I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics plus a hardcover.
Check them all out here:
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Habit is a funny thing. I always try to make it work for me but you never know. This week I was making it work for me in order to get some stuff done but it was a mystery as to why I couldn’t get things done before then. Or at least the drawings I got done this week. My large marker drawings. It was back in September that I made a bunch of my 20×28 inch marker drawings. By a bunch I mean four of them. Being that they each take a day to two to make that’s a bunch of time and the strange thing is that after I spend so much time on one thing I start to think it would be time better spent on some other thing. So it was about a two and a half week period in which I got those four drawing done and then I moved on. The odd thing is that between the beginning of October and now, the end of January, I wanted to do some more but couldn’t. It just didn’t happen and I don’t know why. It’s not like I was doing nothing. I was working on other types of art. But not the large marker drawings.
When I say that it takes a day or two to make one of these drawings that doesn’t count the time it takes to make the initial drawing. That can be fast or slow but it takes a little time. I have to dig through my sketch books, find a drawing I want to work with, and then draw it at a 6×9 or 9×12 inch size. After that is done I’m ready to make a big drawing. It was back in December I got it in my head to make some more large marker drawing and so made up a bunch of smaller drawings. About half a dozen 6×9 inch ones and one 9×12 inch one. Then they sat there. I’ll often work up more drawings than I’ll ever make into large 20×28 inch drawings because often all I fell like doing is making small drawings. I can work with a lot of images in a short amount of time. Sometimes all the ambition I have is to work on a small drawing.
This week I decided to make a large marker drawing. I grabbed the largest of my preliminary drawings, the 9×12 inch one named “Unboxing Truth”, and decided to go with that one. It was the most complex of the drawings featuring a large figure, two small figures, a large face, a big building like structure, and a few more smaller buildings. I thought it was a decent image and I especially liked the large female figure. I scanned in the drawing, blew it up to the size it was going to be, and then printed it out on four sheets of 11×17 inch paper that I taped together. I taped the over-sized print out onto my drawing paper and placed graphite paper in between then. Then I took a pencil and drew over the lines on the print out. This transfers the line to the drawing paper by way of graphite. It makes for a crude drawing on the large paper but that’s all I need to get started.
This one was a long one. Over the next two days I used my markers, straight edges, and various curves and templates to make my drawing. I wan’t happy with it most of the time. Whenever I make one of these large drawings I always add things that weren’t in the preliminary drawing. Since the final drawing is so much bigger then the preliminary one there is a lot of room to add things and I do. Scale changes a drawing and I have to change along with it. Still, even after adding things I still wasn’t thrilled with it. I managed to make it better and find some textures that pulled it all together for me but in the end I was still a bit dissatisfied.
In the end I decided it wasn’t the drawing that I didn’t like but it was the fact that I wanted to do a different drawing. I wanted something in a bigger scale and less illustrative and even more graphic. After figuring that out I went to bed. The next day I woke up and got a couple of things done for that day that needed doing. I did all of them and then just before lunch was contemplating what to do with the rest of my day. I decided to make another marker drawing but this time with an image that I wanted to work with. I grabbed my 6×9 inch drawings and liked the one called “Grand Facade”. It was what I was looking for. A large and very black and white graphically drawn. I scanned it in and printed it out (with some annoying trouble from my inkjet printer that day) and transferred it over to my large sheet of paper.
I have to say I enjoyed working on “Grand Facade” much more than “Unboxing Truth”. So much so that I just kept working on it hour after hour until I finished it that night. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t stay up late or anything. That’s not my habit. But I did work on it from about 11 AM until about 9 PM with few breaks. I don’t usually like to work that much especially coming off quite a few long days in a row but I was on such a roll that I kept going. It was the drawing I wanted to be doing for the last two days squeezed into today. In the end I really liked the drawing. And it even made me like the first drawing better.
I paid a price for it though. The next day I was exhausted. I could barely move or get anything done. I was in a miserable state. I absolutely hate getting that way and therefor usually pace myself but I’m also not often on a roll such as I was the day before. It was fun. I got it done. But I still don’t know why it took me from the beginning of October to the end of January to get a large marker drawing going. Habits are weird.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got twelve new comics plus a TPB.
Check them all out here:
Combining things. That’s what I’ve been doing this week. I’ve been combining my monster face drawings with my “On the Rough” drawings to make “Monster a Day” drawings. Or taking bits for each. It all kinda blurs together. Y’see about a month ago I bought some new colored acrylic ink. That’s something I’ve never used very much. I have a small bottle of light blue acrylic ink that I’ve messed with a little but not often. I even think it’s a bit separated and dried out. Ink shouldn’t be chunky.
With my monster faces I use black India ink and colored markers. With my “On the Rough” drawings I use black ink and either some color pigmented inks or watercolor. I use the inks if I want bright color and the watercolor for more muted palette. The new acrylic inks are similar to both of my previous choices but have a bit more of a pigment load. That makes them more opaque. But not gouache opaque.
The first problem I had with the new inks, well maybe the only problem, was that I bought six once bottles of them. Most ink bottles that I work with and out of are one or two ounces. That’s small enough to keep on the desk, dip into, and not spill. I’ve got no place to keep and work out of a six ounce bottle let alone three of them. And they’re tall rather than wide. That makes for spilling. Rubbermaid to the rescue. I got these four ounce square-ish containers that are also airtight. I could drop an ounce or two of ink in them, work out of them easily with a brush, and then put them away so they won’t dry out. It took me a few weeks of the new ink bottles sitting around to figure that out though. In my defense I was busy with other things.
At first I just wanted to use the inks for my “On the Rough” drawings. I was just gonna make a few more. But for some reason I decided that I wanted to draw four monsters. So I grabbed four sheets of my rough five by seven inch watercolor paper, my old and battered brush that I use for dry brushing, and started on the monsters. I do all four of the black ink drawings before starting the color.
When using watercolor I have five colors pre-mixed and ready to go in larger Rubbermaid containers. When using the pigmented inks I have a set of twelve of them. In small bottles. Many more choices. With the new acrylic inks I only bought three colors. Red, yellow, and blue. The three primaries with which you can mix all the other colors. Except I don’t mix colors when I do these type drawings. At least not in a separate container.
The pigmented inks and watercolors are transparent color. That means I can layer them on top of each other to mix colors. I put down some blue, let it dry, put down some yellow, and then I’ve got green. I also sometimes put down some water on the paper and then paint so that I start with a real light layer of color. The water dilutes the paint. The first thing I noticed was that the new acrylic inks were very dense with pigment and color. They were not as transparent as what I was used to. It took a bit of trial and error but I eventually learned to put down a lot more water than I usually do. This worked but slowed the process down as all that water took time to dry. In then end it worked out okay. I like the drawings, They get a bit muddier with all that pigment than I’m used to but I got some nice color out of them. Plus monsters are supposed to be dark.
After that I wanted to draw more monsters. But I didn’t want to use the six by nine inch paper and marker that I normally use. I wanted the rough five by seven watercolor paper and ink. But I didn’t want them in color either. Just black and white. Time to combine.
I’m an odd bird when it comes to making my art. Plus I’m methodical. That means method is very important to me. Method is how I get things done. Naming what I’m doing is part of the method and the distinction between things helps me get stuff done. So these new monster drawing couldn’t be “On the Rough” drawings. They also couldn’t be my other individually named monster face drawings. So they became “Monster a Day” drawings. The four I did in color even became that. They didn’t quite fit in with “On the Rough” so they became “Monster a Day” numbers one through four. They don’t quite fit in there either but oh, well.
I’ve even managed to get one a day done just like the name. I think I may have done a couple a day some days but I’ve got fourteen in total. They’re fun to do and I post them on my Instagram to show them off a little. I also found another way to use the new acrylic inks. I grabbed my red ink and used it just as I’d use the black ink to draw a monster face. That red ink is dense too. There was almost no difference between using the red and the black. But in the end the monster was too red. Too bright. So I went back in with my black ink right over top of the red. It was dense enough to cover the red when I needed it to but the dry brush technique let a lot of the red show though in the end. I like the way it came out and am going to have to try it with the blue and the yellow.
Meanwhile I even decided to make a video of me drawing one of the “Monster a Day” drawings. Most of my spontaneous live drawing videos are ten to fifteen minutes long and I thought I could get a monster drawing done in that about of time. I’m not even sure how long they usually take me but I bet it’s no more than half an hour on the outside. The red and black one probably took the longest since I basically drew it twice but the black went a lot faster than the red because there was already a drawing there. Turned out to be no problem getting a drawing done in about ten minutes. It wasn’t my best one but with this method of spontaneous drawing some of them are going to be better than others. Either way the video has some nice dry brushing sounds.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got six new comics.
Check them all out here:
What’s on my mind this week? How about my favorite TV shows where nothing ever happens. I’ve written about some of these shows before but thought I’d give them another look to see if anything has changed. This is a genre full of reality “Documentary” shows. When I’m by myself and working on my art I often like to put something on to keep me company. It can’t be something that compels me to watch it or I won’t get any work done. So usually it’s something I can mostly listen too. I’m a fan of history and a fan of documentaries so I put on a lot of those. But there seems to be fewer and fewer actual documentaries on and more and more of those supernatural or mystery documentary style reality shows. They’re not really documenting anything but whatever the hosts are doing in the show. I also call them “Good shows to nap to” and I have napped to them because I can fall asleep and not miss anything.
First on the list is “Finding Bigfoot”. They’re on season six with this show and they still haven’t found Bigfoot. That’ll tell you right there that there is nothing going on. Well not really nothing. The four hosts go out into the woods in various parts of the world and scream and howl in an attempt to find Bigfoot. There are three Bigfoot believers and one sceptic. I gotta figure that’s about the ration you’d need to go hunting for Bigfoot because any more skeptics on the team and they probably wouldn’t even bother. I laugh at the show all the time when they tell us all about “Typical Bigfoot behavior”. They can’t even find one but they know all about its behavior. Cracks me up every time. At least “Finding Bigfoot” is fairly entertaining. They’re mostly out in the woods having a good time.
Next up is “Curse of Oak Island”. This one is in its second season and I think it has ten or so episodes a season. Oak Island is home of “The Money Pit”. That’s a place where supposedly someone at some time in the past buried a secret treasure. It’s the Arc of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the Crown Jewels of Scotland, Shakespeare’s secret manuscripts, or your basic pirate’s treasure. It could be anything. The problem is the no one has ever found treasure on Oak Island. The whole thing is probably just a myth but that hasn’t stopped people from digging there. Lots of people over the last hundred years have dug there to no avail. So much of the island has been dug up that no one is even sure where the original spot the treasure was supposed to be is. This show is all about the current people who are digging on the island. So far after twenty episodes or so they have found no treasure. They have found a couple of small things like an old Spanish coin of the wrong age (there have been people on the island for hundreds of years) and some old wood but it had lead them no where. I think they’d have more fun looking for Bigfoot.
“America Unearthed” in another of my background shows. This one can occasionally have some actual interesting history in it though. It stars a forensic geologist who travels around the USA looking for bits of history that have gone unreported. Y’know, the Knights Templar and such came to the US and know one really knows about it but they left evidence behind. They’re on season three with this one with about ten shows a season. Sometimes the show is interesting and sometimes ridiculous. It’s more evidence based than the first two shows but sometimes it goes out into speculation-ville and never comes back.
I’ve tried out a couple of new background TV shows recently and they’ve been a little lacking. The first is “Finding Giants”. It’s in it’s first season and is all about a couple of brothers who have decided to hunt down the legends of giants and prove they are real. Yes, they believe that a race of really big humans existed in the US and there is evidence of them. They track down a bunch of old newspaper articles and go to the places they were written about. That is a really thin premise. There is not much going on in this show at all so it’s mostly the same thing over and over. Hey, let’s track down this lead. Wait we found nothing. Oh well.
There was another show that I had on in the background for a bunch of episodes but it was too insipid for my taste. I can’t even remember its name since I don’t have any of the episodes hanging around. It was “Hidden History” or some such. There are a lot of shows with similar names so who knows which one it was. But it was one of those kinds that deals with three or four different mystery stories in an hour. At least the shows I mentioned have to construct some kind of story for their hour but this one just hits the highlights of “The Shroud of Turin”, “The Holy Grail”, or some other mystery. It’s the fluffiest of the fluff shows and even as background made me turn it off.
One of the type of shows that I don’t like and never have on in the background are those ghost hunting shows. They always turned me off and I only recently was able to suss out why. I blame it on bad storytelling. There are two different type of ghost hunting shows. Type one has a person sitting there and telling you their ghost story that is reenacted by the show. Problem is that usually the person is just an average person and not a good storyteller. So they’re telling you a boring story and then showing it to you. Yawn. The other type is ghost hunters going into some old building late at night and filming dust particles. At least with “Finding Bigfoot” you get nice locations. But with ghost hunting the locations are all the same. Dark rooms.
So there are some of this years background shows for you. Oh yeah, and I’m still watching a ton of YouTube comic book haul videos. Those are always good.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eleven new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’ve written before about my reading habits but it seems I’ve developed a new one that’s been working for me. At least where it comes to the many collected editions of comic books that I have on my shelves. For a few years there, about 2008-2011, I was mainly buying collected editions rather than monthly comics. There weren’t enough monthly comics that I was interested in. But then I started searching out more monthlies and Image Comics in particular started publishing a lot more comics I was interested in. So for the last three years it’s been mostly single issues for me. That’s good because I like single issues.
As much as I like a well made hard cover book of comics I prefer reading my comics monthly. I’m not much of a binge consumer of anything. I don’t sit down and watch many episodes of TV shows or movies in a row. I prefer one episode a night if I have a lot of one particular show to watch. Binging gets boring for me. I can’t sit still that long. I also like the wait between episodes and I enjoy variety. So I prefer having a stack of ten different comics to read rather than ten issues of one comic.
I’ve got my monthly comics reading habit down pat now. I’ve got it to the point where I read all my new comics twice. I’ve found the key to that is to leave them out and available for a few weeks rather than file them away. So I buy them, put them on the end table next to my reading chair, read one, and then put the read copy on top of my inkjet printer. That way the already read copies are still in front of me. I can easily glance at them, thumb through them, or give them a second read before filing them away. Being on top of my printer they’re also kind of in the way which encourages me to read them again in a timely manner. It’s a weird little habit but it works. I get more enjoyment out of my comics reading them twice. Plus a lot of modern comics read really fast so it’s not much trouble to read them again. But that leaves my collected editions out of the loop.
As I wrote before I don’t buy a ton of collected editions anymore but I still get some of them. I have a wish list of stuff on Amazon that my family buys off of at Christmas and my birthday so I get them for presents. Plus I often see good deals online and pick up a book or two here and there or want to try out something new from my local comic shop. The problem is that I wasn’t always reading them after I got them.
Back when I was mostly buying collections my reading habits were simple. Pick out a collection to read and then keep it out until I read it. Repeat. The problem I ran into with that is many of the collections I bought really weren’t meant to be binge read. And I don’t like binge reading anyway. A lot of the collections I bought were of old genre comics. I got a lot of the Atlas Era Marvel Masterworks books for example. I like them a lot and find them interesting but they are mostly made up of eight page stories from the 1950s. It’s tough to read thirty or forty such stories on the same subject in a row. They just weren’t made to be read like that. So I just sort of stopped reading them. I was still buying some of them but they languished as I read my now healthy supply of monthly comics.
Cut to this Christmas. I got a few new collections as presents plus the last week of the year is a slow one for new comics. I read all my monthly comics and even read them all twice and cleared them off the top of my printer. So I grabbed one of my new collected editions and gave it a read. As I wrote before I’m not a binge reader so I only read one issue of “Glory: The Complete Saga” and then put it down. Later on I found myself wanting to read a comic but not “Glory” so I ended up reading nothing. After all “Glory” was the one that was out to be read.
After a couple of times of that I decided I needed a new reading habit. I had already read another book I had received for Christmas called “Shoplifter” but that was a graphic novel and not a collection. And it was short so that was not a problem. But I also had a pile of collections sitting on a footstool nearby. My Christmas books plus a few things I purchased recently and left out to read. Turns out I never read them and they just got more stuff stacked on them.
Next time I wanted something to read I grabbed a “Serenity” collected edition, which had been sitting around for a month, and read an issue from that. After that I grabbed a collection of Richard Corben “Creepy” stories which had been sitting around for two years. After that “Winterworld” which I bought a few weeks ago.
I stack all these collected editions in a new place. On my drafting chair. I have to find a better place but for now the chair is okay. It’s in my line of sight and I don’t sit on it a ton since I stand and work. I can easily grab a book off it to read. I finished up “Glory” and “Serenity” pretty quickly and have since added “Starstruck” and “Starman: Omnibus Volume 6” to the pile. Those are both books that have been on my shelf unread since 2011. That’s a crazy amount of time to not read a book but they are both huge volumes with three and five hundred pages in them and I was never in the mood to read ten issues of “Starman” in a row. Now I don’t have to.
With this new habit I’m enjoying reading my collected editions again. I’m especially liking the Richard Corben “Creepy” stories because this is more how they were meant to be read. Since there was usually one Corben drawn short story every monthly issue or so of “Creepy” they weren’t supposed to be read ten stories in a sitting. A sameness crept into them when I tried reading them that way and it was tough to pay attention to the details of any one story. Now that I’ve been reading them a story or two at a time and then moving on to something different I appreciate the Corben stories much more. They get my full concentration. I like when I can make my habits work for me and not against me.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got seven new comics.
Check them all out here: