I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics plus a big book.
Check them all out here:
I just checked my calendar and it’s been two years since I finished my last 18×24 inch acrylic on canvas painting. That is my last one before I finished one this week. It’s been a while. Since then I’ve made plenty of drawings, big ink drawings, marker drawings, art cards, faux comic book covers, watercolor drawings, and other things I can’t remember right now. But no acrylic paintings.
What is the difference between all that stuff and my acrylic paintings? Surface. That’s the difference between drawing and painting. When making a painting an artist has to decide what they are going to do with the surface. Acrylic and oil paint have a thickness. You can really pour it on and lay on a thick coat of paint or thin it out and make the surface as smooth as possible. Then there is all the stuff in between those two extremes. There are lots of decisions to be made about the surface of the paint as you work.
Even when I’m dealing with color in a gouache or watercolor painting I consider it closer to drawing than painting. That’s because there are almost no decisions to be made about the surface. Those mediums are thin and don’t hold brush strokes like oil and acrylic paint do. Their surface is all about what paper you choose rather than how the paint is put on the surface.
The painting I finished is called “Strange Character.” It started as a drawing in my ink book and then I made an ink drawing out of it. This past winter I went on a 6×9 inch ink drawing tear. I made about 45 of them from mid November until the end of January. I would blow up one of my small ink book sketches onto a 6×9 inch piece of Bristol board and then go at it with a brush or pen full of ink.
I got tired of making big ink drawings as I’ve been doing a lot of this year so I decided to look through my stack of 6×9 inch ink drawings to see if there was anything I wanted to make a painting out of. I settled on a drawing that was originally named “Horrible Character” but as I worked on the painting I changed the name. I didn’t think the person in the painting was horrible or had anything to do with horror. Instead he was strange.
I’ve been coming up with stories that go along with my drawings and paintings lately. They mostly take place in the Dreamworld. That’s the place on the edge of our knowledge and consciousness where lessons are learned through stories, feelings, metaphor, and images. There is a lot of stuff to be learned from the Dreamworld if we have the imagination to perceive it.
I start the painting by transferring the image to the canvas. I blow up the drawing on the computer, print it out on multiple piece of paper, tape the paper together, and transfer the drawing to the canvas using graphite paper. That’s wax paper with a thin layer of graphite on one side. Press down on the paper with a pencil and a line of graphite transfers to the canvas.
The next step is to draw the black line of the drawing in purple paint on the canvas. In the past I used to use black paint for this but in recent years I’ve used a dark purple. The purple is so dark it’s hard to tell it’s not black and it functions as black in the color scheme but I find it slightly more lively. I usually do this part as quickly as I can because unlike its ink drawing compatriot this line drawing in not the final line drawing. It’s just step one and there are plenty of steps to go.
Step two is to make a color sketch on the computer. I prefer to figure out what my colors are going to be before I hit the paint. That cut the mistakes down a whole lot.
Step three is to lay down all the basic colors on the canvas. I use the sketch as a guide and paint in the color where it needs to go. This step can take most of the day. This and the purple line step can be a bit of a chore. There aren’t a lot of creative decisions to be made but it’s laying the groundwork for all the creative stuff to come.
Step four is to go back into the line with more purple paint. This gets me almost to the final line. As the painting goes on there is still decisions to be made and touch ups to be done but it’s here that I’m really thinking about the final line. I work the line and the color shapes back and forth until I get the relationship between the positive and negative spaces created by the paint just how I want it.
An 18×24 inch painting takes around three days. Day one is working on the image, transferring it to canvas, and painting the purple line. Day two is putting in all the color and reworking the purple line. Day three is where the whole thing comes together. That’s when all the lines, blobs, and brush strokes full of color are put on. This takes a remarkable amount of time because there is a lot of looking at and contemplating the painting going on.
I almost always work standing up but at this stage I spend a lot of time sitting and distracting myself for a few minutes before glancing over at the painting. Somehow moving in and out of concentration helps me see the next bit of color I want to paint. It seems like an almost endless process at first but as the day goes on and I put on more and more paint my choices narrow. It’s when I finally see no more choices that the painting is finished.
“Strange Character” is a strange character because we’re not sure what he’s thinking. His thoughts appear to be obvious, at least for a moment, but are they? We just get a glimpse of his head with some type of phallic symbol comic out of his head. Or is it a rocket? Is he a unicorn? Is that a lipstick? What is he really trying to tell us about his thoughts? I don’t know. That’s what makes him so strange.
What really brought this painting together for me are the light blue marks on his face. Even with all the other marks and patterns of color in this painting something was missing for me. It just wasn’t lively enough. It was missing a certain dream-like quality. The light blue marks changes that for me. The color of them works well with the pink of his face and the line and “No pattern-pattern” makes a nice counterpoint to all the color patterns in the painting. I knew I had it figured out after I put those lines in.
After finishing this one I still have two more 18×24 inch canvases ready to go. I bought them back in 2018 and they’ve been sitting around since then. Let’s see what I can do with them.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got six new comics.
Check them all out here:
I bought “Asterios Polyp” by David Mazzucchelli back when it came out in 2009. I even wrote a blog review about it. http://radiantcomics.com/comics-i-bought-this-week-october-1-2009/ I remember liking it but not being overly enthusiastic about the book. In rereading my review I think that comes across. I meant to give the book another look after some time had passed and somehow not just a couple of years went by but eleven. It’s hard to believe over a decade has passed since “Asterios Polyp” came out.
Asterios Polyp is the name of the lead character in this graphic novel. He is a “Paper Architect.” That means that none of his buildings have ever been built. He has spent his career in academia teaching architecture. He wrote some books that got him some fame and he’s well respected in his field despite having no standing buildings.
The story begins with lightning striking Asterios’s NYC apartment and sets it on fire. Asterios grabs three things: a lighter, a watch, and a Swiss Army knife and leaves. He doesn’t even look back as he flees the fire but instead heads up to what I assume to be Port Authority Bus Station and takes a bus out of town. So the story begins.
I was very aware of time in this story. I think it starts with the fact that back in 2009 when I first read this comic I was younger than Asterios Polyp. Now I’m older than him. I think that affected my perception of the story but I was also calculating ages overall in the story.
Asterios is fifty when the story begins and he is recently retired and divorced. It flashes back to his youth and early days teaching and gives us years for them. He met his wife Hana at a faculty party in 1984. It also says his wife’s parents were married in 1948, had four sons in five years, and his wife six years later. So his wife was born in 1959. That makes her fifty in 2009. That was a bit confusing since she seemed younger than him but then it’s later mentioned that the story takes place in the year 2000. So he was fifty then and she was forty one. She was in her mid twenties when they met and he was in his mid thirties.
There seemed to be a lot of recalculating in this story for me. Things that might not be clear in the beginning, like the three things Asterios grabbed as the fire burned, became clear later on in the story. The many flashbacks in the story emphasized this as we got glimpses into important moments in Asterios’s life. We got insight into him, his career, and his marriage.
In the story’s present Asterios takes the bus to a random town, gets off and finds a job as a car mechanic, and rents a room at his boss’s house. He blends right in with his boss’s family. Asterios is a really smart guy and has lots of interesting conversation with the people around him. It seems he wants to learn something about life from everyone he meets.
Let me drop in a word about the art. First of all Mazzucchelli is a visual storyteller of the highest order. His panel to panel storytelling is as clear and concise as can be. Never once was I wondering what was happening in a scene nor was I ever visually confused. This helps so much in entering the world of a comic and believing in it. Everyone loves him from his Batman and Daredevil days but this art is his much more cartoony style. He even keeps the color basic and uses it sparingly. But never once did I think the color wasn’t right on.
Mazzucchelli also used some interesting techniques in his drawing. He had a few scenes of Asterios and Hana (who was also a teacher and artist) arguing and the art style changed during those arguments. In those scenes Asterios was drawn as if he was made out of geometric shapes while Hana was drawn more loosely in a sketchy style. It reflected their points of view with him being rigid and material as she was more emotional and feeling. It really changed the mood in an interesting way when this happened.
I also learned an interesting thing about the art from a friend who went to a lecture back in 2009 where Mazzucchelli spoke about the book. He drew Asterios’s face with elipse templates rather than the normal freehand way. That’s because he wanted the same exact curves to Asterios’s face every time. He wanted a certain rigidity to the drawing. Since there was a rigidity to the character I found that fitting.
I really didn’t remember a lot of the story consciously since reading it back in 2009 but I think some things must have stuck in my subconscious. I was very aware of things, like those three fire items, that were going to pay off further in the story. Plus there were themes and little snippets of conversation that repeated themselves. Little inside jokes between husband and wife. It all seemed to work for me this time around.
I think that back in 2009 this seemed like just another midlife crisis story to me. It wasn’t bad but I had seen stuff like it before. This time around I didn’t get that feeling. Instead of a midlife crisis it seemed like more of an adventure story. After all he really wasn’t having a crisis. He just kind of abandoned his life because he was tired of it.
There is one more theme that was in this story. During the fire we see a room that has what looks like shelves full of video tapes with dates on them. We have no idea what these are. It isn’t until well into the book we get a flashback to Asterios and Hana in Asterios’s apartment in about 1985. Asterios reveals to her that he has video cameras all throughout his apartment recording everything. Hana freaks out at the weirdness but Asterios explains that he had a twin brother who was stillborn and that haunts him (his ghost twin is actually another character in the book who occasionally haunts Asterios’s dreams). He never watches nor does he want to watch the videos but they give him comfort knowing that there is a twin of himself on the videos. A lot of this book is about time’s passing.
With this second read so many years later I have to say there is a lot more stuff in this book than I caught the first time around. I haven’t even mentioned a lot of it here. Give it a read.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’m a big believer in working with what you have. That’s my creative mantra. I try not to worry about what equipment or art supplies that I don’t have and concentrate on the ones that I do have. I’ve seen people get stalled or hung up on something they want to create because they don’t have one of the things they think they need to create it. I try never to get hung up like that and move forward with the tools I got. But it isn’t always easy. The desire for the perfect tools and circumstance is strong in us humans.
I recently wrote a blog about reviving all my gouache paint (a type of watercolor) so I could use them again. “Art Writing: Back to Gouache” was its name. And what did I do after I wrote that blog? I went onto my wish list on dickblick.com and put a whole bunch of new tubes of gouache on my wish list. About $150 worth. I really wanted to buy it. I had just set up all my old gouache, which was still perfectly good, but here I wanted all new tubes.
Why did I want all new tubes? I think because in my head that seemed like an easy starting point. Cleaning up all the old tubes and cubbies of gouache was hard and it was all a bit disorganized in the end. I imagined that if I could start over again with all new tubes I could get more done. I have no idea if that would be true but the very thought was stopping me from getting things done. Even when I know that I should concentrate on what I have and not what I don’t have it isn’t always easy to do.
As I was looking for new tubes of gouache I stumbled upon something I hadn’t seen before. Some gouache (or watercolor) is sold in pans. You get 12, 24, 36, or even 48 colors in small pans in a set. You wet the paint and off you go. I knew about pan sets but I didn’t realize you could buy the pan sets empty and add your own gouache. I though that would be cool to do with all those new tubes of gouache I was looking at. Now my price was up to $170.
In the end I came to my senses and didn’t buy all those new tubes of gouache. But I also remembered that I had a cheap set of gouache somewhere in my cabinets. I looked around and found a Reeves 24 tube set of gouache that had probably been sitting there for half a decade. I ended up ordering an empty pan set for $20 and now I’ll put the Reeves paints I already have in there. I don’t even care about the new tubes anymore. Sure I might get them someday but not today. I can get things done with what I have.
You’d think that all that couldn’t happen to me twice in one month, right? Well it did. This week I decided to do an acrylic on canvas painting. I don’t think I’ve painted in acrylics in at least three years. I have my acrylics in tubes, jars, and in small plastic cubbies. I often mix my colors in the cubbies. They’re fairly air tight but over three years acrylic paint will still dry out in them. Acrylics can’t be revived with water. They turn to solid plastic. I can peel them out of the cubbies but that takes some doing.
The cubbies I like are hard to find these days. In fact I can’t find them. So as I was painting I decided to clean out all my cubbies. About sixty of them. If I was richer or they were easy to find I would have just thrown these ones out. It really is a fair amount of work to clean a cubby of paint. I cleaned out a few of them to use as I was going along but for the most part I used my acrylic paint straight from the tube or jar.
Almost all of my tubes and jars of acrylic were in good shape. A couple of them were dried out but those were ones with little paint in them. The paint in some of the jars was thickened and needed some water added to them but that’s because they were nearly ten years old and had a lot of paint missing from them. I’m amazed they were even still good.
I worked on the painting for a few days and it was a little bit clumsy without all my mixed color in the cubbies. I did have plenty of paint though. I have three 11x14x3 inch plastic bins with tubes of paint in them plus about ten other jars of paint. I estimate I had 75 tubes and jars of paint to choose from. That is plenty. I got the painting done and it came out nice but do you know what? I didn’t enjoy making it. It was a hard process. Sometimes working on art is like that. It could have been because I haven’t made a painting like that in a while.
So guess what I did afterwards? I started looking at new acrylic paints on the internet. Yes, I somehow got it in my head that if I started over and put together a new set of paints things would get easier. I’ve got 75 tubes of paint and I wanted new ones. Before I actually took the time to pick all the colors out I came to my senses. I think I’ll take an inventory of the paint I actually have. That’s probably the way to go before adding more.
One last thing is the canvas I painted on. It’s an 18×24 inch canvas and I bought a bunch of them back when I was doing acrylic on canvas work regularly. I have three of them left but it also got into my mind that I should order more. These three have been sitting around for years and I immediately wanted more before they were even used. Sometimes it’s tough to work with what you have. The allure of what we don’t have is strong.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics.
Check them all out here:
I keep having to buy bike parts and tools. That’s what I’ve been up to. Not only is my own road bike in need of some repair but a friend gave me his mountain bike that’s in pieces and needs work. He told me a whole bunch of things that were wrong with it but they really didn’t sink in until I tried to fix it. Then I realized how much work it would take. No wonder he got rid of it.
Lets start with my road bike. It needs a new front rim. This winter I accidentally went over a curb with the bike and now the rim has a flat spot. I’ve been riding it like that but it really needs a new rim. I finally ordered one and the day after I did I walked out for my bike ride and noticed a bubble on my back tire.
Isn’t that always the way? Fix one thing and another comes up? Or at least order the part you need for the fix. I inspected the tire and the rim was bent out a little and the tread was damaged. I’m guessing it was from the same curb incident but I somehow never noticed. I stripped the tread and tube from the rim and them used some C clamps to bend the rim back into shape. This was an easy fix compared to having a flat spot in the rim. The tread was trashed but luckily my friend who gave me the mountain bike also gave me a tread for a road bike. So I was good to go.
The front brake on my road bike has been malfunctioning for years. It will stop me if I need it to but then it won’t let go. I have to reach down and pull it off the wheel by hand. It’s an emergency brake only. I used the rear brake almost all of the time, I’ve been meaning to replace the front brake but haven’t because all the winter riding I’ve done has frozen it in place with rust and road grime. I feared I’d have to break it off.
Since I ordered a new front rim I decided to order a new front brake too. After I ordered the new front brake I decided too try and get the old one off right then so the new one could go right on when it arrived. It took an hour to get it off the bike and, as I feared, in the end I had to break it off. I ended up grabbing it with vicegrips and snapping it off piece by piece. I had to drill out part of the bolt stem so I hope the new one fits right. We’ll see.
I also ordered a new rear derailleur for my road bike. The gears on the old one are worn down to almost nothing. I should have replaced it a while ago but you know how these things go. Why go to the trouble if it’s still rideable”
The mountain bike isn’t even rideable yet. When I got it the fork wasn’t even on it. I’ve never taken a fork off or put one on a bike before now. Turns out I needed a new headset for the fork. These are the ball bearing parts that go on the top and bottom of the fork that makes it turn. I ordered a new headset.
After I got the headset and went to put it on I discovered that I needed a special tool to remove a part of the old headset from the fork. I also needed a tool to put that same part on the fork. I ordered the part to take the old one off but then decided I could just turn that tool upside down to put the new one on. When I finally go the tool I was right. It was a little clumsy putting the new headset on but I got it done.
I went to finally install the fork and the next thing I discovered was that the star nut that kept the fork in place needed yet another special tool to install. I went online and ordered that tool. A week later it came and I could finally install the fork. I think all that took two weeks to do.
Next I decided to try and install the front derailleur. Turns out the shifter/brake handle was broken. But only the front one and not the rear one. But you have to order them in pairs so I did. Then I turned my attention to the rear derailleur. Turns out it was in pieces and some of the pieces were even missing. I had to order a new rear derailleur.
With all these problems this bike still has yet to get any wheels on it. But I got the new parts in the mail and went to install the rear derailleur. That’s when I discovered a new and even bigger problem. The derailleur bolts right to the frame but the threads on the frame were stripped. I have no idea how my friend managed this but I’ve never seen it before. No derailleur was going to attach to this frame. No wonder he didn’t want the bike anymore.
I did some research on the internet and found a possible solution. I would have to drill out the bolt hole and put in a replacement piece that has new threads in it. Of course I’d have to order the piece and the drill bit. I did but there is no guarantee that it’s work. I also found out that a lot of newer bikes have replaceable derailleur hangers in case this happens but this mountain bike has the derailleur hanger welded right on. Oh well.
Despite all the repairs I’ve been doing on my road bike it has still been rideable all this time. I’ve been putting off all the stuff I needed to do to it because I didn’t have the money for the parts. I finally do so it feels good to be getting it done.
The mountain bike has been a lot more trouble. I’ve never had a mountain bike before and have always wanted one so it’s cool to be fixing it up. I’ve ben patient with it and it has also given me something to look forward to during this quarantine time. I’ll get it up and running sooner or later.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics.
Check them all out here:
I was making some Magic the Gathering Altered art cards today. What are they? That’s when you take a card from the Magic the Gathering game and change the art that’s printed on the card into something new. I’ve been making them and selling them on Ebay for about four years. I’m lucky if I make fifty bucks a month doing it but I can use that PayPal money to get other things.
Some people do original art as their Altered art cards. They paint right over the original image. That takes too much time and energy for me so I do mine by using my printer to print on the card. That sounds easy but there are a lot of steps involved and things can go wrong at any time.
I follow a process that I saw on YouTube. It’s easy to find if you’re looking for it. I stumbled onto it one day never even having heard of altered art cards before. I was a MTG player back in the 1990s and early 2000s but haven’t touched the game much since. I still have a lot of cards sitting around so I had some raw material for altered art cards. One day I decided to give it a try. I found it kind of fun.
The first thing you have to do is strip the art off the front of the card using acetone (nail polish remover). The video shows them doing this with a rag but that didn’t work for me. It took a whole lot of effort and wasn’t very precise. So the first thing I do is mask off the area I want to stay the same with frisket. That’s a thin plastic with one sticky side. I stick it down where I want the card protected and untouched.
After the card has been masked I use a electric sander, a piece of cloth, and some acetone to remove the original ink. This takes a while. Though it’s faster than rubbing the cloth on the card by hand. I do it in a well ventilated area (the garage with the garage door open) and it takes four or five re-wettings of the cloth with the acetone. Often that’s not even enough. I also have to rub a cotton swab dipped in acetone along the edge of the frisket to pick up the ink that gets stuck along that edge. Plus sometimes there is some stubborn ink that just doesn’t want to come up and I have to hit it with some 600 grit sand paper. It takes fifteen to twenty minutes to clear four cards.
After the part of the card I want to print on is white I have to prepare the ground for printing. Step one is to spray the cards with fixative. That’s the easy part because it comes in a spray can. For the next two parts I need a paintbrush. I use a one inch flat brush. First I brush on a thin coat of glass and tile medium and after that dries I brush on a thin coat of inkjet precoat. That’s three coats of stuff before the card is ready for printing. And I don’t want brush strokes showing so I put a few drops of the medium on and them brush it top to bottom and then side to side over and over. This smooths it out and gets rid of air bubbles. I really have to pay attention as I do this.
I have the image I want to print on the card set up in Photoshop. This is a process all to itself. My most popular card (only popular card even) is the Batman slapping Robin meme on a Counterspell card. I had to redraw the meme, scan it in, color it, and set it upon to be printed.
The way I set it up to be printed was that I put the image in the middle of an 8.5×11 inch document. I then print out an outline of the card on a piece of cardstock the same size. After that I take the actual card and tape in inside the outline on the cardstock paper. Now when I print the image it lines up with the card on the paper. Most of the time it does. Things can easily go wrong here and they do.
Things can go wrong at any step but it’s during this printing part when things go wrong most often. I’d say my failure rate is about 25%. One in four cards don’t come out well. Just today I was trying some new frisket. It was old frisket that someone gave me. As I was using the sander and cloth the frisket started to come off the card. I just barely saved the card and had to re-frisket it and seven others.
That was my only problem until the printing stage. Well, besides the ink not easily coming off the cards today. The second problem was when I printed one of the cards it printed poorly. It was not crisp like the others. It looked like it had streaks and air bubbles in it. I took it back out to the garage, stripped off the new ink, prepped the ground again, and reprinted it. Same results. I still don’t know why. Once again I stripped the ink off but this time when I prepped the ground I put an extra coat of fixative on. I have no idea if that really did anything but this time the card printed well.
After the printing is done the final step is to hit the card with some more spray fixative. This makes sure the printing is sealed up and can’t easily be scratched off. I like to use matte fixative rather than glossy because I think it makes the art look batter. I spray out in the back yard.
I sell the cards on Ebay for $15 shipped. I’m still not sure if it’s worth my time but what the heck. I usually only sell five of six of them a month so it’s not like I’m making them all the time. The money came in handy this week as the latest Apple upgrade to my laptop made my 15 year old small Wacom tablet not work anymore. I looked for a used one on Ebay and found one for about $60. I had that much in my PayPal account from selling these cards so I ordered a tablet up. So I guess I’ll make some more cards in a month or two.