Radiant Comics

I’ve decided that tonight I’g going to write about what is right in front of me. And that is “Dreams of Things” number three hundred and twenty. It’s right in front of me because it’s on my easel at the moment as I showed in off in this week’s (4/8/2026) Pull List Comic Book Haul video over on Youtube. I usually have whatever is my latest stuff on my easel but this one is from March 3, 2026. I’m a month behind in showing off my stuff on video so when I record I take this week’s piece down and put a month ago’s piece up.

As I look at this one I barely remember making it. Some I remember well and some I don’t. Being that it’s only a month old you’d think I could remember it but no. Maybe it’s because it has four faces on it. Somehow I find that less memorable than if it had one large face with maybe another smaller one. This one has two large faces and two small ones. I don’t know why that would make a difference in my memory but it’s all I can think of at the moment.

This looks like one that I colored with my new Pantone ink markers. In looking at the area in the middle of box of dull yellow, blue, and red I remember making those first in all grey and then not liking the greys. So I put color over them to give them more vibrancy. That’s it. That’s the one thought I remember. Plus I remember doing it with the Pantone markers.

Usually I color these background first and then I work my way into the main figures. I’m guessing that I started with that blue/green in the background up top. That color anchors a lot of the piece and was probably decided on at the beginning. Everything else has to revolve around it. That color makes it look like both water and sky.

Speaking of sky I bet the next thing I did was the blue sky and green grass down the bottom in the background. They give a little obviousness to the piece and ground it. I probably waited on coloring those yellow circles until near the end but had the color in mind the whole time. I use a lot of small yellow circles.

The neutrals were probably the next step. First those boxes of brown on top and then the ones on the bottom. Or maybe the other way around. I may have been hesitant to put them on top for fear of the pyramid being brown too and thus having too much brown. But I think the contrast of browns on the rectangles took care of that problem. They make the brown rectangles their own thing.

The yellow flame haired figure on the left must have been the next thing to be colored. His hair is his main color feature but there is a lot of line textures in him too. He has weird color combinations with a shirt of pink and olive green and a cloak of blue and violet. Not of the colors are particularly bright so that helps him sit back in space a bit.

The small yellow haired guy down the bottom is the simplest figure on the cover and I kept him that way with the coloring. He has some texture lines in his clothes but they are simple ones. They are some more blue/green plus some purple.

I think I left the big figure on top for last but I’m not quite sure. I know I had a vague idea to put him in a purple outfit so I may have taken care of that first. He has some orange hair to bring some bright color up to the top among all the neutrals and my classic split face colors. I just get bored making a face all one color so I like to split it down the middle and make it two colors. I especially do this in these dream like drawings. I find it makes them more fun to do and to look at. I added some pinks to the purples into the outfit to give it less of a monochrome look. Those two spots of light blue were decided last. I can tell.

For the stripes on the bottom guys shirt I went with shades of grey. The color in this one was already a little bit odd so I wanted some more neutrals. That freed me up to make half the face a bright green. But I wanted some texture on the face so I made spirals in a darker green on the right side. This added the strangeness I was looking for and made it different than the top face. Some neutral orange/brown hair frames the colors of the face.

I think I added the yellow into those small circles as the finishing touch.

This one is more crowded than my usual Dreams of Things covers. It has four figures and two horizon lines. With the sky of the top half also working as a wall of water it really flattens the piece out in a modernist way. Then that little hint of sky at the bottom opens up the piece to deep space.

The tree towns of rectangles on top, bottom, and the middle also twist the space a bit. The bottom row moves forward but then identical the top row is behind the hair of the figure so it moves back in space. It bends the sense of space as I look at it. Plus the color in the middle row of rectangles, which is in front of the figure, moves forward too. It’s tough to figure out the dream like space.

It also reminds me of a lesson I learned from one of my teachers. His name was Gary Bauer (or maybe Bower). He taught drawing at SUNY Purchase in 1986. He said something like “Overlap creates space. Forget cool colors recede and warm colors come forward it’s all about overlap.” Overlap really helped me play with space in this one. He was using hyperbole and you really don’t have to forget about warm and cool colors but overlap is step one in creating space. I thought I’d pass that on to you.

I love making art. It’s my favorite thing to do and my whole life revolves around it. For good or for bad. This is the time of year when my semester ends and I have no classes to teach. So I have some more time to make art. This is when I like to sit down and contemplate what types of things that I can get done in the summer. So I wrote a list. I’m not going to get to everything on the list but it’s a start. Here is what I wrote down so far.

Apply for more teaching gigs. – Yes, I really should find more paying work this summer but I really just want to make art. But still I should apply myself.

Set up LLC. – I’ve always meant to set up a business identity. That seems to be what everyone does. Even artists. I just never have but I often think I should. Maybe I finally will this summer. We’ll have to see.

Revive my eBay and Etsy selling. – I used to sell stuff (or at least try to on these two internet sites. When I started teaching it became too much of a bother for too little money. I kind of feel like trying it again though. Especially with some of the ideas that I have on my summer list.

Work on learning bookbinding. – I saw someone on the internet who takes old books and upscales them to journals and sketchbooks. She sells said books online. That seems like a cool thing. I already bought some bookbinding tools so I am almost ready to go with this one. Maybe this will help me revive my selling sites.

Work on publishing something. – This has to do with bookbinding and zine making too. I want to make an art book or a photo book and publish it somewhere. Even self publish. I just plain like books and haven’t made any of my own in a while. I’ve made digital books over the years so maybe I can make more of those too. I can even make a single art book and bind it.

Work on “Art From the Machine.” – I’ve got this one started. Art From the machine is my name for generative AI art. A few years ago I took one of my old “Organics” comics and ran it through an AI engine that turned my art into another style art. It’s weird but my comic was weird to begin with. I want to put together a comic that examines this weirdness and questions what AI art even is.

Make paint tins. – Here is something I’ve been doing for about a year now. I eat these “Big Sky” sugar free mints that come in a tin. It’s the same size tin as an Altoids tin. I take the empty tin, put in 14 watercolor half pans, and drop watercolor into the pans. I put a piece of magnetic tape on the bottoms of the half pans so they stick on the metal tin. I use tubes of ShinHan watercolor to fill the tins. I’ve made a bunch of them and I’ve been giving them away to my students. I think I might sell some on eBay too.

Work on a comic of my “Dreams of Things” blogs. – I’ve had this idea to take one of my blogs where I describe making one of my “Dreams of Things” covers and turn it into a comic. I’ll show myself examining the drawing and show the drawing. I still don’t have the idea solidified in my mind just yet and it may be too much work in the end but I’ll think about it for now.

Put “Dreams of Things” covers on actual comics. – Here is something that I’ve done before but only a couple of times. I print out one of my covers onto a piece of paper and then wrap that paper around an actual comic book. So in the end it looks like an actual comic. I’ve done this before and it looks fine but then I don’t know what to do with the comic. I could try selling them on eBay. We’ll see.

Make more “Super Talk” comics. – This year I replaced my “Message Tee” comic with one called “Super Talk!” It’s a one panel comic of a super hero talking to you. I like it. It’s a nice change from “Message Tee” but if I want it to continue in 2027 then I’m going to have to make more of them. Let’s see if I have more of them in me.

Make more art videos. – I’ve made about half a dozen art videos so far and have been porting them on my social media channels. I want to keep this going and make more of them. I think I have a pretty firm grasp on these and will make more.

Make more “Big Ink” drawings. – Since making my art videos I’ve had some of my Big Ink drawings out of their portfolio homes. I enjoy looking at them and it makes me want to make more. We’ll have to see if I’m motivated to actually make more.

Go to the library. – A few years ago I used to order books from the library. Mostly comic book collected editions that I don’t want to own but want to look at and maybe read. Then I somehow just stopped doing that. I think it was because I was falling behind on reading books that I bought and actually wanted to read. But now I’m okay with only thumbing through the library comics. I got back to library once so far but I’ll probably get more stuff.

Test out YouTube Live – I do a live show on YouTube every Friday night with Wilson and Paulo and we use software named “Streamyard” to get that done. YouTube has its own live software but it was generally not very good. Except that I haven’t tried it in years. Maybe YouTube improved its own streaming software? I don’t know because I never use it. I want to try it out to see how it works but not during our regular show. I need tried and true for that. I have an idea for a live show where all I’m doing is filling out swatches for my markers. I might go with that one day.

So there is my list of things to get done this summer. I doubt I’ll get to all of them but I prefer to overshoot and give myself choices rather than only have a couple of things and get locked in. I like the option to change my mind.

www.jaredosborn.com

This whole piece of writing is because of a song by the Police that I haven’t heard in years but was running through my mind this morning. The song’s name is “Rehumanize Yourself” and it’s from their 1981 album “Ghost in the Machine.” I listened to that album a lot back in the 1980s and I’ll have to give it another listen soon. But meanwhile it reminded me of my summer job back in the summers of 1987 and 1988.

The summer of 1987 was the first time I worked at a place called Prentice Hall. It was a book distribution warehouse (a publisher too) and my uncle happened to work there at the time. I was looking for a summer job since I was home from college and he knew that they hired college students for the summer. So I got a job there.

One of the main types of books that Prentice Hall distributed were textbooks to schools. So the summer was their busy time as they had extra books coming through the place as schools all over the country got ready for the upcoming school year that started at the end of the summer. I, and a lot of the other college kids, worked in the Quality Control department.

The first summer I worked there I was on the loading dock. The way the place worked was:
1) An order was placed.
2) The order came to the guys who drove electric vehicles all around the warehouse.
3) They picked all the books off of shelves and put them on the carts they dragged behind them.
4) The carts were dropped off at quality control.
5) The quality control people checked each order to make sure the right books were there.
6) The book carts were pushed over to the packing department.
7) The packers packed them in boxes.
8) The boxes went onto skids (wooden pallets piled high with boxes).
9) The skids went onto trucks.

My job that summer was to make sure the right skids (pallets full of books in boxes) got on the right trucks. Each box had a bill of lading attached to it with the name of the shipping company on it. At least half a dozen shipping companies were used to ship the books. If the box of books said “Yellow Freight” on it I made sure it was on a Yellow Freight skid and the skid got onto a Yellow Freight truck.

If a box that said it was for ABS Trucking (Always Be First!) was on a Yellow Freight skid then it was my job to move it onto the Yellow Freight skid.

Every now and then I was to open a box, make sure the right books were in the box, and tape the box back up.

When a truck pulled in to load up there was a guy whose job it was to run the forklift and load the skids on to the truck. He would stop before he put the skid on the truck and I would check the bills of lading a second time to make sure the right stuff was going on the right truck. It wasn’t a tough job but you had to pay attention. It was a bit dull but it was always fun talking to the drivers. So when they’d pull in it was an event. It beat looking through boxes.

In the summer of 1988 I had a different quality control job. It turned out I had done the job too well last summer. I didn’t make a single mistake and that showed up some of the other full time people. It turned out the loading dock job was a little more coveted by the regulars because it was slightly less dull than some of the other jobs and they didn’t want me, or any other college kids, working there anymore.

So that summer I worked on the carts with a bunch of about four other college students. Our job was to make sure that the pickers picked the right books. After they made the rounds of the warehouse they’d drop the carts off with us and we’d check each order for the right books. If they missed something they’d go back and get it. After we checked everything we’d roll the cart over to the packers’ area.

We got each other to talk to on occasion but the job was duller than being on the loading dock. There was a lot of standing around broken up by ISBN checks. It wasn’t enough to check the titles of books, since they could be similar, so we had to make sure the ISBN number on the bill matched the one on the book. “ISBN check!” was the phrase that went through my head all summer.

This was before the age of social media. You can now keep track of just about anyone you meet. But back then if you left a place you mostly left everyone you knew there forever. Here are a few of the people I remember from that summer. I mostly remember the characters the best.

My Boss – I can’t remember his name but he ran our Quality Control department. I remember him having big glasses but he was fairly nondescript. He was a nice guy who looked out for us. He was maybe in his early thirties. If you were casting a middle manager in a movie he would look like this guy. He would fit right into “Office Space.”

Craig – An enthusiastic guy who was looked at as a bit of a weirdo in the place. Weirdos are my people so I got along with him fine. He ran the forklift at the loading dock so I worked with him a lot that first summer. He must have been in his late 20s. I’m not really sure. He had a love for machinery and especially big diggers. In his spare time he used to go to job sites, watch the diggers, and even photograph them. It was his dream to learn how the run them and get a job using them. He even commissioned a drawing from me of one of the digging machines. I wonder if he ever got to dig with one?

Beef – He was a big and heavy guy so I think that’s how he got his nickname. I didn’t work with him as much but he ran a forklift too. He had some charisma to him and was popular around the place. I think he also played on the softball team. If memory serves that was something that brought a lot of the regulars together. Playing softball.

ABF Driver – I can’t remember his name but in my memory he looks sort of like Gabe Kaplan from “Welcome Back Kotter” except more normal looking. I think he had short brown (maybe curly) hair and a dark mustache. He must have come in every day or two (around 4PM) and he was good to talk to. We always had good conversations to pass the time as the truck was being be loaded. The only thing I distinctly remember him saying was to complain that Yellow Freight was expanding and taking everybody’s work. There sure were a lot of Yellow freight trucks coming through the place.

Fun Guy – I wish I remembered his name as he was the star of the place. He was a regular who worked in Quality Control with us. He was around my age at the time (I turned 21 in the summer of 1987 and 22 in 1988). Maybe a year or two older. He hadn’t gone to college and this was his daily job. He was good looking, good with the ladies, personable, and liked to go out and have fun. Everybody liked him and liked to live vicariously through him. Especially the older “Normal” regulars. He always had a story for you. He wasn’t the best worker but everybody covered for him. The regulars would hate it if he got fired because he was the life of the place. I always got the impression that he wanted to eventually leave and find his place in the world. I wonder if he ever did?

Young Mother – I think she was younger than me and might have only been nineteen at the time. She was a regular in the Quality control department who I worked with that second summer. Her story was that she had a baby at about sixteen and now she was out in the world working to support her child. I don’t think a father was in the picture. Her parents may have even disowned her (I can’t quite remember). She was as sweet as the day was long and everybody in the place looked out for her.

Older Woman – I had forgotten about her until I was proofreading this. I’m not sure how old she was but I would guess she was at least in her 50s. People were in worse shape, in general, in the 1980s then now so she could have been younger. I was only 21-22 then so my judgment and memory could be off but she did have to sit down and work. I remember her being nice and she liked to chat. The one quote I remember her saying was about saving money. “The first ten thousand is the hardest,” she said one day. I don’t know how much she and her husband had saved up but it must have been a good amount.

College Kid – This is where the Police Song “Rehumanize Yourself” finally fits in. I wish I could remember college kid’s name but I don’t. I don’t even remember what school he went to except it was just a regular school for a regular major. Not an art school like me. But he was the one I hung out with on the job most that summer.

This was one of those jobs where you had to “Look busy” even when you weren’t. If you couldn’t look busy then you’d hide. So we hid among the boxes of books. One day few of us were sitting there chatting and somehow I talked about that Police song and specifically mentioned the lyric, ‘Because violence here is a social norm.” College kid liked that lyric and was also in the habit of occasionally doodling on the boxes as we sat. So he wrote that line on a random box.

It all should have ended there and I never would have a Prentice Hall association with the song except a couple of hours later our boss came over all in a tizzy. It seems that someone had seen that written on the box and reported it to someone else. It went up the chain and people got upset. We couldn’t have anyone getting these textbooks thinking Prentice Hall was a place where violence was a social norm.

They asked who did it and we all pleaded ignorance. I remember saying, “I think that’s just a song lyric.” Since no one confessed the boss told us not to write on the boxes and went away. Now, thirty eight years later, that silly little story entered my mind today as that song ran through my head. Time is a funny thing.

Here is an article from 1965 about Prentice Hall expanding into West Nyack where I worked twenty two years later.
https://www.nytimes.com/1965/10/13/archives/expansion-is-set-by-prenticehall-publisher-plans-distribution.html

Last week when I left off writing about my attempt to make videos about my art I had already recorded stuff and had the editing left to do. Now I’ll tell you what’s gone on since then.

I got the editing done. I decided to go for the “Quick Cut” look and edit between the videos of myself talking an me showing closeups of the art. It worked out okay but it took way too long and in the end I wasn’t that impressed with it. It took me two hours to edit a two minute video. That is an untenable amount of time especially since I wasn’t impressed with the results. So I decided to start over again.

First a word about microphones. As I explained last week I ended up not going with my cheap lapel mic and used my stationary Yeti mic. It sounded okay but there was a little too much difference in the sound of the heads up shots and the close up shots. The mic was in two different points in the room and two different distances away from my mouth. So I need up buying a new mic.

I bought a Bluetooth DJI Mini Mic that is sold as going with my DJI Osmo 3 camera. It also said it can connect with phones. It only cost $25 so I figured I’d give it a try. But I ran into a problem. I like to shoot on the iPad because of its big screen but I couldn’t get the DJI mic to work with the iPad’s camera app. I could get the mic to pair with it but when I ran the camera app it wouldn’t use the mic. If I opened the FaceTime app I could use the mic just fine but not the camera app. It was frustrating.

I could get the mic to work just fine with the Osmo 3 camera so I thought about doing these videos with that. The main problem with that is that the LCD screen is small on the Osmo 3. I much prefer the big iPad screen. But it would be my fallback camera.

It took a couple of hours of fiddling with the mic and looking stuff up on the internet before I found an app named RODE Reporter. This app was free and made to solve just this problem. I pair the mic with the iPad, open up RODE Reporter to choose the mic, and then open up the Camera app which will now be able the use the mic. It’s convoluted but worked.

One more thing about the lapel mic that I learned was to put it on my lapel. That sounds obvious but last week I mentioned clipping my cheap lapel mic onto my collar (I’ve seen that done on TV) and then not liking the sound of it. That’s because it being right under my chin muffled the sound. I put the new one where my lapel would be if I was wearing a sports coat (next to the button holes on my collared shirt) and it sounded fine. I even tested it on my collar and it too sounded muffled when put there. So use the tools how they are built to be used. Like I said, obvious.

This second time around recording the video I had a better idea what I was doing. I had a plan. I would do a heads up shot of me holding the art and taking about it and then a close up shot of the art on my drawing table as I taped about it. Each segment would be about a minute long. Then I’d edit the two of them together. Not in bits and pieces but one minute and then the next.

I was originally going to do a five piece art show and that’s what I stuck with. At around a minute per segment and two segments per piece I would end up with around a ten minute video. That worked for me. I shot five heads up pieces on the tripod and then five hand held videos of close up stuff.

After shooting I decided to work on my desktop using Premier Pro to edit with. Things went a lot faster than last where I was making a lot of edits to blend the heads up and closeups together. This time I edited out some of my fumfering around at the beginning of the clips and put one after the other. It worked out well.

One thing that I forgot to do was record an introduction. Last week I had an opening for the beginning of the video but I didn’t record not this week. So I set up the iPad on the tripod again and recorded the opening. Once it was done I stuck it on the beginning.

After I had the whole video done (it was about twelve minutes long) I decided to give each pice of art its own two minute finished video too. I want to post the whole thing to YouTube but I can also post the two minute videos to Instagram and TikTok. It was just a matter of exporting a segment at a time so it wasn’t that much extra work.

I ended up working on the videos all of Saturday from about eight in the morning to around four in the afternoon. But a lot of that time was mic testing, thinking about stuff, and figuring out what exactly needed to be done. Shooting and editing the videos took me only about two hours. That’s much better than the two hours to edit just one two minute video.

I think this weekend’s videos are a step in the right direction. I don’t think I have everything down just yet. For example I might want to use some music in the videos. What music and how to use it I’m not sure of. I tried looking for some free background music but didn’t find anything I liked. I even broke out GarageBand and tried making some of my own but that didn’t work out either. So I still have a way to go but I will start posting what I have done so far. That’s the plan.

I’m a tool person. I like to have a lot of tools to choose from and I like to try new ones. I’m okay with “The right tool for the right job” but one of my rules to live by is “Work with what you’ve got.” That means that I try not to put things off because I don’t have some tool that I’ve convinced myself is the right one. Sometimes I have to just get started on a project because putting it off gets nothing done.

I mention this because this past weekend I finally got started making some videos showing off the art I have made over a lifetime. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve wanted to do this but I never had any really good ideas for how to get it done. Figuring out how to show off static paintings and drawings on moving video isn’t an easy thing. In the end I haven’t really figured it out. Instead I just started.

Speaking of tools I have a bunch of cameras. I have the DJI video camera that I shoot my Walk and Talk videos with, I have a pocket zoom camera for street photos, I have a bigger super zoom camera for street photos, I have my phone, and I have an iPad. I couldn’t even decide which camera to use to shoot these art videos. That’s been going on for months and months. Finally I decided to stick with what I know.

I make a comic book haul video every week. I’ve been making them for over ten years. They’re very simple. I put my iPad on a tripod, attach my Yeti microphone, stand in from of the iPad camera, talk, and show some comics. There is no editing involved. That’s where I decided to start when making these art videos. It took me a long time to decide to work with what I already know.

I did do some microphone tests before I started. I already knew that when using the Yeti mic if I drift away from it (it’s stationary) or hold a piece of art between the mic and my mouth the sound can fade a bit. That happens sometimes in my comic haul videos. I wanted to avoid this. Plus I was planning on shooting some footage holding the camera right over the art so I wanted the sound to be consistent.

When I bought my DJI video camera I also bought some lapel microphones. I haven’t used them much since I find the camera’s mic works just fine when I’m walking and shooting sweet video with it. I’m holding the camera in front of my face so the mic picks up what I say very nicely. But I’ve seen other people use lapel mics and they get some nice and consistent sound out of them. So I gave my lapel mics a test.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people hold these small lapel mics right in front of their face when they record. I did the same and got good sound that way. But that meant that I only had one hand to hold the camera in the hand held shots. Even with the tripod that meant I only had one hand to hold the art. It was not a solution that worked.

Since lapel microphones have a clip on them to clip to a lapel I decided to do that and clip it to the collar of the shirt I was wearing. The sound ended up being a little too muffled for my taste. I expected this because the lapel mic I had was a cheap one. They came in a set of two for $12 (though they go for $25 today) and didn’t sound great compared to the much larger $100 Yeti mic that I’ve been using since 2014.

I decided to stick with the Yeti and try and keep a consistent distance from it and not put the art between me and it. After all that time of trying to figure out what to do and with which camera and microphone I ended up doing it exactly how I always have done my comic book hauls videos.

There is one big difference though. Editing. I never edit my comic book haul videos because I don’t want to. I want to make them as easy as possible on myself so that I’ll do them and I like the honest unedited way they come out. I think that captures my excitement of showing off the new comics I buy each week. If I stumble over my words a bit that’s okay.

I want these art videos to be a bit more about presentation. They are a bit more about the art I am showing and less about me showing it. I’ve got to try and make the videos interesting enough to look at and that means editing. I’m not a huge fan of video editing because it takes a lot of time but I might try out some of these new automatic features in video editing programs.

So I set up my iPad camera and Yeti mic as I always did and did some shooting. I had already decided to show off five pieces of art per show so I pulled out five things. I recorded an introduction and then me talking about each piece individually. I didn’t write any scripts since I’m used to talking spontaneously. I gave myself a few tries with each piece and more than that for the intro.

After than I pulled the iPad off the tripod and shot handheld from over the top of the art as it sat on my drawing table. I also put the mic on my desk the same distance away from me as when I was standing. I thought it went well enough that I took out three more pieces of art and recored me showing off them. That gave me some more choices.

Now it’s all down to the editing. I have no idea how that’s going to go. I’m not sure if I want to edit on my iPad to give myself a little more flexibility with where and when I edit or to edit on my desktop because it’ll probably be faster. It might end up being both for different things. I want the five piece art show but I can also use shorter one piece videos for various social media.

All this shooting only took me about three hours on Sunday so that’s not bad all things considered. It’s going to take me a bit to get the video edited so I’ll let you know how that goes. At least I got started. With what I have.