved on from the idea.
An offshoot of my cartoon art cards are my oversized (5×7 inches) superhero cartoon art cards. Same head and same word balloon but bigger and with superhero masked faces. I made 52 of these for my webcomic and they are going to replace “Message Tee” next year (2026).
I do the initial drawing and writing for these superhero cartoon art cards digitally in Procreate. Then I print them out on 5×7 inch paper and ink and color them. After I had 52 of them finished for next year I still had some momentum and drew another ten of them but never printed them out to be inked. After I finished the eleven drawings for my next painting I decided to print out the ten superhero cartoon art cards just to have them around in case I felt like working on them.
Upon seeing those superhero art cards it revived the idea of making a painting out of a cartoon art card. I think one of the reasons that idea went away in the first place is because my regular 2.5×3.5 inch cartoon art cards are really small. I couldn’t just blow one up. I’d have to make a whole new drawing out of the face. But with these 5×7 inch cartoon art cards the drawing was much more worked out. I could take one of these and blow it up without a lot more drawing to be done. It’s easier to do something when my vision of it is clear.
I made the decision to make my next painting one of the superhero cartoon art cards pretty quickly after I finished those eleven drawings. It was a bit of a surprise to myself. I had been working on those eleven drawings for a week and a half and I was happy with them. But maybe I was just happy with them as drawings and not as potential paintings. Or maybe I had just spent so much time with them that they needed a little space now. The cartoon art cards idea obviously needed a little space since before it was juts an idea and now I really liked it.
So the painting is now under way. I’ve finished day four of working on it and I still have a bunch of days to go. Since it’s a face it’s similar to the first painting that I made in June so I think I’ll be finishing it kind of the same but we’ll see. The main difference is that first one was all face so that the painting of the face has to carry the whole painting. This one is mostly face but it’s also a superhero face. So the character has a mask. Oddly that makes it less of an “Art face” than the first one. The mask grounds it in reality more than the first one which has no mask but has the face split in half with two colors.
Of course the other big difference is the word balloon. The type. I’ve used word balloons on paintings only a couple of times and I think I did it the same way both times. I painted the letters in black (or in this case dark purple) and then painted the white space around them with white paint.
Y’see, I don’t want what would be the white space of the paper to just be the white of the canvas. I want the white to have the presence of paint. I want it to have some texture and surface. But this word balloon has a lot words in it so it will take a while to paint around all the lettering. More time than I want to spend. So I’m thinking of doing it another way.
I already painted the type and I used a dark purple acrylic ink. What I’m going to try and do it to paint with white paint over the whole balloon. I think the white paint won’t cover the lettering one hundred percent and will be a little bit transparent. That way I can repaint the lettering over the white paint using the original lettering as a guide. This is my plan as of now but I’m going to do that after I finish the rest of the painting.
I’ll let you know how it goes.