Radiant Comics

Digital Version

Usually when I make one of my big collage photos I work with a lot of different photos and organize them into, if not one big image, a series of images designed to work together. It’s all about using the different spaces in the photos to create a new space. A space that can’t be created with just one photo. A piece of land here, some sky there, a few building, and then some people. It all adds up to a different looking space compared to a single photo.

I changed up that formula for my latest photo. Instead of multiple images I decided to work with one big image. That’s something I haven’t really done before with my photography. I do it all the time with my drawing and painting but with photos I’ve always gone in a different direction. As long as I’ve been shooting street photos I’ve always been looking for series of images. Usually with photography you search for the one good shot but I never have. I like candid photography so I shoot from the hip and work with what I get. But occasionally I do get that one good shot. The law of averages says it has to happen every now and then. Especially when I’m out taking 5000 street photos on a single Saturday.

My “One good shot” photos I take get posted to Instagram. I look through a lot of photos on my iPad, pick one out, crop it, and do some digital manipulation with various iPad apps. Sometimes I also print out theses photos onto five by seven inch pieces of paper. I have a box of those 5x7s an pick one out to put on a little easel on my desk. I change the picture for a new one every so often. I mention all that because the current photo on my desk easel is the one I decided to blow up big.

Physical Version on the Easel

The photo is a close up crop of the faces of two women looking at a phone while sitting in Bryant Park. One woman is staring intensely through sunglasses at the second woman who is looking at the phone. I cropped the phone out of the picture so it looks like she’s staring into the middle distance. I like the emotions on their faces and the feeling of affection between them. It’s a good buddy photo.

I used this photo before as the base for one of my 11×17 inch prints. I paired it with the words “All Your Secrets are my Secrets.” It came out nice but it’s been a few years since I made that print and I wanted to make something bigger with this photo. The 5×7 version of this photo is cropped horizontally but the print was cropped vertically. I was looking to go horizontal with the big version.

I knew I didn’t have enough resolution to print this photo big. Usually I print stuff at 300 DPI but since this was going to be 20×28 inches my 15 megapixel camera would only give me about 150 DPI at that big size. But I’m prepared for such events. I teach a class in digital prepress. That’s printing stuff.

One of the things I teach my students is that if you don’t have enough DPI for printing you have to get creative. Over the years I’ve developed a series of Photoshop filter recipes that use pattern, color, and texture to turn a photo into something closer to a drawing. I still like it to be close to a photo but since it’s not a continuous tone it can be printed bigger. As a matter of fact a lot of the effects work better at lower resolution.

So I took the photo of the two women, sized it 20×28 inches, and then started to find the right filter recipes on it. For the first time in making one of my prints or photos I also used my iPad in the process. One of the good things about modern iPads is that they apps on them work on photos at full resolution. This wasn’t the case in the past. My old iPad would always lower the resolution on photo before working on them. It just wasn’t a powerful enough machine for full 10-15 megapixel resolution.

Certain photo apps on the iPad do one or two things really well and I wanted to use those. I have an app that allows me to transfer things to and from my desktop hard drive so I pulled my full resolution photo over, worked on it with a couple of apps, and copied the photos back to my desktop computer. Since the new photos were the same resolution as the original I could load them into Photoshop as layers and they would snap right into place. That’s pretty cool.

It took me a few hours to get the photo looking like I wanted it to. I ended up using about half a dozen different filter recipes and effects all on different layers and mixes together by setting the layers to different opacities. It’s something I’ve done a lot with my 11×17 inch prints so it was familiar to me. I also added some boxes of color photos but I kept them geometric and fairly abstract. There are the lines of some stairs, concrete decorative building elements, and random foliage turned different colors. I kept it minimal because I knew I’d add a few more elements after I printed out and pasted up the full size image.

The printing process was pretty easy. I kept the rectangular pieces smaller than 8.5×11 inches so I could print them all out on letter size paper. Then I put some sticky 3M paper on the back of the photos and cut them all to size. This all took another few hours. After that it was line them up, peel the backing off to reveal the sticky paper, and put them down in place on a big piece of 22×30 inch drawing paper. Then I had to do the same with the boxes of color. They get pasted down on top of the photo.

As I looked at the big finished piece it would give me ideas for more color blocks. I think to myself, “I need some more green here” and then go make that green happen on the digital file. I’d print out some new color blocks and add them to the physical photo. The very last thing I did was put in those four red color blocks closest to their faces. That finished it for me. I knew I needed nothing else after I had those in.

Well, I wasn’t quite finished. One of the photo rectangles, the one containing the woman’s lips, looked like it had a flaw in it. It was just some stray pixels brought up by the process but I didn’t like it. It was all I could see. So I went back to the digital file to fix it. Three hours later I finally had it fixed. It took so long to do it was crazy. It took nearly as long to get that one small flaw right as to make the original file. Sometimes trouble shooting is the most time consuming part of making something. Though I’m glad I got the trouble fixed. Now I can look at this photo without that flaw being what I see first.

My movie watching habits aren’t what they used to be. I was just sitting here watching a movie and I lasted about five minutes before I turned it off and decided to do some writing. It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying the movie but I had enough of it. After five minutes I was done. I’ll go back and watch it some other time but probably in bits and pieces just like I watched that bit. I don’t think I have the patience to watch many movies all the way through in one sitting anymore.

Patience is an odd thing. I still have plenty of patience for getting stuff done. Just this past Saturday I spent the whole day working on a big ink drawing. I started at about eight in the morning and kept going until about five at night. That takes a lot of concentration. It’s not like my powers of patience and concentration have gone away.

I also have plenty of patience for TV shows. I can put on a TV show and watch it for however long it is. Though without commercials TV shows are usually only 20 minutes or 40 minutes long. That’s considerably shorter than a two hour movie. I don’t binge watch TV either. I like to take time between episodes and give them some space. Normally I watch TV at night. I go to bed at 11PM so from about 9 until 11 I kick back and watch some shows. It helps me wind down.

The only time I’ve binge watched anything recently was when I was sick. I had a flu, sinus infection, cold, or some such. I had a fever and head congestion. What it lacked in severity it made up for in duration. I was sick for nearly two weeks and it lingered after that a bit too. The first week I had no concentration. I couldn’t watch anything because I couldn’t pay attention. That finally wore off in the second week and I had the TV back on.

One Saturday when I could concentrate a little I had the TV on all day. I binge watched the new Netflix zombie show “Black Summer.” Or at least what counts as binge watching for a sick person. What I liked about the show was that it didn’t demand I pay that close of attention to it. I could sit back, rest, watch the show, or not watch the show as my concentration waned. I had no expectations of the show except that it help me pass the time as I got better. It wasn’t a great show so I’m not sure if I would have watched all the episodes if I was well but since I was sick they hit the spot. It just kind of pleasantly passed by as I sat there with no energy.

I don’t go to the movies anymore either. I never went to them very much, maybe I went to six moxies a year in my heyday, but now I don’t go at all. I don’t miss them either. A lot of people like to go to the movies because they like the experience of it. The popcorn, sodas, big screen, and watching the movie with an audience. None of that ever appealed to me. I’d rather hang out and talk to my friends than go to a movie and have to sit there and be quiet for two hours. The movie always seemed to interrupt my good time.

A couple of days ago I decided I wanted to watch John Wick Chapter 2 for a second time. The first time I watched it I sat through it from beginning to end one night but not this time. I watched in in what I call “Old man style.” I watched it twenty minutes at a time. I enjoyed the movie and though it was a lot of fun but sitting there and watching it for two hours wasn’t something I wanted to do. That was too long. It took a couple of days to get through. I’d take a break from working on my big ink drawing and watch for a few minutes. I even watched it on my iPad a couple of times instead of my big TV. Sometimes it’s fun to hold the movie in my hands with headphones blaring in my ears. That’s a way different experience from being in the theatre.

The closest I come to binge watching a TV show is when I’m rewatching a sitcom. Right now I’m doing that with the show “Superstore.” I’ll watch an episode at lunch time, one at diner time, and maybe one more at night. That’s three episodes a day but at only about 20 minutes an episode they go fast. Of course them I might not watch any for a few days so it’s a slow motion binge. If it’s a forty minute TV show then one show a day is enough for me. I’m not sure what 40 minute show I’ve rewatched lately. It seems that comedies always get the rewatch with me.

Back in the days when I used to have cable TV and movie channels I would sometimes watch a movie a little bit at a time. A channel would play a movie over and over at different times the day so if I were to turn on the TV at any given time and see a movie I liked I’d watch it for a little while. Maybe I turned it on midway through and a good scene was coming up so I’d sit there and wait for the scene. But more often I’d watch a movie from start to finish when I got the chance.

The longest things I have on these days are podcasts. Though I often watch them on YouTube and they have video components I’m really just listening to them. I put them on as I work and they pass the time. I’ve had a bunch of true crime ones on lately but I also listen to a lot of comic book ones. They can be anywhere from five minutes to over an hour but almost none of them are two hours long. These days that seems to be an unreasonable amount of time for me to sit still.

“Have I wanted my time?” That’s a serious question that I sometimes ask myself while working on, or after working on, a piece of art. Of course it’s a question one can ask one’s self in many different parts of life but I’m only contemplating it in this art context right now. Though it’s not something I ask myself often. I’ve been making art for a long time and generally I know what I’m doing. But sometimes, usually when I’m trying something new, I don’t have as much confidence in a piece turning out like I want it to. That makes sense. If I’ve never quite done something before how do I know if it’ll turn out right? It’s always a risk to try something new but without it stagnation can set in.

I recently wrote about the sci-fi fantasy landscapes that I was working on. They were mostly five by seven inch pieces except for the two of them that were nine by twelve inches. Those two were the biggest ones I had ever done in that style. So of course I got it in my head to go even bigger with them. For a lot of last winter I had been working on black and white drawings that were on 22×30 inch watercolor paper. Those are pretty big and I thought I could blow my landscape drawings up to that size. Then I sat on the idea for a month. That’s how these things go.

I draw the five by seven inch drawings in ink. I don’t drawing pencil lines first. I grab my busted brush, dip it in ink, and have at it. They’re small drawings so I can compose them fairly quickly and even if I mess up I can start a new one without much thought to losing one. They’re low risk. I can also play around with the compositions as I do more of them. After the ink I use some watercolor on them to give them a hint of color. Not a ton of color. I’m not going for full illustrative color. I just want some subtle suggestions of color. The black ink carries most of the drawing.

For the 22×30 inch drawing I knew I had to figure out the composition before hand. I didn’t want to be drawing on such a big piece of paper without mapping a few things out first. Especially since I would be using the same busted brush as on the small paper. The brush was a lot smaller compared to the big piece of paper so I wouldn’t be able to lay out the composition with a few flicks of the wrist. Instead I got my big and chunky General’s sketching pencil to draw with.

I also set down all of the small landscape drawings on my drawing table to look at (the big paper was on my easel). That way I could pick and choose elements from the small drawings to use in the big one. I liked a certain building in one, the way the horizon line sat on the paper in another, and a background in yet another. I didn’t want to have to make everything up from scratch for such a big drawing. I loosely laid out my composition in about half an hour and was ready to go with the brush after that.

I started working on the big domed building in the center of the drawing and worked out from there. I think I worked on the ground after that and then all of the small buildings in the background. It’s a simple composition. The drawing is really all about the brush technique. It’s about building architectural shapes with lots of fuzzy lines. The busted brush is an old watercolor brush that can no longer come to a single point like it’s supposed to. Instead five or six points shoot off it and every time I go to draw a line I draw three to six of them instead. The uncontrollability is part of the technique.

After I finished drawing it all in black I decided to put in some color too. I was really undecided about color before this point. I had only added color to one of my previous big drawings and I wasn’t happy with how it came out. I thought the black and white ones were better. But I decided on color and laid in a sky first. After that I added color to the buildings and the ground. It’s simple color. There is not a lot to it but it gets the job done.

I was questioning myself through this whole process. Did I really like it? Would it turn out well? Was I wasting my time? This drawing took me all of Sunday to do and at a few points I really did think I was wasting my time. I hate that feeling. There is only so much time and wasting it doing bad art is not a good way to spend it.

After I painted in the color I went back in with more black ink too. Since I was putting the color right over the black ink the black got a little dull. So I went in and reapplied some more ink. It was then that I sat back and thought to myself, “This needs more.” So I added more background buildings and more stuff onto the big building. Originally it only had a cap on top and not this other things shooting off the side of the dome. I liked it better with a little bit more intricacy to the big building.

That pretty much finished off the piece but I still wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. It was new and weird and I didn’t know if I was successful or not. So I finished for the night and decided not to look at it anymore. The next morning I had to commute into the city and do some teaching so I didn’t look at it much that morning either. Though I still wondered if I wasted my time. After being gone all day I got home around 5:30 PM. As I was putting my bag down and taking the stuff out of it I glanced over after not thinking about the drawing all day and liked it. I though to myself, “I didn’t waste my time.” And that was a nice thought.

I’m coming off two weeks of being sick with a cold, sinus infection, or whatever the heck it was that I had. I couldn’t get any kind of artwork done for ten days in a row. Nothing. Well, I did manage to fill up a couple of pages in my ink book on two of my Monday commutes but that was it. I had no energy and couldn’t get anything done.

After that long layoff the first thing I tried to do was get a 6×9 inch pencil drawing done. I felt good in the morning so I decided to get going and pulled out a blue line drawing I had ready to pencil over. I lasted about an hour before I needed a nap. That kind of took me by surprise. Eventually I finished the drawing but it took me from 8AM until about 3 PM to do it. With a lot of rest in there too. That’s probably about three times longer than if I was well.

The next day I fared a little bit better with another pencil drawing. It was a much more complicated drawing but I didn’t need a nap an hour into it. It still took me longer to do than normal. Not only was I working slower but I needed to sit down and rest more often than normal. That was the story of my cold. I needed a lot of rest.

On day three of my getting back to work I finally got a bit more ambitious and to to work inking one of my faux comic book covers. It was “Dreams of Things” #71. I ink these covers in a couple of inking styles that I have developed and this one was done in my rough side of the brush technique. For years and years I had one basic inking technique. I’d dip my brush in ink and then draw a line with it that went from thick to thin in some proportion. I can make a really pretty line in ink and that’s what I did to build up an image.

For drawing straight lines I use a pen, such as a technical pen or marker, and draw it along the side of a straight edge, French curve, or circle template. That way I can make perfect straight lines to go along with my pretty thick to thin brush strokes. Besides adding various textures to things if they were called for that’s how I inked things for a long time.

A few years ago I stated working with my old inking brushes that were so battered and beat up that they could no longer make a pretty thick to thin line. That’s when I developed my busted brush technique along with my side of the brush technique. With “Dreams of Things” #71 I decided to go with my side of the brush technique. It’s a technique where none of the straight edges are drawn with an even or thick to thin line. I use the side of the brush to draw a rough textured line.

For whatever reason I didn’t have the energy to make things pretty on this third day of trying to get things done. I wanted to keep the drawing rough. That must have been the state of my mind. I worked on the main figure most of the day and built it up slowly over time. With lots of rest in there. I actually had the hardest time with the buildings in the background where I used a straight edge and marker. There wasn’t even much to them but they took way more of my concentration than I thought they should. Maybe the day was getting too long by then.

On the fourth day of trying to get things done I still wanted to keep things rough. I decided to make a couple of my 5×7 inch landscapes with my busted brush technique. I first drew the landscape and buildings in ink with my busted brush and then add some watercolors to that. I always think I should be able to get them done quickly but then they always take more time than I expect. That day was no exception.

The odd thing was that the next day I worked on “Dreams of Things” #72 almost exclusively with straight edges, French curves, templates, and a marker. No busted brush and no side of the brush technique. It’s weird how some days I have no patience for that way of working and other days it’s all I have the patience for. I grabbed my straight edge and made one line at a time. I didn’t even think a whole lot about it. One line just lead me to the next in a mechanical process. Once again I needed a lot more rest than usual but every time I got back to it I was ready to make another technical line. All the lines I couldn’t make the day before.

After finishing eighty percent of the drawing that way all that was left was some pretty thick to thin brush work. I was on top of it and I got that done easily. It was amazing to me how one day I could get things done with the side of the brush and the next it was my pretty line and neither could be done if the days were switched. You would think that I would have any of my techniques at my disposal at any time but it doesn’t always work out that way.

The one thing I knew I couldn’t get done was marker coloring one of my faux covers. I had a few of them ready to go and I contemplated doing one but I couldn’t bring myself to. All those colors and all those markers seemed too complicated. I don’t know why since I’ve done plenty of them before but my stuffy head wasn’t up to the task. The water color in the landscapes that I did was a simple task compared to a faux cover. Simple is how I had to make things this week. I can’t wait for my head to finally clear.

I was thinking of things to make videos about earlier this week and I decided to pull an old Overstreet comic book price guide out of the closet. It came out in 1980 and it’s the tenth edition of the Overstreet guide. It was the first comic book price dude I ever bought and I was thirteen or fourteen years old when I first got it. I haven’t made a video about it (at least not yet) so I thought I’d write a little something.

First off it’s got an Alex Schomburg cover. This may have been my first exposure to him and I wasn’t impressed. It’s a World War Two cover featuring Captain America, the Human Torch, and Namor fighting Nazis. I remember it looking very old fashioned to me and now as I look at the cover it’s done in a weird style. Some of it is traditional line art with color inside the line and some of it (Namor) is painted with flesh tone lines. There is an awkwardness to it. I have long since found plenty of great Schomburg’s Golden Age covers from the 1940s to the 1950s. His covers are some of my favorites but not this one.

I can remember when I first bought this book I liked it not so much as a price guide, since I wasn’t buying a ton of old comics, but as a history book. It has all sorts of information on comics. For example I randomly opened a page and there is a listing for and old Marvel comic “Hedy Divine Comics.” It immediately tells us that it was formerly “USA” number 17 and titled “Hedy of Hollywood” from number 36 on. Number 22 came out in 1947 and number 50 in September of 1952. Then there is a note that says “18-21 exist?” Even the Overstreet guide did’t know everything about these obscure old comics.

The listing goes on further to tell us what issues had art with the more popular and famous artists in them. There are issues with Basil Wolverton and and some with Harvey Kurtzman art. I barely knew who those two guys were back then but now I knew some issues they drew. It was fascinating to me that I could open up to any page and learn something about comics that were made before I was born and knew nothing about.

Beside the price guide the book also has articles about comics. The first article is about grading comics and storing them. It has lots of stuff about bags, boards, and taking care of you comics. Serious stuff to a thirteen year old. That is followed by a 1979 market report. I had never seen anything like that before and was fascinated. It was all about a whole bunch of old comics that I had never heard of and that they were selling for record prices.

I got to see some old Schomburg cover printed about three inches tall in section called “Timelys – The Top Six” and “More Timelys” They had Sub-Mariner, Captain America, and the Human Torch comics in that section. Those were really cool to see. There was no internet and stuff like that was rarely reprinted back then so the price guide was the only place to see it. There is also a cover section in the back featuring random old comics from all sorts of publishers. That was also great. Where else was I ever going to see the bikini clad jungle woman who starred in “Zoot Comics?”

The book also has yellow pages in them. Ads that are actually on yellow paper. Ads for stores, ads for conventions, and a lot of ads for people buying and selling comics. I remember liking these ads because they made me feel connected to a larger comic book collecting community. There were people out there who liked comics as much as I did. Plus a lot of the ads had some nice art in them. There a few pieces by well known comic book artists that must have been commissioned by whoever was placing the ad.

Some of the ads even come with lists. Lists of prices of comics being sold and lists of prices for comics being bought. I think the buying lists were themes interesting to me fo how low the prices were. One ad says that he buys comics for 25% of the value listed in this guide. That taught me all I needed to know about selling comics. They probably were worth a lot less than anyone thought they were. With one hand the price guide giveth and with the other hand it taketh away.

Somewhere in the middle of the book is another article called “The Chronology of the American Comic Book.” That sounds pretty cool and it hits the highlights in only a few pages. But the one I’m really going to have to go back and reread is a 25 page article on the history of Marvel Comics. I don’t remember it at all but I must have read it a few times as a kid. As a fan of both history and comics this one was really up my alley.

And of course one of the fun things to do with old price guides is look up how cheap certain comics were back in the day. For example you could get a copy of the first appearance of Wolverine in “The Incredible Hulk” #181 for a mer $3.75. If you had the big bucks a copy of the first appearance of Superman, Action Comics #1, could be had for $9,800. Expect to pay over a million for that book today. And how much is the first appearance of Spider-Man in “Amazing Fantasy” #15 you ask? Well, that would be $900. It all sounds so cheap now but only if you have a time machine. Few people had ten grand lying around to get a copy of Action Comics #1.

Well, as any comic fan knows, we could sit around all day looking up nostalgia prices so I’ll cut it off here. Maybe someday I’ll make a video but until them writing will have to suffice.