Radiant Comics

I’m a methodical artist. That means that method is important to me. It’s how I get things done. I do things a certain way. A series of steps. I do step one, followed by step two, then step three, until I’ve finished however many steps it takes to make a finished piece of art. I’ve also got a bunch of different methods for a bunch of different types of art. My “Drawings on Comics” have a different method from my “Big Ink Drawings.”

As a consequence of being methodical I can usually tell if things are going wrong early in the process. If there are problems with the piece on step three then those problems are not going to get better on step five. Conversely if things are going well they’ll probably continue on that path. As a consequence I’m not usually surprised when a piece comes together in the end and looks good. After all that’s the plan. But sometimes I do surprise myself.

One of the dangers of being a methodical artist is getting bored. If I plan things out too much then there is a chance that I’ll get disinterested in the piece halfway through making it. In my head I can see it finished and it seems to be just going through the motions to actually finish it. In my youth I abandoned pieces because I got tired of making them.

To avoid this problem I developed ways of doing things that left room for improvisation at the end. A put a place in my methods for the very last finished stages to be unplanned. This gave me a place to be creative. After that I looked forward to finishing a piece. The boredom of being able to see it finished halfway through was replaced by seeing the places I could get creative at the end. I could surprise myself.

I bring this topic up because just yesterday I finished marker coloring “Dreams of Things” number 140. It’s from my “Covers to Comic Books That Don’t Exist” series and I it surprised my how much I liked it after I colored it. That doesn’t always happen but here it did. With this series I leave room for it to happen but I’m often surprised when it does.

The “Dreams of Things” seres are done in three stages. First I draw them in pencil, then I print out the pencils in blue line with the logo on it so I can ink it, and finally I use markers to color right over the inked line. Usually these stages are days or weeks apart as I can have from three to five of them going at any given time.

Often these covers look good in their inked form. They could be finished ink drawings if I wanted them to be. They’re fully realized as images even though I eventually add color to them. With others the ink drawing looks drab. Not terrible or anything like that but they lack technique to make them look interesting. I’m saving the flair of technique for the coloring. The ink drawings are left looking “open for color.”

I have a few inked covers on the pile waiting for me to color them. All of them look bland to me right now. Maybe that’s why I was unenthusiastic about coloring them. But one day I there was nothing I wanted to do so I picked the next cover off the pile and decided to give it a go.

For a lot of the covers I have color schemes in mind. I don’t know why but the colors suggest themselves to me. With #140 the colors had no suggestions for me. I couldn’t visualize any of the colors beforehand as I so often can. In cases like that I start with the background and usually some easy literal colors. In this case I started with the blue sky on top. After that I decided to make the green sky in the middle but at the last second changed it from a sky to alternating rough green parallel lines. I think that was a good choice. Third was the darker bottom blue sky. Finally I decided to make the tiny little blue sky in the small guy’s box blue too.

The skies were only the initial background elements. There was still a lot of other stuff in there. I went literal with the two areas of green land too. They helped balance out the green in the middle plus made the weird triple landscape a little more grounded.

The next background pieces were the various bits of brown. They look like parts of fences and houses. The first piece of bright color I put in was the orange on the curtains on the top left. They stand out against the sky. I was going to put dark blue over the curtains but then I realized the color would blend in with the logo too much. Some yellow would be a better choice. So I went with some rough yellow and yellow ochre lines.

The last of the background was that strange machine on the right. I went with purple for it but it was too flat. I decided I would have to try and do something about that at the end with some black ink. Color couldn’t help that bit any more.

Finally only the three faces were left. I like to mix up my skin tones and make all different faces from dark to light or with crazy colors. I find if I don’t specifically think about the skin tones I default to making everyone my own skin tone and that gets boring. So I started with the top one and made him/her (I don’t always have a gender in mind with my androgynous faces) a dark orange-ish skin tone. The I decided to do one of my split face skin tones on the bottom woman (I don’t know why I think of her as a woman but not the top one). The yellow/orange and blue make a nice combination. The little patch faced guy was the last skin tone.

I finished the color with the blue green of the top face’s shoulders and then the red and yellow of the bottom face’s shirt. That was it for the color so them I decided to go in with some black ink lines and give a little more visual interest to the purple machine. I drew in all those little parallel lines to give a stylized indication of roundness.

In the end I really liked this cover. The color made it come alive. After I finished it I let it sit on my easel for a day and then I looked at it with fresh eyes. I was a little surprised that I liked it. I went from a bit indifferent about it in its ink stage to liking it with color. That doesn’t always happen. It was a nice surprise.

If you ever want to know why artists, illustrators, cartoonists, or anybody on a deadline does things the same way time after time I have the answer for you. Trying to do something a new way takes ten times as long. This weekend I’ve been working on my Gatsby Project (for which I’m not on a deadline) and I’ve been doing things a new way and it has been slow going. Frustratingly slow.

I’ve been working on making illustrations to go along with the book “The Great Gatsby” since the beginning of 2022. It has taken me a couple of months to find my footings with it but for the last couple of months (it’s the beginning of June as I write this) things have been going well. I’ve got a few illustrations finished and a few more in the process. Not bad.

This weekend I decided to go back and work on one that was almost finished but that I didn’t like how it was turning out. It was an ink drawing that had Tom, Gatsby, and Daisy in it. The main problem was, once again, drawing the suits. This time it wasn’t the fashion details of the suits that was bothering me (I think I have the details down now) but the drawing style itself. The drawings of the two men looked boring.

The drawings were full figures of Tom and Gatsby standing apart but back to back. Each drawing is about six inches tall and the men are wearing suits. It was one of the drawings that I used 3D models to get just the right pose and then drew suits over the models. They were adequate drawings but too boring for me to be satisfied with them. So I redrew them.

First I redrew them with pencil and then I inked them. I tried inking them with some pens but they didn’t come out well. After that I inked them with a brush and they were fine. I digitized the ink drawings and set about coloring the piece in Photoshop. As I was coloring I thought the suit drawings were still boring. I tried to compensate with some coloring techniques but nothing I tried worked. I probably spent two hours trying to color those suits only to come up with nothing. So I went back to the ink drawings.

I decided the failure was still in the ink stage so I tried some other ink drawing techniques. I failed another three times. I finally remembered that the comic book artist Frank Cho had done some nice suits that I saw months ago on Instagram. I decided to look them up. He was using an Art Deco hatching technique where he drew black lines directionally following the pull of the tension of the fabric. He did a really great job with it.

I gave a try to that technique but it took me another three tries to get it right. At least as right as I could get it. There wasn’t a lot of tension and folds in the suits I was drawing. The suits weren’t in action and were designed to have a good looking straight silhouette so it was hard for me to pick the right lines and the direction of them. But I got it done. In the end I like the technique a lot better than what I had before.

Finishing the suits I had to decide what I wanted for the large Daisy head I had at the bottom of the drawing. I wanted to color it but it was a stripped down and simplified face. It seemed to want some shading and realism but how much and with what technique? I wasn’t sure at all.

I’ve been doing a lot of coloring with markers in the last few years. If I had decided to color this piece that way instead of digitally I would have had this face done and looking good in forty minutes. That’s what I mean when I say people on deadlines don’t try new things. Two hours later and I still didn’t have what I wanted with the Daisy face.

At one point I even decided to try and finish the face as if I was using my markers. I scanned in the marker color swatches I made on a piece of paper so that I could sample the colors and use them in Photoshop. It didn’t work out. Drawing digitally is not like drawing in the real world no matter how much I prepare and want it to be. I couldn’t pull it off.

Keep in mind that last weekend I digitally colored two of these Gatsby drawings. They took a long time to do but I knew what I was doing the whole time. I was using my usual techniques and liked the drawings I was working on so that I didn’t have to “Fix” them at any point. So today’s drawing was extra frustrating.

I’m still not done with the Daisy face but I think I figured out how I’m going to do it. After failing with various digital drawing techniques I finally decided to draw only the shapes of the shadows with the vector pen tool to make the curves. It’s a tedious way to draw but sometimes I like the result.

It took me a good two hours to nail down the technique but I still have to erase all that and start again. Y’see, between using my regular color palette and the marker palette that I made I really screwed up my color. He face was not quite in harmony. I also made the mistake of putting my shadows and highlights on the same layer. That makes it harder to mass change either category of the color. I have to redo it all, get the color correct, and put the shading on different layers. That way if I decide I want my shadows a little darker it’s an easy adjustment. If they’re on the same layer it takes more time and therefor discourages me from making possibly necessary changes.

But it’s 8PM on Sunday night right now. That’s way too late for me to start anything. Daisy’s face will have to wait for another day.

Time sure can slip by can’t it? I ask this because this week I decide to make one of my Big Ink Drawings. They are done on 22×30 inch paper and are made with brushes, India ink, markers, straight edges, French curves, and my Haff hatching machine. All the stuff that helps me get black ink on paper. Sometimes I use color ink but most often its black ink.

I can’t even tell you how many of these Big Ink Drawings I’ve made of the last ten years. I could tell you if I dragged them all out and counted them but I’m not going to do that. I’d guess that I’ve made fifty of them though.

My habit with these drawings is to keep them on my easel when it’s not in use. I usually take photos of the drawings while they are in progress but, like all my other drawings, I like to scan them when I finish them. Unlike all my other drawings I don’t have a scanner big enough to accommodate a 22×30 inch drawing. My scanner is 11×17 inches so I have to scan the Big Ink Drawings in six pieces.

Scanning a large drawing in pieces is actually pretty easy except in order for me to do it I have to move my scanner onto a portable table that has the room around it to fit the drawing. My usual scanner spot can’t fit a 22×30 inch drawing in it. I don’t like to move the scanner and set it up to scan just one drawing so I don’t scan until I have a bunch of them ready to go. I have a bout eight of them stacked on my easel.

Since I have drawing table, computer, easel, and iPad and use all of them for drawing I don’t use my easel every day. Often I won’t use it for weeks. In that case the Big Ink Drawings just sit there on the easel. Otherwise I take the drawings off the easel in the morning and lay them down on my bed. That way I can work on the easel.

I sign and date all my drawings. It’s a good habit for young artists to get into because otherwise, over the years, you’ll forget exactly when a certain piece of art was from. I didn’t learn that lesson until my late 20s so there are some pieces I have that I know are from between 1991-1994 but I’m not sure exactly when. Sign the work too because that’ll help you get over imposter syndrome.

I mention all this as a long way to get around to the fact that it has been nearly a year since I’ve made a Big Ink Drawing. It’s May, 23, 2022 as I write this and the date on my last Big Ink Drawing is June 6, 2021. That’s a long time ago. How did it happen that I haven’t made one in over a year?

The first answer to that question is painting. Last summer I decided I wanted to do some painting. Before that I hadn’t painted in a while. I bought five new 24×36 inch pre-stretched canvases and worked on them all summer and into the fall. They take considerably longer to make than a Big Ink Drawing and so took up all my art time for about four months. The paintings are what I got done.

I’m not sure why I didn’t get any done after that except that I get on rolls with things. I got on a roll with paintings last summer and got all five canvases done. I’ve been on rolls with the Big Ink Drawing and there have been periods where I’ve done one or even two a week for weeks in a row. This winter I was on a roll making my Paste-Up Mash-Up Magic the Gathering cards. I guess I never got on a Big Ink roll for a year.

In making these Big Ink Drawings I sometimes make a whole new drawing and sometimes I look through my archive of drawings and find one that I want to make into a Big Ink Drawing. This time I wanted to make a new drawings so I pulled out my Ink Book and looked through my thumbnail drawings until one caught my eye.

Actually a few caught my eye beyond the first one so I set up four thumbnails so that I could make a 6×9 inch pencil drawing from them. I figured I’d give myself some choices in case the first one didn’t work out.

Over the years my Big Ink Drawings have ranged from fairly simple to incredibly complex. Simple often takes more preparation than complex but the eventual execution can be quicker. I would spend more time preparing the drawing but less time making the finished drawing. I’m not exactly sure why but simple appealed more to me than complex for this first Big Ink Drawing in a year. So I put the prep time in and made the drawing.

This Big Ink Drawing is called “Sleep Dream.” In an unusual moved I used the title of the drawing in the drawing itself as I wrote those words over the eyebrows of the face in the drawing. It’s a simple drawing in that it’s only one face. Water for the foreground, and a background full of simple shapes. Lots of texture in the background though.

It went about as I expected it to. It took around three days to complete and was painless to execute as I worked most of the piece out before hand. I like the way it came out. The face has a pensive look that I have empathy for. The hair could be on fire so there is a little bit of alarm in the piece but the hair could also be some sort of artichoke. That’s some weird hair. I like the two thickness of lined clouds in the back too.

I discovered a new technique with this drawing. The three black areas on top were going to be spirals but I didn’t like them and so blacked them in. Then I somehow got it in my head to draw black on black spirals. I used a marker that has a matte black in it and drew over the glossier black ink. It’s almost like a really dark grey over the black. I’m not sure if it’ll be visible in all light but I like the way it looks. I’ll have to try to do something in another piece with that. Maybe I’ll even get on a roll. We’ll have to see.

I started a new project this week (it’s the middle of May, 2022). Or maybe it’s a new genre for me. I’m not sure exactly what it is but I guess it’s the closest to scrapbooking that I’ve ever done. As an old school paste-up guy (that was what book publishing involved before the digital age) I have the skills and tools to cut stuff out and paste it down with precision and neatness. I like to use those skills.

The project started when I was looking online at sketchbooks and I saw a square 5×5 inch one. I don’t know why but it caught my eye. Then as I was thinking about square sketchbooks it struck me that Instagram made the square photo popular. Maybe I could do something with that.

I like to collect photos and images from social media and the web in general. I usually look at Instagram and Twitter on my iPad. As I browse those social media sites if I see a picture that I like I either download it or take a screen shot. As I’m an organized person I then put the picture in a folder with the person’s name or social media handle on it. I’ve been doing this for years. I usually don’t do anything with the photos but they sit there and I sometimes look at them.

So the thought I had was that I could print out a square photo and paste it into the square sketch book. That idea was enough to get me to buy the book. When the book arrived it gave me more ideas. Just pasting down Instagram photos didn’t seem interesting enough but I knew that was a starting point. Over the next day I thought about what else I wanted the book to be.

By the way I named the book “Small Things.”

Being an artist who has spent three decades making art I’ve got a lot of stuff lying around the studio. Among that stuff is a lot of little drawings on little pieces of paper. Nothing finished. They’re all mostly working drawings. Working drawings are done in order to make a bigger finished piece. I have a baseball card box filled with little drawings that I kept because I liked them but on their own aren’t much to look at. Who cares about an inch tall sketch of a random face?

I’ve also kept some small pieces of paper that I used for testing pens or markers. Usually they have some color in them but otherwise have black and white lines that aren’t really drawings but often look cool. I kept them because they are little works of abstract art.

I took these three things: square photos, baseball card size thumbnail drawings, and those little abstract works and started pasting them down in the sketchbook. I would arrange two or three things on the right hand page and leave the left hand side blank. After getting a few pages done I decided to write stuff on the left hand side. I would write stuff on the right hand side too but the left hand side had more room for wring.

After working on a few pages of art, photos, and writing I decided I needed more variety in sizes. I needed some photos to fit under a 2.5 inch square of art. So I printed out some photos (from Instagram) that were 1×4 inches. After doing that I immediately noticed that I needed some vertical versions of photos that size. So I printed some 4×1 inch photos.

As I made more pages it seemed I needed a bigger variety of stuff to paste down. That’s when I remembered my tracing paper drawings. Sometimes as I’m drawing I need to use tracing paper. Often it’s when I’m drawing something symmetrical. I draw the right side, put a sheet to tracing paper over it, trace the right side in dark graphite, flip the paper and transfer the drawing to the left side.

There is really nothing to do with these tracing paper drawings after I’m done with them. Often I reuse the tracing paper and there are a lot of pieces of different drawings on it. So I decided to pick out some of the pieces to glue down into the book.

A quick word about how I paste things down. I don’t use paste. I use repositional mounting adhesive. That’s sticky stuff on a roll of plastic paper. I put my art or photo on the sticky side of the paper, burnish it down (apply pressure), peel the plastic backing, and at this point the sticky stuff has transferred to the back of the photo or art and it can be stuck into the book.

I mention that because the next thing I though I needed were stamps. At least something about stamp sized. I remembered that I had some inkjet sticker paper so I decided to use it. I made a bunch of one inch squares in Photoshop and put a bunch of my street photos into them and printed them out. I then had a bunch of tiny photos to stick down.

The last photo idea I had was to use my “Objects” photo folder from my iPad. These are random things I’ve taken photos of over the years. Usually just a small something that I wanted to post somewhere. Some dice, purple flowers in my lawn, a toy, and lots of other stuff. Photos that served a purpose for a moment but were then useless. I kept them anyway. In a folder. I like to keep things because I never know if I can reuse them but I am always looking to reuses them. I printed these ones at half the size of the Instagram ones. About 2.5×5 inches.

For about a week I was moving at a pretty good clip on this project. I think I made 50 pages. I also decided to make a digital book out of it too. I scanned in all the pages and set them up in a book in InDesign. That took some time but was still doable. I like the way it’s going.

I’ve lost a little energy for this project at the end of this week. Maybe because I had a lot of energy for it at the beginning. I have gotten a lot of pages done, and that’s a good thing, but I think I need even more types of things to paste down. Even with all the stuff I’ve come up with I want even more variety. We’ll what I can come up with. Time will tell.

I’m pretty good at backing up my digital files. I even pay five dollars a month with a service that backs things up off site. That’s really an “In case of emergency” thing since most of my files are really big and to recover a whole hard drive worth of stuff would take a while. They’d have to ship me a new hard drive with the stuff on it as downloading it would take forever.

I’ve also used the “Time Machine” app on my Mac over the years. They problem really is money. I have six hard drives connected to my computer and if I really wanted to back each of them up that means I’d need six additional hard drives. Thats a lot of space, money, and hard drives! (They’re all backed up off site though.)

From 2008-2021 my main computer was a MacPro Tower. My main hard drive on that one, by the end, was an 8TB hard drive that housed all my artwork. I’ve got stuff going back 25 years on that drive. The problem was that 8 TB hard drives are expensive so when I bought that 8TB one I couldn’t afford to buy a backup one too. So I no longer had a Time Machine backup for my main drive. I still had the offsite one though so I was okay.

Last year I finally got a new computer. A MacMini. I had to buy docks to attach all my old hard drives to it but I also bought a 2TB hard drive to use as a backup for my new main system (the built in hard drive of the new MacMini was only 1TB). Of course my old 8TB hard drive was hooked up and I was still going to be working on it and it was still not backed up on site. After buying a whole new computer I sure couldn’t afford a new 8TB drive.

Everything was running fine with the new computer with one exception. Occasionally as I was going to save a document (on my 8TB hard drive) I would get a message that said I didn’t have permission to save it. I could do a “Save As” and rename the file and everything would be fine. Sometimes Macs have weird permission quirks and there was an easy workaround so I didn’t sweat it too much. That went on for eight months.

Last Friday I woke to a disturbing message from my computer. It told me it could no longer save things to my 8TB hard drive and I had to copy everything off of it and reformat it. That will sure cause some anxiety! Especially since I had nowhere to copy the 4TB+ worth of data I had on the drive. I had no choice but to buy a new 8TB hard drive then. I got on Amazon and found that they could get one to me that night. So I ordered it and waited.

I got the hard drive that night at about 8PM and then I had to decide what to do with it. The old 8TB hard drive still had my old system on it in case I wanted to slide it back in my old computer and start that thing up again. In the eight months I had the new computer I never had to do that but I could. If I wanted to do that again I’d have to clone my old drive rather than just copy info off it. I looked up how to clone a drive and gave it try. As I suspected it took about ten seconds to tell me it couldn’t clone the drive. After all the drive needed to be reformatted as it wasn’t working right.

I decided that I didn’t need the old system anymore and I would just have to copy the info to the new drive. I grabbed my “Work” folder and a few others and set them to copying overnight. I knew that with copying such large chunks of info things could go wrong but what else could I do at that time of night? I tried to put it out of my mind and get some sleep.

The next morning I woke up to find that the copying had failed because of permissions. I didn’t have the permission to copy something. The problem is there was nothing to tell me what was the thing that I didn’t have permission copy. So I’d have to copy everything chunk by chunk. I’d grab one folder that had anywhere from 10-200TBs in it and see if it would copy. This took all day. From 7AM until 7PM.

It turned out that what stopped everything from copying the night before was one font. One font out of 4TBs worth of files held up the whole process. It was even a duplicate copy of a font. It cost me about five hours to find that out. Luckily it wasn’t a real five hours as the vast majority of time the machine was doing its own thing copying files as I was doing other things but I had to keep checking it. It didn’t make getting anything done that day any easier.

After I got everything copied I reformatted the old 8TB hard drive and all was well with it. I decided to set it up with Time Machine to back up the new 8TB hard drive. It turns out that is a little confusing to do. It’s easy with a main hard drive and an external hard drive for back up but with two external hard drives I was a little lost. I think I did it correctly but I’m not 100% sure. It’s been backing up for about 12 hours now so I think it’s doing its job. We’ll see.

So I dropped $170 on that 8TB hard drive but now I had another worry. My photo hard drive. That 3TB hard drive has all my photos and other family photos going back nearly 100 years; thousands upon thousands of photos. I didn’t want a panic moment with that drive. I went back online and dropped another $100 on a portable 3TB hard drive.

For my photos I don’t need an active Time Machine back up. I like a hard drive I can just copy to and then turn off. A hard drive that is off can’t break. At least I think not. I’m copy everything from my photos drive onto the new backup drive and then just add the new photos in every now and then. That’s the plan and as I said I’m good at backing stuff up so I know I’ll keep it up. They key was having the money to buy the drives. Luckily I had it this time.