Radiant Comics

Fall cleanup is no fun. You know the deal: raking leaves. On a pleasant day it’s okay though. So far during this fall pleasant days have not been around on leaf cleanup days. Instead it’s been unseasonably cold and windy. Not the ideal weather for doing yard work.

This year I added a new tool to my yard work tool kit. I bought an electric leaf blower. It’s the corded kind that you’ll need a long extension cord for but I was in no way getting a gas powered one. Those are messy with their gas and oil and eventually their little engines get hard to start. Gas ones are more powerful and easier to use but they’re also a little more expensive. The Toro leaf blower/vacuum that I bought cost me $75. Add another $25 for a gas one but it’s the mess and troublesome starting that really kept me away.

There are three areas in my yard that need leaf clean up. The big back yard, the driveway with its fences that really collect leaves, and the smaller front yard. I mulch my leaves with the John Deere riding mower. I rake them to the back yard and ride over them again and again until they turn to small pieces and dust which feeds the lawn. The mowing takes a while but is the easy part. It’s moving all those leaves that takes time.

The leaf blower I got is also a vacuum mulcher. I didn’t even know leaf blowers did that. A big plastic tube connects to the bottom of the blower that sucks the leaves up, runs them through the fan blades, and deposits them into a bag that’s connected to the air output. I decided to try and use that vacuum mulcher to clean up the leaves in the driveway rather than rake/blow them all the way to the back yard. The leaf blower box said that the mulcher made sixteen bags of leaves into one bag of leaves. I had no idea how many bags it would take me to suck up all those leaves but I knew it was going to be a lot.

The first thing I have to say about the mulcher is, “Holy crap it’s clumsy to use”. It has a big handle on top plus two knobs for holding onto but there is no graceful way to use it. You just have to hold it up a few inches above the leaves as it sucks them up the vertical column. The leaf bag is attached to the back of the thing and has a shoulder strap to help you hold it. The bag gets heavier and heavier as it fills up. Plus it’s attached by an electrical cord that seemed to always get unconnected as I was working. It was like constantly doing bicep curls and then taking a break as the cord fell off.

Now here is where the weather kicks in. When raking leaves I pretty much want them to be dry. Light and fluffy leaves are so much easier to move then wet ones. Since there has been a bit of rain lately I waited as long as I could for the leaves to dry but there were still some wet ones. Plus some frozen ones. With the extra cold temperatures it’s been around 24ºF at night going up to about 38ºF during the day. So, yes, the leaves down on the bottom of the piles were frozen. That makes them a bit harder to vacuum up. And my fingers were frozen too. At first I had on fingerless gloves but they weren’t working out so I moved to some really old-school arctic mittens. Those babies kept my hands warm.

It took about two and a half hours to clean up the driveway. I don’t know why I thought it would take less time than raking but it didn’t. I think I emptied the bag of mulched leaves a at least fifteen times. I dumped them in the back yard to be mulched up further later on. I quit for the day at that point and picked things up the next day. My arms had had enough.

The next day was a balmy 45ºF as I started to go for the leaf blower. In the back yard I wouldn’t need to move the leaves far as I just needed them off the fence so that the mover could get them. But there is quite a bit of fence. I started blowing and almost immediately had to go and add an attachment that narrowed the opening the air came out. That was to help move wet heavy leaves and I needed it.

The leaf blower wasn’t quite as clumsy as the vacuum but it was a lot clumsier than a rake. I found that I could really only hold the blower one way and it could only blow the leaves in one direction. If there was a fence, bushes, or a tree in that direction then I had to work the leaves around them somehow. With a rake you pull leaves away from obstacles but with a blower you blow the leaves at the obstacle if that’s your only direction. And the cord fell out even more than with the vacuum because I was covering more ground faster. It was not a graceful ballet.

Finally I got to the mower part and I couldn’t get the John Deere started. The battery had lost all its juice. The cold can make a battery loose its charge and if your battery goes dead on cold days then you need a new one. I really should have replaced this one last winter but I got along with a plug-in charger. Then the warm weather came and the battery worked fine. I tried to use the charger on it with no success and got more and more frustrated. Finally I made the twenty minute drive to Sears Auto and bought a new battery. They didn’t have any on the shelf but the guy found me one in the back. I was glad for that since I wasn’t in the mood for any more frustration.

I popped the new battery in the tractor and got it started. It didn’t start as smoothly as it should but only took half a minute and the new battery could easily handle that. Then I mowed and mowed and mowed. I’m not even sure how long I mulched those leaves for. Maybe it was half an hour. Maybe it was forty five minutes. Seems like forever though. And it got cold out. After I was going for about ten minutes I noticed the sun going away and the wind picking up. Gave me a chill. Not enough to make me go and get a warmer outfit, I had a hat, wool coat, and those fingerless gloves, but enough to make it take a while to warm up afterwards.

And one final note. Mulching leaves is a weird thing. At first there are so many of them that you have to be careful. They build up and get stuck in front of and under the mower. There can be so many that they stall the mower by stopping the blades. Then they get down to a more manageable level and I mow them over and over and it seems to be doing nothing. There are just so many leaves. But then they reach a point where they almost disappear. They get chopped up into such small pieces and spread out over such a wide area that they fall in-between the blades of grass. It’s like the end of a magic trick. Stupid leaves.

Sometimes things take a while. A long while. Let your mind drift back in time to the year 1999. That’s when I first started this project. Fifteen years ago. Or at least I think so. That’s the creation date I have on some scans but sometimes those dates get mixed up. I’m pretty sure this one is right. It all started because, on rare occasion, I like to work with someone else’s images rather than my own. That lead me to discover that I could buy old photo negatives on Ebay. So sometime back in 1999 I discovered and bought some black and white medium format (2-1/4) negatives of nude dancers in Paris from 1964. There were eleven negative in total all of behind the scenes type stuff. A woman showing off and dancing for the camera not on stage but backstage near the dressing room. But what to do with them?

First of all, back in 1999, I had no scanner that could handle scanning in medium format negatives. Such scanners were rare and expensive then. But at work, back in my good ol’ Marvel Comics days, I had access to a scanner that at least had a transparency adapter on it. That meant I could scan them in but the scans might not be very good since it really wasn’t meant for photo negatives. And so I scanned them in. Just as predicted the scans weren’t very good. I had eleven substandard scans of photos that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with. So they sat. The scans on my computer and the negatives in sleeves. I’d occasionally pull them out and look at them but nothing got done. No ideas leaped to the front.

Dancers in Paris 1964

Cut to nine years later in 2008. I had just gotten a bunch of old medium format negatives from my mother of family pictures. I needed something to scan them in with so I started looking at scanners again. Turns out that not only had scanners gotten cheaper but they’d also gotten much better at scanning medium format negatives. I ended up buying one for just a couple of hundred dollars that could do the job well. It took a couple of thousand dollars to buy a scanner in 1999 that could do that. So I rescanned the Paris nude dancer negatives. And then nothing. They sat.

Usually when I do one of my large photo collages I have an idea in mind before hand. And a lot of photos. For example I have made large photos of the weddings of friends of mine. I take pictures during the whole wedding and then arrange them into one large photo in such a way as to try and capture the event. In these days of digital photography I can easily take a thousand pictures at a wedding to choose from. Eleven pictures is a lot less.

The lack of color was also daunting. Often my ideas in my photos have to do with color. I’m forever using color to draw the eye around the photo and always use small bits of photos just for their color. I have all sorts of photos of odds and ends that I use for their color and texture in any given composition. A bit of blue sky here, a bit of green grass there, and some leaves of a red maple can really help pull a photo together. But none of that would be of any use with old black and white photos.

Now we’ll change time-frames again to this past summer. Once again I was looking at Ebay for stuff and found a photographer selling his negatives. They were medium format black and white negatives of alt-model Nettie Harris who I am familiar with through following her Tumblr blog. I figured I’d bid on a couple of them and ended up with two single image negatives. I decided I wasn’t going to make one of my large 20×28 inch photos out of it and would try to make one of my smaller 10×15 inch photos with the Nettie Harris negative as the main image. I would use a bunch of my own street photography to build the rest of the composition. The problem was how to integrate color and black and white photography. I’ve found that to be troublesome.

The obvious answer is to add color to the black and white photo. But that’s not as easy as it seems. With a computer and Photoshop there are lots of ways to add color to a photo but most of them are unsuitable for all sorts of esthetic reasons. I must have tried a dozen different ways until I found one I liked. And it’s simple. I used Photoshop’s “Monochrome” image mode to turn pieces of the black and white photo to black and whatever color I choose. This kept the values of the photo mostly the same for visual continuity but allowed me to drop in blocks of color. In other words it doesn’t interrupt the image as much as other ways I tried to add color. So I finished the Nettie Harris photo.

Nettie Harris Photo 1

Then my mind drifted back to those Paris dancer negatives I bought almost fifteen years ago now. I knew I wanted to use just the eleven photos and not any of my street photos and thought the monochrome blocks of color would work to tie the whole thing together. This time I used a transparent border around the color bits though. I think the small border added a cohesiveness to the whole thing. I even went back and added those borders to the first Nettie Harris photo.

The funny thing is that I scanned in the Paris negatives yet again but then after a day or two of figuring out the layout and composition of the whole thing I discovered I didn’t like the scans I just made. So I had to change some settings and scan the negative for a fourth time and then rebuild all that I had just done. The final image size is 20×28 inches on a 22×30 inch piece of paper. Yes, I really did make an actual one of a kind physical photograph out of this. I print the large photo out in pieces, cut the pieces out along their white borders, and then paste the pieces down onto a large piece of drawing paper. So the white borders are actually the paper showing through in-between the photos. I like the physical nature such a finished piece provides.

So here it is, fifteen years later, finally finished. Things don’t usually take me that long so I find it a little hard to believe that I actually finished it. It’ll sink in though.

Nettie Harris Photo 2

The summer shows have ended and the fall shows have begun so I think it’s time for another TV recap. What have I been watching?

Legends – A summer show I stumbled onto by chance. Legends is a spy/thriller/conspiracy show. The main character is an undercover FBI agent and his undercover identities that are called legends. Hence the title of the show. This one is part police procedural and part action adventure. He has a team of FBI agents he works with: the boss, the agent in charge that he has a little conflict with, and the tech person You know the drill. But it’s also about the main guy not remembering his past quite clearly enough and mixing up his legends with reality. Or is his reality a legend? That’s the questions that get asked in season one along with the bad-ass FBI agent adventures. A solid show.

The Strain – Another summer show that, as a comic book fan, I was aware was coming but I’ve never read the comic. It’s a vampire show where the vampires are evil and ugly and not sexy and beautiful. The twist is that the lead character is a doctor for the CDC and treats the whole vampire outbreak as some kind of medical epidemic. That’s the terms he sees it in. Plus we get his young son, loyal love interest/assistant, a tough city worker with lots of practical knowledge, an old vampire hunter who has some of the answers, and a bunch of other characters who come and go. I’ve read some people complain that they don’t like the way the main vampire looks but I’m not a special effects guy so it doesn’t bother me. I’m happy to see a good monster show.

Extant – This was the sci-fi show starring Halle Berry that ran this summer. There were two main plots. First, Halle Berry was an astronaut who came back from a year long solo mission in space to find out she was pregnant. What’s going on? Was it an alien baby? What’s with the conspiracy at the company she works for? Are they covering up the real reason for her mission? Second, Halle’s husband is a scientist who is working on creating artificial intelligence which takes the form of a robot boy who is their son. I liked how fast this show moved and that they gave you answers. Too many mystery shows these days string you along never revealing too much. This one revealed what was going on in a timely manner so I wasn’t left frustrated and disinterested. I like that.

Broad City – I think this show ran last spring but I didn’t catch it until this summer. It’s a comedy show about two young women living in NYC. I liked it. Lots of funny stuff. It’s filled with drug humor and raunchy humor. If that’s not your thing than stay away but it was good for me.

Scorpion – A new show for this season. I’d call Scorpions solidly mediocre. It falls into the quirky detective show category except this time our detective is a team of misfit geniuses. We get the leader genius, the math genius, the gizmo genius, and the psychology genius. They team up with an FBI agent and have a regular mom with her genius little son thrown into the mix. They solve and stop crimes. Nothing about the show is original or great but it’s still entertaining for an hour.

Gotham – Batman is so popular that then can make a show about him that he’s not even in. Gotham is a drama that’s all about Gotham City before Batman shows up. Bruce Wayne is there as a little kid right after his parents are murdered but he’s still five or ten years away from becoming Batman. Instead the show is about Jim Gordon (Batman’s Commissioner Gordon) as a young cop dealing with crime and corruption. Lots of Batman’s future friends and foes are there before they become colorful villains. Catwoman, Penguin, Riddler, and maybe even the Joker were all seen. Plus lots of non-super gangsters from the Batman comics. All in all the show works pretty well for me as a police drama but it’s a little weird that Batman isn’t in it and they really can’t show any super heroes or villains yet.

Forever – Here I go with yet another quirky detective show. They really do seem to be my favorite. The twist in this one is that the main character, a NYC coroner, is secretly immortal. He’s been alive for a few hundred years and anytime he happens to die he’s reborn (fully grown) in nearby water. He’s partnered with a NYC detective as he investigates death and his own condition. He is also contacted on the phone by a guy who knows about the immortality and also claims to not be able to die only the new guy is a couple of thousand years old. And he’s messing with the younger immortal just to entertain himself. A solid quirky detective show.

The Blacklist – I mention this show because I’m giving it another try. I watched the first six or so episodes last year and gave up on it. It wasn’t moving fast enough for me and I got frustrated with the slowness of the plot. I watched the first three episodes this year and I like it better. I still have no idea what is going on since I missed a lot of episodes but things move much faster. I like that and will watch it a little more.

And some returning shows. I don’t have a ton to say about them since they’ve been around for a while and are known quantities but I like them all.

Agents of SHIELD – A lot of my comic book friends complain about this show but I like it. It’s not like there have been a ton of good SHIELD comic books that they have to live up to. It’s a solid super spy show.

The Big Bang Theory – Not a show that the hipsters like but I don’t care. I find it pleasantly funny.

Brooklyn Nine Nine – Now in its second season this has turned into a nice ensemble comedy after a slow start. One I look forward to laughing at.

Castle – Nathan Fillion as a quirky detective. You know I’m there.

Comic Book Men – Once again a lot of my comic book friends don’t like this show but some of us do.

The Middle – The least hip comedy on my list but it’s consistently entertaining.

Modern Family – A funny and creative show.

New Girl – Another one that I look forward to laughing at every week. I like the writing and find a lot of the quick aside jokes hilarious. “Depression era garbage man” cracked me up.

Supernatural – Back for its tenth season they’ve always managed to keep this show fresh and fun. Two brothers fighting monsters. Simple yet they’ve managed to get a lot of complexity out of it.
There you go. What have you been watching?

There were a couple of times this week where I couldn’t get anything done. It could have been the sinus headache or it could have been general artistic directionlessness but either way I had nothing going on. So I decided to dig into my pile of drawings that I have printed out in blue line to ink. Sometimes I feel like drawing and coming up with new things but I’m not in the mood to ink and therefore finish things. So I scan in the pencil drawing, print it out on bristol board, and put it on the pile for another day. Today was that other day.

Inking, for me, is mostly about reacting rather than acting. I’m trying to finish off a drawing with a definitive black line rather than the grey of a pencil. That grey can look a bit indecisive at times. You can always go back and fix it later but with ink you’d better get it correct now. But since ninety percent of the drawing is already done it’s easier to get it correct. I find I can ink my own work with less mindfulness than drawing it. I can pick up a brush or pen and just go when I got nothing going on. So that’s what I did.

The first piece that I inked is called “With Everybody”. This is a case of the inking taking me longer than I expected because I didn’t have as much of it worked out as I usually do. Instead of the ninety percent that I mentioned above I probably had about seventy five percent worked out. All of the basic shapes were there but I still had to figure out what I was going to do with them, And none of the blacks, greys, or positive vs negative shapes were worked out.

The first thing I notice about this piece is the guy ended up looking like some sort of moth man. He didn’t start out that way since I didn’t have all the black spots worked out but he sure ended up looking like a moth. He has wings that are spotted and even extra eyes on his chest.

I started this drawing, much like I’ve started many drawings in recent years, with a felt tip pen that’s been refilled with india ink. The regular ink in a felt tip pen isn’t really suitable for artwork but if you refill the sponge in the body of the pen with tech pen ink you can get a nice black line out of it. You have to be careful though because it makes a mess out of French curves and straight edges. You have to clean them a few times a day. Make that a half dozen. At least.

After I make the mechanical lines with the pen and straight edges/curves I pull out my brush and bottle of India ink. That’s where those thick to thin lines across the center of the body come from. I also thicken up some of the outlines that I made with the pen. I don’t always want the perfectly even line of a pen. Often the less even brush line is livelier. And if I mix the two I can get the best of both worlds.

I also had to figure out where to put the small parallel lines that make up the greys of this piece. They’re not really grey, of course, but create the illusion of a mid tone. None of that was indicated in the original drawing so I had to figure it out here. That took a while since the space is all about flatness and it’s often easier to organize the illusion of space because that follows rules. Flatness has rules that are different and not always easy to see. I think I figured it out here but it took a while. I’m not sure exactly but I’d say the ink work on this drawing took five to six hours.

The next drawing that I did this week probably took half that time. It’s called “Race Away” and is mainly the marked up face of a person. I think of him as a male figure but he really is a bit androgynous. Most of the black and white parts were figured out in the drawing except for on his shoulders and chest. And they were fairly easy to figure out.

This one is made up of two of my favorite things. Faces with designs on them and spirals. I’m forever putting triangles on faces and often filling the sky with spirals. Sometimes I make spirals out of hair two but I got baldness going on in this one. I’m not sure why but the whimsical triangles and circles in the background remind me of music or musical notes. Maybe it’s a “Follow the bouncing ball” thing. I’m not sure but I can almost hear a song when I look at them. That’s unusual for my drawings. I don’t think they often suggest sound.

The space in this drawing was a lot easier to figure out than the first one because it’s mostly “Real” space. It’s not real in any exact location sort of way but there is a sky and some ground with maybe a fence on it. Could be some waves and water behind him but it seems like he’s in a real space. The Mothman could be anywhere. His space is more of a story space than a real one. I have no idea where he is. And where is that giant face coming from? Who knows?

In both of these drawings I not only mixed the line of a brush with the line of a pen and edge but I also mixed in some freehand pen work. In the glasses of the man and the spots of the Mothman’s wings I made some short pen marks. They don’t have the perfect spacing of the mechanical background lines and so add to the natural flavor of the piece. Really, too many “Perfect” lines to deaden a thing.

So there you have my week of not having it going on. I always find it a good idea to have something in reserve for when I just want to get zen with things.