Radiant Comics

Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love #12

This week I finished two different “Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love” prints. Numbers eleven and twelve. This is notable because they’ve been sitting around for a few weeks with the basic coloring done on them but they were still unfinished. I couldn’t seem to get them done.

I came up with this series of prints last year and before these two I had ten of them done. They all consist of a drawing of a woman with the phrase “Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love” written somewhere on them. It’s usually there a few times because I use the type as a design element and build it into the drawing.

I make these prints the same way I usually make prints. I start by looking through one of my inkbooks for a small drawing I can use, blow it up digitally to 6×9 inches, print it out in blue line on a 6×9 inch piece of paper, make a pencil drawing over the blue line, scan in the pencil drawing, blow that drawing up to 10×15 inches, print the blue line drawing out on 11×17 inch paper, ink over the blue line drawing, scan in the ink drawing, and finally color that ink drawing on the computer in either Photoshop or Illustrator.

I was fine with these two up until the color part. Coloring on the computer is a completely different process than coloring with actual physical tools like paint or markers. Instead of standing at my drawing table or easel and picking and using all my physical tools I’m standing at my computer and picking virtual tools. I’m in a different head space using virtual tools.

Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love #11

Often I have a preference for which method I want to work on at the time. I keep a bunch of projects going all at once so that I always have something that I feel like doing. If I feel like digital then I’m ready to go. If I feel like physical I’ve got some of that underway too. That way I don’t have any “Blocks” and can go in whatever direction suits me.

That’s why it was strange when, a couple of weeks ago, I went to color these two prints and I couldn’t finish them. I thought I was in the mood for finishing them but somewhere in the process I hated the color that was coming out.

The starting point of my digital coloring process is usually the same. I start with my color swatches. These are digital samples of colors that are put into a visual color palette. They are equivalent to tubes of paint. I have a swatch palette of about forty colors that I always start with. These are my basic colors and I always know exactly how they are going to look when they print. It’s like starting with the same forty tubes of paint. You can use them straight from the tube but you can always mix them too. I usually start straight from the tube.

I start my coloring process by laying down all the base colors. I don’t use gradients, add patterns, or do anything fancy at this stage. I just try to figure out what parts should be blue and what parts should be red. Plus I have multiple shades of each color so I figure out what sections should be light, dark, and medium blue. There is a lot of changing of colors at this point but digital makes that easy. Much easier than if I was trying to change colors using paint.

After getting the basic colors down I add shading to the color. With this “Dreamt” series I’ve been using dark shapes of color over the basic color to add depth and interest. This is where the most creative work is done and what pulls the piece together to be finished. This is what I wasn’t able to do. This is where I got stuck.

I’m not sure why I got stuck at this point with these two prints but I did. Maybe on some level I didn’t feel like working on the computer and when I went to finish them I didn’t like what I was doing. I think that rather than finish number eleven I went on and did the basic coloring of number twelve. Then I was stuck on two of them.

It was the basic color that I didn’t like. I used my same basic color swatches that I’ve been using for decades but they looked boring to me all of a sudden. I tried moving forward with the shading but I couldn’t. That looked boring to me too. The color on the whole piece wasn’t working.

I tried changing things up and using a new technique (at least new to me). I tried a technique where you sample color from an old movie poster or some such and use those colors for your piece. I found a few old posters online to sample and it was okay. It was different than my usual color but not that different. I grew bored of that technique and put my digital pen down and moved on to other stuff. I had had enough.

Cut to a couple of weeks later and I decide to finish up these two pieces. I change a little bit of the basic color and got to work on the finished colors. I add in shading and textures and things went fine. It all took a while though. I think I worked for a day and a half on finishing the two pieces but it all went smoothly. I’m not even sure what I didn’t like about the color the first go around. I certainly changed things this second time around but I didn’t have that frustrating sense that all the color was boring. I don’t know what that even was.

One thing I haven’t done with these two was to make the all blue versions of them. I think the dissatisfaction with the coloring of these was building over time. With the first ten I made full color versions but I also made all blue versions. For some reason I wasn’t satisfied with the full color ones so I made all blue ones to, sort of, cheat my sense of satisfaction.

I thought the simpler all blue ones looked cool in a way the color ones didn’t. But monochrome wears out its welcome with me pretty quickly. So I didn’t want them to only have a monochrome version. That was an alternate to full color version.

With numbers eleven and twelve I ended up so satisfied with the full color versions I completely forgot about the all blue ones that I was making in the series. That’s a strange turn of events because there was a time I thought they’d never be finished because I was so bored with the color. The process of making art can be a strange thing.

After buying a big art supply haul back in February I got another one yesterday (April 18, 2025). That’s a small window of time for me between hauls but I figured I wanted to stock up a little bit more before the summer and also try out some new things.

One thing I did learn with this haul is not to order it close to bedtime. Not in the, “Don’t order things online when you’re tired and not sharp” way but in the, “It’ll get you questioning your entire existence as you’re trying to fall asleep” way.

I ended up thinking, “Do I really need this stuff? Could I have waited to buy it? Does my budget have the money right now? Why am I an artist? Could I have done something else with my life?” as I try to fall asleep. Not the time to contemplate such stuff.

As with most of my big art supply orders I built up things in my cart over time. I never just sit down, fill up my online shopping cart with stuff, and then order it. Instead I put two or three small things in my cart and leave them there. Then over the weeks before I make a big order I put more stuff in the cart as I realize I need the supplies.

This way of shopping sometimes gets me ordering extra stuff. By that I mean buying something I might not actually need because I added something else in a week later that negates the first thing. I did that this time with little black markers.

Recently I bought some house brand Blick 1.0mm black pigment markers. They came with my last big order. I really liked that pen and ended up drawing my “Tiny Drawings” with it. I decided to get a bunch more of them with this order. I bought five more of the 1.0mm, five brush pens, and five 0.5mm ones. Fifteen new pens. Nice.

The kicker is that a couple of weeks earlier I put a set of those pens in my cart. Eight pens in eight different sizes including the three I bought. Being that those three are my favorite sizes I don’t know if I’ll ever use the other five smaller size pens.

In the end it really doesn’t matter because the set was about $12 and each individual pen is about $3 so it was just like buying and even half dozen of my favorites and getting the others for free. But it’s weird that I didn’t notice the overlap until I got the stuff.

The main impetus for this order was to try some Montana paint markers. “Montana” is a brand I first noticed about a decade ago when they appeared in a lot of my art supply catalogs with their brand of spray paint aimed at fine artists. I’ve never used spray paint to make things but these cans and their paint all looked cool. Eventually they made acrylic markers to go with the spray paint.

The markers come in a couple of different sizes. There is the big chunky 15mm size and the smaller 2mm and .7mm sizes. I decided to go with the 2mm size. I would be using them on paper and not a wall so I thought the 2mm bullet tip would be best for me.

One of the reasons I decided to try these markers is that they have refills. I can put more paint in them so that if the marker runs dry in the middle of a piece I’m not screwed. I picked out eight markers at $5.12 a piece and eight refills at $8.81 a piece. It adds up.

It looks like a lot of companies have started making paint markers recently and so I also bought a set of six Copic paint markers. I have a lot of Copic alcohol markers so I thought I would give these a try. It was $20 for a set of six markers and there are no refills with these ones.

Usually a set of 20 no name brand of paint markers costs around $25 so these six markers were on the expansive side. But Copic makes top of the line markers. So I’ll give their paint markers a try.

As I wrote before I make these big orders over time and I add and take things away from my cart as I decide what I want to get. Normally I add a whole bunch of stuff without regard to price and then I delete stuff from the cart to bring the price down to a more manageable level. Standard shopping practice.

So it was a little bit weird that the last things that I added to the cart were the most expensive things. Not that they were super expensive or anything.

Pantone is a company that specializes in color. They have a proprietary color system. They’re well known in the printing industry and any other industry that makes stuff in color. Recently they came out with a line of Pantone branded markers. They’re pigment based markers so they have more lightfastness than alcohol dye based markers. That makes them different than my usual markers.

The Pantone markers are expensive too. They are $8.50 per marker and $12.95 for a bottle of the refill ink. But the refill ink is 30ml compared to Copic’s 12ml refill for $5.39. I just checked the price of Copic sketch markers on Blick and they’re $4.42 per marker. I think that’s cheaper than usual. Maybe a sale is going on.

Back in February I bought one Pantone marker and refill. A blue. A cyan or process blue. Pantone colors don’t usually have names. They have numbers. This time I added on a red and yellow marker along with their refills. That’s an extra forty dollars for two markers I stuck on in the end. Not my usual habit.

One final thing I got in this order was a $10 ruler. A twelve inch clear gridded ruler with a metal edge for cutting against. I already have the same ruler but the grid on it is rubbing off. The ruler is clear and the grid is grey but when I put the ruler on a white piece of paper the grid is so faded that it blends in with the paper. I had to replace that so I did.

So that’s the story of my latest batch of art supplies. All in it cost me about $270. That’s a pretty big chunk of change for me but I’ll use all the stuff. Except for maybe that .2mm black pigment marker. That might be too small for my taste.

Maybe a Cover

I’ve got to finish up this Great Gatsby project I’ve been working on. I started it back in January of 2022 and as I write this it’s April of 2025. So I’ve started my fourth year of working on it. Of course I haven’t touched it since December of 2024 so it’s not like I’ve been working on it constantly for three years. At the beginning I decided to give myself as much time as I needed on it. Otherwise I didn’t think I’d ever even start it. It’s my own project so it doesn’t need a deadline.

The last thing I did on it in December was to finish some cartoon art cards (http://radiantcomics.com/art-writing-paste-it-down-and-draw/) and put those into the book. Then I had to print out those new pages and add them to the first proof of the book that I had printed. That’s where it has stood these last three months.

Though the book is almost finished, I have way more illustrations in it than the average illustrated book, I still have some stuff that needs to get done. Number one is figuring out the cover. I have one cover illustration made and it’s set up to be the cover right now but the design isn’t finished. I’m not even sure I want it to be the cover. I have other ideas for the cover that I might go with. Either way I was working on the cover design yesterday. I added in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s name and my own name to the design. It’s not much but they weren’t even there before.

I also added in an illustration that I didn’t like before I fixed it up with some collage. It’s the one mentioned in the link above in paragraph two. I decided to add it to the end of the book rather than in its place among the text. It’s an illustration of the last swimmers coming out of the water. It was mentioned at the beginning of an early chapter but I think it’s more poignant at the end of the book. We readers become the last swimmers out of the water at the end of the book. I like that.

I also had to rearrange some of the end pages. Those pages are filled with small drawings of Gatsby’s party guests. I originally had one of those pages set up as cover three (the inside front cover) and an illustration on cover 4 (the back cover). I decided that I had better set up a regular back cover which will have some blurbs and to move the end paper to the last page of the book with the illustration now on cover 3. I needed an extra page for the swimmers too.

There are over a hundred drawings of Gatsby’s party guests on the end pages and they are set up on a grid. The grids are 4×3 and there are ten pages of faces so that makes 120 drawings. Except that there were only 119 names so I an actually one drawing short. The last box is blank.

I made those 119 drawings so long ago that I can’t remember if I had a plan for that last one. I’m not sure if I ever did but I have a plan now. I’m going to put myself in that box. I’ll draw a self portrait in that same style. I’ll probably have to draw myself younger since twenty something year old Jared would fit in with that crowd. Fifty eight year old Jared probably wouldn’t.

I mentioned the back cover above but that really needs some work. It has to be written and designed and I have nothing for that so far. I think the writing is going to have to be something like one of my blogs about the book but I’m not sure exactly what. I don’t think the book needs a recap of what Gatsby is but could use a recap of what got me to make my own illustrated version. But I’m not sure. I’ll actually have to write and design it before I’m sure. Whenever that will be.

One of the final things I have to do is to proof the text of the book. Gatsby came into the public domain shortly before I started this project and so I found the text of the book online and used that to typeset the book. But I never proofread it.

Typesetting the book involves a lot of formatting the text. What fonts do you want? What size should the font be? Do you want any italics or bolds? How are the chapters set up? Do you want any special flourishes? Those are some of the questions to be answered when typesetting.

Plus there are usually all sorts of weird things going on with type you find online. Formatting stuff that different writing programs put in. Extra spaces and weird apostrophes abound. All that had to be fixed.

I find that all a bit easier to do than proofreading. Typesetting is more like putting together a puzzle. There is no real picture on the box but you know the thing has to look like a book in the end. So you’re making it look like a book. Proofreading takes a lot of concentration. You have to pay attention to every word equally.

I have a plan to get the proofreading done and that’s to read along with an audiobook. Gatsby is a short book and the audiobook is only about five hours long so that’s not too bad. I can also reference a printed version of the book if I need to. I’ve had that plan for about two years now but still haven’t done it. I will someday.

I want to get this first version on my illustrated Gatsby done this year. I say the first version because I have it set up so that I can add new illustrations into it whenever I want to. I think I can make the book available digitally but a print version would be too expensive. As a digital book I can add stuff to it and update the file. That’s kind of cool. And if I don’t get it done this year there is always next year. That’s what’s good about not having a deadline. You can keep going.

“Leg Competition”
The finished piece.

Trying something new is hard. That’s my observation for the week. It’s not a new thought. People have stated that many times over the years. But it’s a thought that came home to roost for me last Saturday (April 29, 2025). I tried something new. At least it was semi-new.

The biggest risk in trying something new is that you won’t be any good at it. When you’re younger this is less of a risk because almost everything is new and you’re not going to be good at much. Youth is when you’re learning a lot of stuff. When you’re older, like I am, there can be plenty of stuff that you’re good at. Trying something new means taking a risk that you won’t be good at it. When you’re used to being good at stuff it’s not easy to suddenly be bad at stuff.

The new thing I was trying was making a complex watercolor painting. I’ve been working at getting better at watercolor over the last couple of months but it’s mostly been simple stuff. Small 5×7 inch paintings of faces and such. This time I wanted to take one of my complex 11×17 inch drawings and use watercolor to make it.

I even thought I was making it simple for myself. I wasn’t going to render the whole drawing in watercolor. I was going to make a complex ink drawing and then do some basic coloring with watercolor. I had done things like this way back in the 1990s and I was going to try and do that again.

The first thing I did was to dig through my scans of drawings. I have a lot of them. I only wanted to spend a day or two on this project and didn’t want to spend the time coming up with a new drawing to work on. This was a bit of an experiment after all. I found a drawing named “Leg Competition” from back in 2012 that I liked. I printed the drawing out in blue line on watercolor paper and spent the first day inking it.

Also I looked it up later and it turned out that I had done a finished piece from this drawing back in 2012. I made a Big Ink drawing out of it.

Here is where I made my first mistake, I thought it might happen, but decided to try it anyway. Most of the drawing I inked with a brush and waterproof India ink. That waterproof part is important because I was going to go over the top of the ink with watercolor. But for a small part of the drawing I used French curves and a small black marker.

Some small black markers use waterproof ink and some don’t. I refill all my small black markers with waterproof India ink but this marker was a new one. Though I had already refilled even this new marker with India ink I didn’t know if that first bit of ink would be waterproof or not. It wasn’t.

The second day, Saturday the 29th, I started in the morning by putting in some colors with my watercolor paints. It was going okay until I hit the parts made with that pen. The black line of the pen started bleeding into the paint and greying out the color. That was not fun.

What was even less fun was using the watercolor in general. It turned out that I had no vision for it. With most pieces, when I’m not trying something new, even if I don’t have an exact vision for how it’s going to turn out, I can, “trust the process.” With tried and true methods that I’m good at, even if something doesn’t look good in the moment, I know that it’s going to look good at the end.

I once was told that some famous artist said that art should look finished at every stage in the process. I’ve never found this to be true. Often as I’m working on a piece it looks terrible and unfinished. This is because I’m laying the groundwork for it to be finished. Plus it’s okay that it looks unfinished because I know it will look good in the end. That’s what I’m working towards and I’ve done it before.

All that was not so with this watercolor painting. I was putting down color, some of the black line was bleeding into the paint, none of it looked good, and I was not happy with it. It is tough to work on something that you’re not happy with but I kept going. I didn’t want to give up.

After struggling with the painting for a couple of hours I came to the conclusion that something had to change. I realized that my idea for what the painting should be was too blurry and incomplete for me to follow. Plus I had no tried-and-true process to use. This watercolor method was new to me.

The first thing I did was to stop putting the watercolor down neatly. I started throwing watercolor all over the page, letting the black line bleed in some places, and letting the color bleed into the color. Exactingly putting the color in for two hours got me nowhere so I decided to wreck it all in about fifteen minutes. At first it seemed like I had ruined the whole piece. And I kind of did.

I ruined the piece but it also freed up my thinking. At that point I decided to use acrylic paint markers to finish the piece. Since watercolor is transparent I thought the opaque acrylic would make a nice counterpoint. And it did. I spent the rest of the day using the markers and black ink to finish the piece. It took a while to get it into shape. I worked on it from eight in the morning until six at night.

The struggle was real with this one. With no process to fall back on I had to invent one as I went along. That takes a lot more time and energy. In the end I like the piece but I’m not sure if I love it. I like the big main face best but the little face in the bottom right lets me down a little. It’s not easy doing new things.

It can be tough being a self motivated artist and figuring out what to do next. What art to make, what project to work on, how to spend your making art time in general. I’m a little bit stuck right now. Not really stuck but I don’t have an idea in mind for any kind of big project.

My big project for the last three years or so has been my illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby.” I’ve almost finished it. I still have some work to do on it but for some reason I put it aside and haven’t looked at it in months. That could be because the finishing touches seem pointless to me now. I have no plan for it after I finish it so why should I finish it? That’s kind of a crazy thought but it’s where I am with it right now.

I’ve also been getting a lot of stuff done lately but most of it is the regular stuff that I get done. Somehow that doesn’t count and anything “Big” in my brain but it’s not like I’m sitting around doing nothing. I just finished inking “Dreams of Things” cover number 283. When I finish cover 300 I think I’m going to take some time and put them all into a digital book. But that’s in the future. I’ve been getting one of those a week done so number 300 isn’t far away but it’s not today.

I’ve also been getting a lot of “Tiny Drawings” done. I only started doing those a few weeks ago and I’ve already drawn over two hundred of them. I’m drawing them faster than I can give them away and the plan is to give them all away. But that’s way more drawings than people that I see. I’ll keep making more though. As long as I’m not tired of them I’ll keep drawing them. But that’s not a big project in my mind.

I’m thinking about doing a bunch of paintings this summer. Back in the summer of 2021 (was it really that long ago?) I made a series of five 24×36 inch paintings. That was my last “Summer of Painting” and I think I might try to do the same thing this year. I’m not sure yet and it’s only March 29 as I write this so the summer is still a couple of months off. But maybe that could be my big project.

I’ve got a lot of stuff done over the last few months. I’ve been keeping up with writing and finishing my five times a week “Four Talking Boxes” comic strip. I’ve been doing that for over fifteen years but since I always get it done it’s one of those things that doesn’t count as a “Big Project” in my head. I also finished up all of 2026’s “Drifting and Dreaming” strips. I’m usually finishing those about now but I fished them early this year.

Another thing I finished early was a new comic to replace my “Message Tee” comic. That just kind of happened organically. A few years ago I started making these comics that were a drawing of a superhero’s head and shoulders with a word balloon. They were like my “Art Cards” except they were bigger. The art cards are 2.5×3.5 inches and the “Super Talk” ones are 5×7 inches.

The bigger size gives me more room to put detail into the faces plus the larger balloon size lets me write a little bit more. I did about a dozen of these over the last few years and thought nothing of them but then, back in December 2024 or so, they caught fire with me. I figured out a new way to do them and started making a bunch of them. (http://radiantcomics.com/art-writing-big-superhero-cartoon-art-cards/) I ended up writing and drawing fifty two of them and now they are going to replace my “Message Tee” comic for 2026. So that’s done.

I started out making those “Super Talk” comics with India ink and marker but then halfway through I switched over to India ink and watercolor. (http://radiantcomics.com/art-writing-another-watercolor-try/)

Watercolor was never my strongest medium but I like to give it a try every now and then. I think this has contributed to my sense of being stuck. I recently bought some larger watercolor paper. It’s 11×17 inches compared to the 5×7 inches I was working at. I made two pieces at that size and I think they came out pretty well. But then when I went to make a third piece I got stuck. I started painting it but then stopped. I don’t know why but I grew disinterested in it as I went. So it’s sitting there only part way done.

It was two days ago that I started to work on another watercolor piece. This time I took a different approach. I didn’t feel like making a whole new drawing so I looked through my vast archive of scanned in drawings for something I could use. I have way more working drawings than finished pieces. I was looking for something complex that I could just fill in with watercolor. I found something.

I spent part of yesterday inking the drawing. I made this new version of the 11×17 inch drawing with a brush and India ink. It came out okay but now that I look at it I can’t seem to find the motivation to break out the watercolors and finish it. I don’t know why.

Usually I’m not an “Inspiration” person. I don’t sit around and wait for inspiration to hit. I get to work instead. I’ve made plenty of good art when I’m not feeling inspired. I have enough things going on and in progress that I can pick one up and work on it. It’s a good habit to get into. It beats the bad habit of doing nothing.

I’ll probably pick up my watercolors sometime today and try to start painting over my drawing. I’m not sure what I’ll get done on it or if I’ll lose this feeling of being stuck but I’ll give it a try. I might end up switching over to working on some other thing that I’m not even thinking about right now. Either way I’m not really stuck. I just feel that way at the moment. Luckily there is a mother moment coming up.