Radiant Comics

Sometimes I get tired of the process. That’s my epiphany of the week but I’m pretty sure I’ve confronted the thought before. I just forget it as I get un-tired of the process or discover a new one. I also switch between a few different artistic mediums to keep from getting tired of one process or another but that doesn’t always work. Specifically I’m writing about my painting process today.

My usual painting process it make small ink drawings in my sketchbook, pick out one of these drawing, turn the small drawing into a more finished working drawing, make a color sketch of the drawing, transfer the drawing to canvas, and follow the color sketch to make the painting. I’ve made lots and lots of painting that way. I’ve got it down. But I haven’t made many in the last half a year or so. I’ve been working on other things.

About a month ago I even bought some new 18×24 in canvases. I only had one blank one left so I bought another half dozen to give myself something to jump start my process. I started a new painting and made it all the way through my process to the part where I transfer the drawing onto the canvas. Then I stopped. And the painting has sat there unfinished ever since then. I lost interest in it and didn’t know why.

Another size that I paint at is 8×10 inches. I started doing that about ten years ago just so I could work with a wider variety of images. Though they are smaller I can get more paintings done in the same amount of time as a large one. The process is the same for the small ones except for one thing. I usually do four small ones at the same time. It’s faster that way. I can se aside the one I was just working on to let it dry as I work on another. And of course I have to do four times the sketches and four times the color drawings.

I think it was the beginning of 2014 that I bought about two dozen 8×10 blank canvases. I’ve probably only used about four of them since then. I was never in the mood to work on any paintings of that type. I wanted to do some this week or work on the 18×24 one that I had in process but I couldn’t. I even made six new drawings for some new 8×10 canvases and though I liked the drawings I had no interest in making paintings out of them. Why? I’m not sure except that I think I’ve grown tired of the process.

This week I got an 8×10 painting done. All because I changed the process. I skipped most of it. I decided to not work from any previous sketches or drawings and draw something new right on the canvas. I used to draw straight on the canvas back in my student days. They were larger canvases back then. About four feet by three feet. I would usually have a figure in the painting that was drawn from either a live model or me in the mirror and then I would add in a whole bunch of other strange little elements. After the drawing was done the painting would begin.

Drawing on canvas isn’t an easy thing. Canvas is a rough surface. It’s actually canvas with gesso on it. Gesso is a white paint that seals the surface of the canvas. You can put layer after layer of gesso on canvas and then sand it down until it’s smooth but usually that’s only done by artists looking for a smooth portrait technique. For the rest of us the roughness of the canvas makes for a good surface for holding the paint. But that also makes for a tough surface to draw on.

Most of the time I draw with a soft pencil. I have a light touch and a hard pencil will make me bear down too much and gouge the paper. A soft pencil leaves a darker line that is also harder to erase. On canvas that line is really tough to erase. So I use my soft pencil and try not to get the lines too dark but that’s not easy. The rough canvas eats at the pencil like sandpaper. The graphite can really build up. Using an eraser can just spread the graphite around rather than erasing it.

I can remember one fellow classmate back in my college days particularly admiring my drawings on canvas because it’s a type of drawing that you never get to see. Because I was figuring out the drawing as I was going alone there was a lot of erasing to be done (students us the eraser a lot) and since nothing was erased very well it left a lot of ghosts in the drawing. It was like a little time machine. You could see the way I changed an arm or a leg three different times. You could track the way I moved one element or another around until I found the right spot. And then a couple of things might be in the correct place on the first try. I hadn’t thought about that before my fellow student pointed it out to me. He even suggested making a series of drawings on canvas but I never got around to it. I was learning to finish things after all.

So that’s what I did with the new 8×10 inch painting. I said to heck with my process, pulled a blank canvas off my shelf, and just drew straight on it. About an hour later I had the image of a half masked face that I could work with. I broke out my acrylics, some of which were in bad shape from neglect, and painted. No color sketches either. I played it by eye. It took me all day to finish the painting which isn’t so bad since I usually get four paintings done in three to four days. This morning as I was stumbling around trying to figure out what to do with an hour of free time I pulled another 8×10 canvas out and drew on it. I’ve got a drawing ready to go on it now and can’t wait to get back to it. That’s a much better process.

One final odd thing about process. The canvases I buy come shrink wrapped in plastic. The first one I grabbed was already unwrapped and there was some yellow paint or ink that I had put on it sometime before. I have no memory of it. I’m guessing that sometime this year I was trying to change my process and see how a thin layer of yellow in a gradient would look. Obviously I didn’t like it and put it back on the shelf. I’m glad this latest change in process worked better for me.

I figure it was time again to pull a random painting off my shelf and have a look at it. This one one of my eight by ten inch acrylic on canvas paintings. I don’t think I’ve made one of these in a while. I have a bunch of blank canvases that size so I’ll have to get some more done in the new year. Meanwhile this one has the date on it of October 3, 2006. Being that it was done that long ago I don’t remember it specifically. After I do these I scan them in, put the originals in a large envelope to keep the dust off it, and then put them on a shelf. I seem to remember this as a scan more than I remember the actual physical painting. That’s too bad because the physical painting is much more interesting than a scan of it.

The first thing I notice about this painting is how crisp, dark, and sharp the black line is on it. Maybe that’s because I’ve used a violet line in my larger acrylic paintings of recent years but the black line really jumped out at me. I think this painting is very much about the black line. Often my paintings are about shape and color and the line takes a back seat. But here it doesn’t. I think that has to do with the sweeping nature of the lines and how they squeeze the shape and color. Take the orange hair across the top of the person’s head for example. That orange is one of the two brightest colors in the painting (yellow being the other) and should stand out and move forward in space. But it doesn’t because the thin shape of it is corralled and knocked back by the strong black line. The black line is the positive shape that the colors sit behind. The black line was obviously the last thing painted as it is so strong.

The colors is this painting look a bit different than I normally use. I don’t usually use brown as a dominant color but here I do. It’s a deep and strong brown too. I think I use lighter browns more often. The depth the brown is really helped by the brightness of the orange around it. The brown picks up a little of the reflected light of the orange and that makes the brown a bit more lively than it would be otherwise. I really like the way the orange seems to flow like air around the solid anchor of the deep brown. This is also helped by the shape of the orange going from thin and referencing a hair band into some flowing waves that reference hair blowing in the wind. The three blocks of orange on the top of the painting connect the top to the bottom visually even if there is no subject in common. They also make a vertical gesture of color up the right side making that the side the painting is weighted to.

When I make these paintings I tend to mix a bunch of a color and then store that color in a plastic cubby. Or sometimes I use the color straight from the tube of paint. But straight or mixed my color palate tends to change over time. I either run out of the particular color that I mixed or get some new tubes of new colors. I’m not really picky about the paints I buy. I buy different brands and always want to try out new colors. So a certain shade of blue ends up in a bunch of my paintings for a while and then disappears to be replaced by s different blue. I say that because I like that purple I used but don’t remember what it is. It’s better than a lot of the purples I’ve used. I find purples to be the most problematic of all the colors. It can tend toward red or tend toward blue so much that it’s tough to find a purple that says what I want it to. This one seems to be a nice one. It looks like it has a bit of white in it and therefor tends towards violet but it’s staying out of the lilac zone. I generally like lilac but it would be way too light to work in this painting.

I like the purple here because it created it’s own no-man’s land. If I had made it a lighter purple or even a blue it would scream out as “Sky”. It would push back in space and change the whole dynamic of the painting. Instead it sits in the mid-ground. It measures out at about a fifty percent grey and sits right in the middle of all the colors. The green and the red want to be darker than it an push the purple forward but black line and the purple won’t let it.

I also managed to use red and green together and not evoke Christmas. That’s because they’re not the dominant colors. The orange, brown, and purple own this painting and the red and green are just along for the ride. They make things livelier and move the eye around but they’re not the main show. The black like keeps the red and the green in their places and away from Christmas. The long swooping line that define the red and green on the top left allow for the black line to dominate better than if they were straight lines.

One last thing that I notice on this painting only after I notice all the other stuff it the small dots and dancing green lines. I often use such touches in my paintings but in this one they are more understated than in most of my paintings. They exist in their own gentle space. They are all single color dots that work in subtle color harmony with the other colors. The bright green swoops near the hair stand out the boldest of them but are paired with the bold orange of the hair and so seem a bit more calm than they might otherwise. As a matter of fact I find most of the color dots calming. I often use them the wake things up but here they sit back and mellow.

So there you go. An eight year old painting that I haven’t pulled off my shelf since I made it. Time does slip by.

After writing a blog just a few weeks ago about contemplating getting a new camera I settled on one that was not even on my list. Or even on my radar. That’s because it’s not actually a camera like the others I was looking at. It’s a smartphone. Except it’s not when I don’t have any phone service with it. I ended up buying an unlocked Amazon Fire phone.

First off I only have a dumb phone. Since I work from my home studio that has an old fashioned land line I don’t have a huge need for a cell phone. So I have a pay-as-you-go dumb phone that costs me a hundred and twenty five dollars a year. That’s fine for how much I use it. I don’t want the sixty dollar a month bill that comes with a smart phone. I wasn’t even considering getting one except then Amazon put their’s on sale.

Normally an Amazon 32GB unlocked Fire phone goes for $450. Unlocked means that it comes with no phone service and you have to arrange for your own if you want the phone part to work. Otherwise it has wifi capabilities and is basically an iPod touch. Since I didn’t want the phone part I might as well have spent the $450 on an iPod touch. But then Amazon put the phone on sale for $200 and that caught my eye. Especially since I’m an Amazon Prime member which costs $100 a year and the phone comes with a free year of Amazon Prime. Since I was going to renew my Prime membership anyway early next year that meant the price of the phone would be $100 for me. Not a bad deal I thought. Then Amazon raised the price back up to $450 before I pulled the trigger and I abandoned the whole idea. Of course a few days later they lowered the price down to $230 and I decided to get it. So I missed out on the $30 less price tag. Oh well…

I wantedt the Fire phone to use as a pocket camera that works well with wifi and the cloud and to use as a music player. So far I like the camera aspects of it but not the music player. I have an iPad 2 that I use all the time to edit and share photos on. I have quite a few photo editing apps and like to post stuff to Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook from it. The only problem is that the iPad 2 has a terrible camera. It’s only two megapixels or so. The camera actually has less resolution than the screen. That’s insane. So I’m always transferring photos from my camera to my computer to the iPad. That’s a bit of a pain and doesn’t encourage the spontaneity that’s usually comes with Instagram and sharing sites in general.

I’m not sure what the exact megapixel count is on the Fire phone but I think it was around eleven. In general it’s an okay but not great camera. It’s nowhere near as good as my other pocket camera the Canon S95 but it’s leagues ahead of my iPad 2’s camera. It’s easier to carry than the Canon and fires up and is ready to take pictures faster than the Canon. But I’ve really liked it because it works well with the cloud.

I like to post photos of my art work in progress to the various social sites. I like to edit those photos and access those sites on my iPad 2. I don’t want to bother doing that on the little screen of a smart phone. But I’ll take the pictures on the smart phone. The LCD screen on a smart phone is bigger than the LCD on my Canon. Or any of my digital cameras. I grab a drawing, aim the phone’s camera at it, snap a picture, and then as long as I’m on wifi the camera automatically upload the photos to the Amazon cloud. I can then turn in my iPad 2, fire up the Amazon cloud app, and view and download the photos to my iPad 2. It’s pretty darn seamless. I’ve posted a lot more spontaneous photos of my works in progress this week than before the Fire phone. That makes me happy.

Other than the photos I’ve found the way things work on the Fire phone pretty clumsy. Though I’m an Apple guy I’ve never been a huge fan of iTunes since the app is basically a kludge that’s jury rigged to do a lot of stuff it wasn’t originally intended to do. But trying to do all that stuff without a dedicated app is a nightmare. Trying to get music on to my phone is complicated and I haven’t even got it to work properly yet.

I’m a make-your-own-playlist guy. I have about forty playlists that are all about an hour and twenty minutes each that I listen to when I’m out. I’ve programed my own music so I don’t need a radio station to do it for me. I even took all the mp3s on my playlists, copied them, and changed the metadata so that the playlist name is now the album name. If I’m ever on a new computer I can drop my copies on it and my playlists are intact even without them being actual playlists. Not with Amazon.

To get my music onto the Fire phone I first have to upload it to the cloud. There is no music manager software on the Mac for Amazon so all I can do is chose my files and upload. So thats what I did. I chose my first playlist that I have set up as an album. But then as they are uploading Amazon’s software tries to recognize the songs and matches them with their version that doesn’t have my version’s metadata. So they’re not in my order anymore. Instead they’re random songs from Amazon’s library. Even the ones that it kept my metadata on it somehow messed up. My songs that all come from the same album now come from six different albums that have the exact same name. It’s crazy. But then it gets crazier.

I finally discovered that the Amazon Cloud music interface was better on my iPad 2 than on the Fire phone. I figured I’d try to reproduce my playlist by creating a new playlist in the Amazon Cloud and dropping the songs on it. Except now all my songs weren’t there. I had a playlist with twenty one songs on it but only nineteen songs were in the cloud. Using the search function brought up no results for the songs. I went back to my Mac to re-upload the songs but it said they were already uploaded. But where where they? Who knows? I still haven’t figured that part out yet.

I’m glad I got the Fire phone overall. It wasn’t too expensive and works really well as a small cloud connected camera. Maybe with a little more work I can get it to work as a music player too. Until then my first generation iPod touch isn’t retired.

It’s all about habit. That’s what I have to say this morning. Writing habit. Or lack there of. I’ve been trying to get some more of my “Message Tee” strips written lately and have not been meeting with much success. All because of habit I’m guessing.

I haven’t even been trying to get more “Message Tee” drawings made. My original plan for the comic was to make it less about the drawings and more about they sayings on their shirts. I was already making new strips six days a week and adding a seventh day was a bit daunting. So I decided to do fifty two drawings, one for each Saturday in a year, and then recolor and reuse the drawing over for the next year. That was in 2011. But then in 2012 I decided I wanted to do fifty two more drawings and have a hundred and four of them to rotate. The same happened in 2013. I finally ran out of steam in 2014 and didn’t do any new “Message Tee” drawings. No explanation. I just didn’t have it in me to make another fifty two drawings this year. But on the bright side I ended up with a hundred and fifty six drawings rather than my originally planned fifty two.

I also had a rather different way of writing this particular comic too. I wrote it while on nice summer walks. I’d grab a small notebook, go for a walk, and then stop every ten or twenty yards to write down an idea for a message. I could knock out ten or twenty ideas in a walk and over a month or so of time have enough ideas (I write at least twice as many as I need and then pick the ones I like best) for a year’s worth of “Message Tee” strips. The system worked well. Until it didn’t. This year, for some reason, I took fewer walks and didn’t feel like writing as I took them. Before I knew it fall came around and I had nothing written. Whoops.

My solution to this problem of having not written anything on my walks was to sit down (or stand up) and write some comics. That seemed pretty darn logical to me but then a strange thing happened. Nothing come out. It wasn’t writer’s block or anything. I still found things to write about on this blog plus wrote a “Four Talking Boxes” strip every day but I had nothing for “Message Tee”. I’d set aside some time but get no closer to writing anything. It was weird and I think it was all about habit. I had a completely different habit for writing “Message Tee” and my normal writing habits wouldn’t do. My solution was to change the habit altogether.

I managed to make it down to Manhattan a few times this summer to take street photos. I take a train to get there. Two trains. One from Nanuet to Secaucus Junction and another from SJ to Penn Station in Manhattan. That’s about an hour on the train plus time spent waiting for trains. This summer I spent that time reading a magazine. I saved my monthly issue of “The Sun” magazine for those trips and reading it took up about the whole of the getting there and back time. It was a nice little habit but this time I decided to switch it up and write.

I got my same little notebook (a Moleskine “The notebook for people with more money than sense”) that I used to take with me on walks and took it on the train. It was interesting writng on the train. First off my little short “Message Tee” messages take a different sort of writing than normal. Or at least a different sort on concentration. With something like this blog or one of my “Four Talking Boxes” strips I have to concentrate for an extended period. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes of concentration and then a few minutes break and then back to concentrating. Repeat for as long as needed. With the “Message Tee” comic I stare off into space/look out the window for anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes, come up with a saying, and write it down in my notebook. Writing in the notebook usually means rewriting too in that the form it first takes in my head usually changes as I try to make the wording just so.

Sometimes the ideas come fast and furious and sometimes it takes the full five minutes for me to write down something I’m not even happy with. I found that to be one of the keys for me to write “Message Tee”. I write down an idea even if I don’t like it just to get it out of the way. And who knows? I may find a way to make it work at some later date. I finished about half of the writing I needed to get done on that train trip so now I just have to get the other half done and I’ll be golden. I’ve already recolored the fifty two comics from 2011 and they’re all good to go once I get new messages on their shirts. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even draw some new ones next year.

Here is one final observation from my train ride that I’ve always taken for granted and never thought about until writing on the train. As I wrote before my process involves staring off into space and thinking (or trying to think) and as I do that I look around or out the window. When I walked and wrote I was always looking around at the scenery on my walk. I’d, of course, nod and say hello to any stranger that happened to pass me because that’s the polite thing to do out in the suburbs. Now here I was writing on the train where it was impolite to talk to a stranger or even look at them. I had to look around without looking at anybody. In Manhattan you pass a million people on the street and everybody has to ignore one and other. That’s nothing new and probably a good thing since you can’t say hello to a million people as you walk the streets but the contrast really struck me as I was trying to write. Now I have to find time to get the other half done.

I finally stared working in video a bit this year. I’ve been meaning to for ages and finally did thanks to YouTube and comic book haul videos. I know they’re not much but they’re an intro to the form. I also made a couple of four minute videos set to music this summer but they are much more time consuming to make. Plus they get far fewer views on YouTube so I’ll have to revisit what I do with those. I’ll have to find a way to make them more interesting for me and the viewer.

Being a gadget guy I’ve been thinking lately about what cameras I have to shoot with and if I need any new ones. My general philosophy has been to “Shoot with what you got”. I’ve seen too many people never do anything because they don’t have the perfect equipment. Y’know, as soon as they get this doodad or that gizmo they’ll get started and they never get those gizmos so they never start. Just use whatever you have even if it’s inferior to your ideal.

The first thing I shoot with is my iPad. That works well for my Comic Book Haul videos. I plop it on a tripod, point it at my easel, and put the comics I want to film on my easel. Works fine. The mic is good too. Or I should say that the mic is good when I’m right on top of it. Since I’m sitting behind the iPad and handling the comics that means the microphone in very close to my mouth and it picks up my voice well rather than the sound of the room.

The other camera that I use is my Canon S95. It’s a small camera that I put on a small tripod to record my ASMR drawing videos. I’m not talking during those videos and the camera mic does a nice job at picking up the sound of the pencil or pen on paper as I’m drawing. It’s only inches away from the paper so it better do a good job.

The problem I had was when I turned the camera on myself to talk for some heads-up comic book videos. First off I tried my laptop. It has the typical built-in iSight camera and everybody else on YouTube seems to use their laptop webcams to make videos fairly easily so I thought I would too. It didn’t work out so well. First off I have bad lighting for filming in my studio. I have a couple of glaringly bright fluorescent tubes on my ceiling. Great for working under but no so great for filming under. I knew that was going to be a problem and it was. But I moved a few things around and waited for some natural light and it was okay.

I tested out the video on the laptop and it looked alright but the sound wasn’t very good. The mic picked up the room sounds and my voice sounded weak and hollow. Pretty typical stuff for a laptop mic in a room. I muddled through and filmed about ten minutes of video when I noticed the spinning beach ball cursor that means things aren’t right. The video capture program had crashed and left me without any video. That made me abandon the laptop approach and go back to my iPad.

I have an iPad 2 that is getting a bit long in the tooth these days but it’s still a nice little machine. I was able to talk for fifteen minutes on video with no crashes and no problems. With my Comic Book Haul videos I film them on my iPad in little one minute segments. I talk for about a minute for each comic and then quickly edit them together in iMovie for the iPad and upload right from the iPad to YouTube. It’s amazing how smoothly that all works. But with the heads up video I ran into the same microphone problem. It all sounds hollow when I’m not right on top of the mic.

These are typical mic problems and there are typical mic solutions to them that usually involve buying a better microphone and keeping it closer to you mouth. This line of thinking, of course, always leads me down the path of evaluating all of my equipment. I have the money right now to replace one of my things but which one? The iPad is the most expensive but would it give me the most bang for my buck? Probably not. My iPad 2 has a terrible still camera and I’d like an iPad with a better one but I’m not sure that’s worth the $800 bucks I’d spend to get it. And for video it’ll be about the same. I’m not lying. I want a new iPad. I just don’t think it’s worth the money right now.

My small Canon camera is just fine. It works well for filming my drawing videos so I don’t really need another small camera. It’s my Canon SX30IS super zoom that might need replacing. I bought that camera back in October of 2010 and it was supposed to be a sort of stop gap camera until I decided if I wanted to get a digital SLR or micro 4/3s camera. Turns out that I really didn’t need either and the Canon SX30IS suited me just fine. I shot with what I had. Though one of the things that camera is missing is a microphone jack. So if I shoot video with it I get a lot of room noise. Or wind noise if I’m outside as I shot with it this past summer.

All that lead me to check out various digital SLR or micro 4/3s cameras once again. Turns out that though those two types of cameras offer a lot of advantages they’re still too expensive for what they’ll offer me that I think I’ll actually use. I’m going to settle for another super-zoom. The latest Canon SX60 even has the mic jack that I’m looking for. I’ve noticed that those high end super-zooms often get mediocre reviews but I’ve muddled through with my Canon SX30 quite well. I have no doubt I will do the same with the SX60. Meanwhile I’ve actually bought a USB microphone this week. I caught a nice one on sale at Amazon yesterday and decided to order it. Not quite spur of the moment but almost. Since it’s USB it won’t be able to plug into a camera but it turns out than I can get a camera mic for only about $25 bucks. I don’t know how great it’ll be but we’ll see. Maybe. I still haven’t decided yet. Meanwhile I’ll continue to shoot with what I got.