Radiant Comics

Pencil on canvas.

I got it going again. This week I finally started a new 24×36 inch acrylic painting named “Around Nine”. I made four such paintings back in 2021 and another in 2023 so it’s been a while. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my slow start to getting another painting started but this week I finally got paint on canvas.

Speaking of paint that’s one of the things I’ve had to check as I started working. I remember buying some new acrylic paints back in 2023 when I was planning on making more paintings (I only made one) but I haven’t looked at my paints in about two years. There is always the problem of the paints drying out.

Most acrylic paint, if properly stored in the original tube or jar, will last for many years without drying out. I still have about a half a dozen big jars of paint that go back twenty years to when I first started painting with acrylics. I put a little bit of water in them every few years and they manage to stay moist. For the most part.

The main problem with old jars of acrylic paint is that small bits of it can dry out. As you use a jar of the level of the paint goes down. This leaves a thin layer of paint on the side of the jar that is going to dry faster than the body of the paint. This only gets to be a problem when I have to stir the paint. Such as when it needs a little more water. That’s when little bits of the dried paint can fall into the wet paint. It leaves tiny chunks of paint in the wet paint that show up when I brush it onto the canvas. I have to pick the little pieces out if I want a smooth brush stroke of paint. It’s a pain.

Most of my paint in jars is fine but I did find a couple of dried out tubes. I have three 11x14x3 inch boxes full of tubes of paint. At a guest I’d say that’s around fifty tube of paint at various sizes. Some are two ounces and some are eight ounces. Most of the ones I’ve looked at so far are fine but two of them are rock solid. I think they had a lot of air in the tube itself so it didn’t matter if the lid was on.

The painting in purple line.

I also have three boxes full of paint in little plastic cubbies. Small airtight plastic jars that I mix and store paint in. These tend to dry out faster than the tubes and jars the paint comes in. It still takes a couple of years for the paint to dry in them but when it does the paint becomes solid plastic. The cubby is actually easier to clean out when the paint is solid. It pulls off the sides of the jar in a solid chunk. It’s a lot messier when the paint is almost but not quite dry.

I can remember when I first started using these plastic cubbies that I thought I’d never bother cleaning them. They were cheap and disposable I supposed. But sometime after I first got them I could no longer find them for sale. I guess they stopped making them. I tried to find replacements for them and tried various other styles but they were not as good. So now I clean out the cubbies if the paint dries in them. And it sure did. I think I’ve cleaned six of them so far.

I’ve had my oil/acrylic painting brushes for a long time. I think I bought almost all of them in the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The funny thing is that for my style of painting I really only use two brushes. A #4 flat and a small #3 watercolor brush. I have a bunch more but it’s these two that get used for most of the painting.

Back when I was in art school and was first developing my way of painting one of my teachers, Nicholas Marsicano, pointed out to me that Piet Mondrian used to push the paint with his brush in order to make paint meet paint in a straight line. I ended up pushing that paint myself with the #4 flat.

As a consequence I ended up with a bunch of #4 flat brushes. Not all of them are in good shape. The first one I tried wasn’t as flat as it used to be. There were a bunch of bristles sticking out of the top that made it hard to push neatly. I switched over to another. Maybe I should toss that old brush but it could have other uses. Plus it’s been around this long.

Because my brushes are so old I was thinking about buying some new brushes. I checked online for the same brush I had and they are around $20 for a new one. Plus the new brush is a lot longer than my old one. Same brand and model but the bristles on my old one are about half an inch long but on the new one the bristles are about an inch long. That’s a big difference.

My brushes are decades old and using them certainly wears down the bristles over time but I have no memory of them originally being an inch long. I still have what I think is my original brush that size from 1986 and that one was worn down to the point that it’s almost a nub and I had to replace it ages ago. Yet I still kept the worn down one. Sure I might get some use out of it but I think I’m just sentimental about my art supplies.

As of right now I’ve been painting for three days and I’m about a third of the way done with this one. I transferred the drawing to the canvas, painted the drawing with a dark purple line, and have started laying in the base color. I have about a third of the base color in and it’s probably take another three days to get the rest of it in.

Painting takes me a long time.

I’ve been thinking about video again. I say again because I’m often thinking about video. How can I not be? A ton of our social media is video these days. The time of six second looping Vine videos has moved on to ten minute TikTok videos. Not to mention three hour YouTube videos.

My main thoughts on video are about how to present my artwork on camera. I see a lot of artists out there presenting their artwork to the world on social media. Some of them are really popular but most aren’t. That’s the way of the world. It’s tough figuring out what way will be best for me. There is no one recipe to follow to bake the best bread.

The one I see the most these days is the turn around. That’s when an artist has a painting or drawing in their hands but it’s facing away from the camera. They slowly turn it around to face the viewer and it’s like a dramatic unveiling. Or at least it’s supposed to be. I don’t know how successful this method has been for individual artists but I see it a lot so it must work for some people. It’s also easy to do so that probably helps its popularity.

I think the turnaround method also depends on the artist. The first thing we see is the artist with a backwards painting. So how the artist presents themselves is important. If people see that artist on first look and aren’t interested then they’ll scroll by. But I have no idea what the answer to how I should present myself is. I can only just stand there like most people who do the turnaround do.

I used to make ASMR drawing videos. I would put a camera right above a 5×7 inch piece of paper and film as a did an on the spot marker drawing. Each one was about ten minutes long. I had some fun making them and made a lot of them but I eventually stopped. They took a lot of concentration and I think I just got bored with making them. That and they never really got me more subscribers on YouTube anyway.

I just checked and I made 161 of those ASMR videos from 2014 to 2019 and then three in 2021. I guess I was trying them going again in 2021 (it’s May 31, 2025 as I write this) but it didn’t take. That’s a lot of videos though. I gave it a good shot.

I’ve thought about making art instruction videos too. Years ago I even made a couple of them on a second YouTube channel. I remember seeing a bunch of successful art instruction channels so I thought I’d set one up. I made a few videos that no one watched and then stopped. One lesson I learned from that is not to have two YouTube channels. I don’t need to split my attention like that. If I ever make art instruction videos again I’ll post them on my regular channel.

Strangely enough the one type of art video that I’ve made that I’ve gotten the most response to is my tape peeling videos. When I make a 6×9 inch ink drawing I put tape around the edges of the paper as a mask so that I can draw over the border of the drawing. That way I don’t have to stop my hand when I hit the black line border of the drawing and can go right over into the white paper outside the border. I find that helpful in making the drawing.

After the drawing is all done I pull up the tape that has ink all over it and reveal the white of the paper. The now white border is only about a quarter inch wide all around the drawing but it looks nice. I started filming myself pulling up the ink marked tape to reveal the clean paper because I thought it looked cool. After posting some of them other people thought it looked cool too. Then I’d also reveal the drawing.

I still make those tape peeling drawings because they’re short, under a minute, and easy to make. But it was my Facebook friends who comment on them and they never expanded my audience.

Now I’m thinking that I have to present my art with some kind of story behind it. But what story? The story the art suggests? The story of making the art? The story of the time the art was made? I’m not sure. I have a lot of art to show off. I graduated from art school back in 1988 and have been making art since then so I have a lot of pieces. What’s their story?

These are all big questions to answer and I don’t have the answer yet. Plus telling the story of my art might take a lot more time, video, and video editing than I’ve done before. I’m not a fan of editing video so I’m hesitant to. Plus I have the nagging idea that the solution I’m looking for should be a simple one. A simple idea that gets across to a lot of people. Simple is not easy.

Another of the problems that I (and other artists) have is that presenting your art to the public is a whole other job. Making the art is a job in itself and that’s the job most artists like to do. Most artists don’t make their living from their art so that they need a paying job too. So that’s two jobs just to make art. Promoting your art is a third job. It is really hard to do three jobs. Especially since making and promoting art are two different skill sets and are, generally, unpaying jobs for the individual artist.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about along with making video is how to make it easy on myself. I usually shoot my YouTube videos with my iPad, a microphone, and a tripod. But I have to take those three things out and set them up. I have other cameras and I want to find the easiest one to set up and use.

I sometimes find it a pain to drag out my full size tripod. I need to find an easier video setup to encourage myself to use it. Any little impediment to creativity makes it harder to be creative.

So all I need is the right idea, the right setup, and the time to do it all. This could take a minute.

“Around Nine” ink drawing for the first painting 11×17 inches

I decided about a month ago that I wanted to do some painting this summer (it’s May 23, 2025 as I write this.) Of course the eternal question is, “What to paint?”. So that’s what has been going through my mind for the last bunch of weeks. It’s often not an easy question to answer.

I’m not an abstract painter so I need to make an image for my painting. On my computer I have a whole bunch of scans of drawings that I’ve done over the decades so, at first, I thought I’d look through them to find something I wanted to paint.

I’m always coming up with ideas for pictures and then drawing them but they go no further than that. Often I’ll look through my archive of drawings and choose one to make a finished piece out of. I do this when I don’t feel like going through the process of coming up with a new idea for a finished piece. I work out many ideas so that I can always go back and pick one. But even more often I work up a new idea for new piece. If I want to do a new, “Dreams of Things” or “Last Night I Dreamt I had a True Love” finished piece I’ll work on a new drawing for them.

I figured that for the paintings I want to work on this summer I’ll look through my drawings rather than make new ones. That’ll save me some time. But it didn’t. Nothing jumped out at me that I wanted to paint. There were plenty of drawings that I could have made paintings of but none of them really spoke to me.

One of the first ideas that came to me was to do some portraits. I haven’t made any portraits in a long time. They’re really not my thing but I thought maybe I could do some this summer. One of the tough parts about doing a portrait for me is choosing who to do one of and then arranging for them to sit for me or have me take a photo of them. That was all too much for me so I abandoned the idea.

After that, I thought that I could go through some old family photos and pick someone from the distant past to make a portrait of. But I find it tough working from photos I didn’t take for the purpose of making a portrait. Plus all the scans I had of old photos needed cleaning and sharpening and that got me distracted by leading me down an AI restoration rabbit hole. Spoiler alert AI restoration wasn’t cheap nor were the results particularly good.

I also thought about some themes for the paintings. I have four canvases and could tie them all together thematically. At first I even thought about taking this four paneled drawing I made years ago and making it into a four paneled painting. Once again that didn’t excite me and it would be a lot of work. I abandoned the idea after a little while.

I also had the idea to do four faces with word balloons. Sort of like my cartoon art cards but as big 24×36 inch paintings. I drew a whole bunch of faces in my inkbook but it never worked out. The idea was also similar to the tiny drawings that I have been making. One face, one word balloon, and one word. It was too familiar. I lost interest in the idea.

Then I went to my pile of three marker drawings. I’ve drawn a lot of them over the years and often I’ve used these ink drawings as the basis of something bigger and more finished. I looked through them and one stood out to me. I printed it out at 11×17 inches in blue line to work on the drawing some more. I’ve been doing most of my preliminary pencil drawings at 6×9 inches but I thought this one would work out better if I drew bigger.

It took half a day to make the drawing and I liked the way it came out. But it was a bunch of small figures and no big faces and after letting the drawing sit for a day I couldn’t see working on it as a painting. I really wanted some big faces so I lost interest in this drawing and moved on.

Finally I decided that I had enough of this particular struggle and that I was going to start over from the beginning and come up with some images. I went back to my main method of doing things and started to look through my inkbooks full of thumbnail drawings that I could turn into finished drawings.

At first I was looking for thumbnails that I could use for my “Dreams of Things” series of marker drawings. I usually set up four or five blue line drawings for this purpose so that I could choose between them when I want to work on something. As I was picking through the thumbnails I started to see things I could use for the paintings too. I ended up setting up about a dozen 6×9 inch blue line drawings to be worked on. About half of them were for the paintings.

So far I’ve finished three of the 6×9 inch drawings for possible paintings. They went pretty well. I like all three drawings but I figure that I’ll do even more. I decided not to rush. I think I was rushing before.

I even decided to blow up these drawings so that I could ink them at 11×17 inches. I don’t always do that with drawings that are going to become paintings since it’s usually not necessary but this time I thought it was. I can always make the ones I won’t make into paintings into prints.

So far I’ve inked two of the drawings and I like the way they’ve come out. They’re my two favorites out of the pile of drawings so that’s not too shocking but just a few days before I couldn’t get anything done.

Now I have to do color sketches with the ink drawings. It’s’ all coming along. I’ll keep you updated.

The art. Dreams of Things #279

Today I’m going to write about one of the recent pieces that I’ve made. Dreams of Things #279. Another of my “Covers to Comic Books That Don’t Exist” series. I’m closing in on finishing 300 of them. Wow, that’s a lot.

It’s May 17, 2025 as I write this and I finished this cover on March 25, 2025. So it’s almost been two months since I’ve seen this cover. It’s a funny thing but usually after I finish a cover I tuck it away. I put it on my easel behind some other 11×17 works on paper that I’ve done. Then when the time comes to make my weekly comic book haul video I pull one out to show. Often the one I pull out I haven’t seen in a month. So it becomes fresh to me.

That was the story of this one this week. I hadn’t seen it since the end of March. It’s familiar to me now because it’s been the one in front of the stack for a few days but on Wednesday it was a new sight. That’s an odd thing for a piece I made myself.

The first thing I notice about this piece is that it’s more poster-like than usual. The space of the image is very flat. It has as much of if not more of a graphic design quality than an illustrative quality.

The pose of the woman reminds me of a fashion ad photograph. It doesn’t give you a full figure in space but just a part of her body with the arms outstretched as if she’s posing instead of standing. Plus her arms are cropped at the sides of the image. That’s more of a graphic design cropping than a figure drawing cropping.

Then there is her hair. It’s an impossible hairdo. It’s being upswept as if by an unseen wind machine like they use in fashion photoshoots. It’s a pink hairdo that matches well with the purple dress. I was just noting this week that though purple is often a tough color to work with and get to print well (when coloring digitally) it’s a lot easier to work with when paired with a pink. Pink and purple together go down smoothly.

Adding to the flat sense of space is that small boy at the bottom of the piece. Is he in front of her or is he a design on the dress? To me his size seems a little bit off for him to be a real person in front of her. He might be a little bit too small to be real. But if he is just a design on the dress the color of him makes him stand out from it. His primary color outfit doesn’t fit with the tight fitting purple stripe design of the dress. He stands out a lot. So maybe he is real.

These search for answers are usually part of my work. I like to come up with images that no one has seen before. Strange stuff that makes me question what it is and what is going on. Often I don’t have all the answers and there might not be a right answer. Like this. It’s up in the air if that’s a real boy or not. It’s something to contemplate.

The top portion of the background and the bottom portion fight each other. The bottom portion is more illustrative and that looks like a normal sort of space behind her. There is a horizon line to give a sense of perspective while the eyeball signs sit down on the horizon. There is nothing behind the signs except for dark blue clouds. It all makes sense as a scene that goes back in space.

The background on top is much more of a graphic design space. There are three stripes of color that don’t create a real space but an artistic one. First are those three color green stripes that go across. They suggest trees or mountains but they don’t line up with the horizon line on the bottom. None of the stripes on top match the horizon line on the bottom. They exist in their own world separate from it.

The orange strips on top go back in space and could possibly suggest a ceiling but it doesn’t match anything else. The horizon line of that ceiling would be somewhere in the middle of the woman’s face and not on the bottom. The hint of dark blue strips up top are slightly off from the orange stripes too. The blue stripes are slightly curved. But they’re barely visible and don’t affect the space much except to anchor the deepest space on top.

The space of the woman in her dress is a mix of illustrative space and graphic design space. Here face and neck have a bit of roundness to them. I used lights and darks to define her skin in such a way as to make it look a little more real than all the flat color around her. It looks like she’s popping out of a flat dress.

Once again this reminds me of a fashion style photo. I wasn’t thinking of that when I was drawing this but now I can see it. There is a certain style of fashion photo, often uses in ads, in which the model’s skin is lit to be very round and sculptural but then she’s wearing a dark dress that’s lit to be flat. It’s a type of photo that’s often done in close up and emphasizes the graphic design of the ad. I haven’t seen one of these ads in ages but it obviously stuck in my head.

One last thing about this cover that reminds me of a fashion shoot is the yellow triangles that are at the side of her head. They remind me of big dangling fashion earrings. They’re not attached to her ears and are floating where earrings wouldn’t even really be but they still read as earrings for me.

It was a conscious decision to put those there and I think it worked out well. I think that was the icing on the cake that pulled the whole thing together for me as I was realizing the graphic design/fashion direction I was going in. One final touch.

Nothing to do with this post but here is a piece of my art. “Pop Art Bottom #4”

I’m only in the month of May as I write this. May 9, 2025. We’re about a third of the way through the year and I have to get my budget under control. I think I’ve bought a lot of stuff this year. Nothing super big that I’d have to take out a loan for but more than usual.

First off I bought two big art supply hauls. Around $300 for each order. Usually I make a big order every six months or so but this time they were only a couple of months apart. I’m not even sure why. It was probably because I had a little bit of extra money and I’m used to stocking up when I have the means. So I did. I even spent another $40 on pens at jetpens.com.

Let’s not forget it was car insurance time. That’s a big chunk of change. But it can’t be helped.

I also bought two other big ticket (relatively) items this year. I bought an Apple watch and a set of Apple AirPods Pros. I bought them both refurbished on eBay so they were cheaper than if I bought them new. The watch was $135 and the AirPods were $160. I wanted the watch because my current not-Apple smart watch wasn’t cutting it. I wanted an upgrade. I spent an extra $15 on a different band.

The AirPods I wanted because, according to the iPhone hearing test, I have moderate hearing loss. I haven’t really noticed much hearing loss but the AirPods were just cleared by some medical board to be used as hearing aids. I wanted to try them out to hear what I have been missing. So far I haven’t gotten much use out of them as such but someday I might. We’ll see.

I also had one of my main hard drives fail. My drive that I keep all my photos on. I had to drop $100 on a new one and since that new one was bigger than my old one (the old one was almost full) I also had to drop another $100 on a new backup hard drive. That was an unexpected purchase.

The problem I have when I buy so many big ticket items is that then the smaller ticket items don’t seem like much. What’s another $20? But it adds up. I spent $20, $25, $37, and another $25 on some plastic storage boxes. Three different orders over a few days. I also spent $75 on some storage portfolios and then another $25 on some more. That’s $207 on boxes to organize art and art supplies in. I like organizing things but that’s enough for now.

I also spent $30 on a tape dispenser. It’s one that holds three rolls of 3 inch core tape. I’ve been meaning to buy a tape dispenser since about 1992 but I never have. There were always more interesting art supplies to buy so it never made it to the top of the list. Thirty years later I finally bought one.

I spent about $40 on art supplies to carry with me in my commuting bag for when I teach. Tape, a ruler, a cutting mat, and other small stuff just to have on me.

I bought about $65 of new watercolor paints.

Back in about 1993 I bought an electric pencil sharpener. It cost about $40 and it was a top of the line one. I was probably making about a $90 a day in those days so that was a lot of money for me to drop on an electric sharpener. It broke after about six months and I was crushed. I went back to sharpening my pencils by hand and never bought another one. Until back in January. I spent about $20 on a new one. What’s another $20?

The lens cover on my everyday carry camera broke so I had to spend $15 on a silicone cover for it.

My phone battery is getting old so I spent $26 on a battery pack for it. I can now charge it on the go.

I spent $10 on a six pack of small sketchbooks.

I spent $50 of a variety of black markers.

I spent $30 on random negatives on eBay. Literally a set of 250 random negatives. I have, many times, bought old negatives off eBay, scanned them in, and made my own art out of them. But I usually choose each negative individually. These were sight unseen. So far I’ve only scanned about 50 of them in but I do see one that I might use.

I spent $45 on some production negatives. Little Lotta #121 that I wrote about earlier in the year. Little Lotta 121 Blog.

I’m noting all this stuff just to show how things went. There were a few big things that I bought and that made it easier to just spend even more. What’s $20 compared to the $300 art supply order I just made? But those $20s add up.

There is no real worry. I had the money and paid off my bill in full. I’ve been a lot broker in my life than I am now but I can’t just keep buying stuff online for $20 a pop. I have to put a stop to that. Especially since it’s all on a credit card.

One expense I haven’t mentioned is my comic book spending. Each week at the comic shop I can spend anywhere from $25 to $50. But that’s in cash. I find it a lot easier to control. I can’t just add on another $20 if I don’t have it with me. Even though I usually do have that extra $20 it’s a little more real than a number on a credit card.

So this week I instituted a ten dollar policy. Something has to be under ten dollars for me to buy it online. No more dropping twenty dollars on stuff willy nilly. No more big orders for the time being.

Just a few days ago I was shopping online for some small rolls of Scotch magic tape. I wanted to replace the crappy tape I carried in my commuting bag with good tape. A box of three was $10 and a box of six was $15. Normally I’d go for the better value at six for $15 but I didn’t need six rolls and it was above my $10 limit. So I went for the three rolls.

Last Friday I was looking for a comic on eBay. It mostly ran from $15 to $30. It was a whimsical purchase and it was above my $10 limit so I passed and didn’t get it. Then the next day a $9 copy appeared. I bought that one.

So that’s it. Nothing particularly brilliant or insightful but the mundane thoughts of spending money and budgeting. The ten dollar limit is going to force me to get more creative on whimsical and impulse purchases but it’s no big deal. Especially since I have all those art supplies stockpiled.