Radiant Comics

“Green Dress” Gouache on Paper

This week I’ve been working with some gouache (an opaque watercolor) for the first time in a while so that inspired me to pull an old gouache painting out of my files and give it a look. This one is dated December 1996, is named “Green Dress”, is 6.5×9 inches, and is done on 300 lb cold press watercolor paper. That’s a pretty literal name so it is obviously from back before I named things with random phrases. I’m sure I moved to random phrases because if “Green Dress” was the best I could do then I was quickly going to run out of distinctive names.

This is an early gouache painting of mine. I had probably only been working in the medium for a couple of years at most but I can see some of the things I had down and some I had to learn. It’s also more illustrative than my later work turned out to be. It’s not super-illustrative but there is a lot of moving from dark to light and rounding of forms on the arms. I get bored doing this technique which explains why I moved away from it but I can see that I haven’t quite let go of it yet.I’m not quite sure I ever let totally go of that illustrative dark to light shading but it’s no usually as evident as here. The gouache I was painting today had more of an illusion of shading than actual shading.

This is also from a phase when I was drawing a lot of dancing people. I can remember first being interested in drawing dancing people back when I was in college (1984-1988) but I didn’t have the drawing skills to pull it off. I tried a few times to come up with a composition of dancing people but it never worked out. By the time I made this drawing I had more skills and had made a few drawings of dancing people. This is one of them. I think my love of drawing dancing people comes from those animated “Peanuts” specials because all of my dancing people dance oddly. This is a strange and awkward pose but that’s what I wanted.

One of the things I find unusual about this painting is that I have her face hidden. Since I love to draw faces it’s odd to find many pieces of mine without a face. But here is one of them. I think that’s because I really wanted to make this piece about the contorted figure and a face might take away from that. And, by the way, she’s also got some big arms. Most photography and drawings about dancers are about slenderness and grace and I was going for the opposite of that. There is no grace here but plenty of strength. You’ve got to be careful around this dancer because if you accidentally get in the way you might get knocked down. Now that’s dancing.

One of the things I see in this painting that I never do anymore is contour lines. Those are the blue stripes that surround the dancer. They’re sort of like action lines found in a comic book and sort of define the negative space around the dancer and sort of just get in the way and make a mess. I can remember using them a bunch of times when I was first learning to use gouache but I never really liked them. Though they work okay in this piece I think they show lack of confidence in the spaces I create. There are better ways to emphasize negative space that don’t include filling them up with lines.

I like the blue of the lines though. They work well to calm down the orange background and red boxes underneath them. I imagine that’s the reason I decided to go with the blue lines in the first place. Those orange and reds were too hot and overwhelming the woman in the green dress. One thing you never want in a painting is for the background color to overwhelm the foreground color. In this case the blue lines team up with the green dress to put the red and orange in their place.

It’s the arms and the green dress that make this painting for me. As I wrote before the arms are illustrative but the green dress is more stylized. There are indications of dark to light modeling but down around her legs the dress takes on a more modernist quality. The lightest green ceases to be a highlight on a form and starts to be a decoration or some such. It flattens out and becomes graphic. It starts reminding me of a Chinese dragon. I find that interesting.

The hair also teeters somewhere between illustrative and stylized. There are some dark to light transitions but it’s not hair I would call realistic. That red hair tie is something I can remember using a bit too. It’s made in a fairly realistic manner so it’s a way to ground the hair in a little more realism without the hair itself being too realistic. It’s also a way to bring a little color to an area in the painting. The red of the hair tie plays nicely with the red shoes.

There is an interesting technique that I am using here that I haven’t done in ages. The brown line around her arms is underneath the final layers of paint. I painted the brown edges first and then put the lighter skin tones over it. The brown line lightens and darkens in places. This means the line becomes a negative shape. It’s defined by the positive shape of the lighter color put down after it. This is the opposite of what I normally do since I’m an artist who loves line and like to give it a lot of importance. Rarely do I make the line a negative shape.

One final observation about this painting is that most of my bits of shapes and colors seem to disappear on this one. I have red and yellow along the left and bottom and green, blue and, yellow along the right but I barely notice them. The blue lines and orange background dominate so much that the other bits fade away. This one was a learning experience.

I’ve written before about the TV shows that I watch and enjoy but I thought I’d write a little something down about a different category of TV shows that I’ve had on lately. TV shows that aren’t good enough for me to watch but are good enough for me to listen to. Since I work at home by myself I often listen to radio shows or podcasts as I work but sometimes I put on some TV shows in the background. They’re shows that aren’t quite interesting enough to demand my entire attention but offer some entertainment non the less.

Finding Bigfoot – This show could more realistically be called “Never Finding Bigfoot” because it’s in season three and they have yet to find a Bigfoot. The show is made up of a few Bigfoot hunters and a biologist who is the show’s skeptic. They all go to different parts of the country every week and hang out in the woods looking for Bigfoot. Most of the people on this show believe Bigfoot exists and say they’ve seen him but don’t have any proof. They howl in the woods, bang on trees, and give us lessons in Bigfoot behavior. I find it impossible to take seriously but it makes for an okay background narrative. People walking around the woods having a good time.

America Unearthed – Another farfetched show about a forensic geologist (who knew that was a thing?) who goes around the USA digging up evidence for a past in the Americas that know one knew existed. Knights Templar, Vikings, Phoenicians, and people of all kinds of stripes were here long before anyone knew they were is the common theme. This one is in its second season and every episode deals with a different bit of the past. The host is way too quick to believe flimsy evidence but he still doesn’t believe everything. Once again it’s a show that tells a nice little story even if I don’t believe it.

The next batch of shows falls into the same category. The “Wars” shows. “Storage Wars” and “Shipping Wars”. There are three different “Storage Wars” shows. The storage shows all follow the same formula. A group of people all are bidding on storage lockers without getting a good look at them in order to sell the lockers’ contents and make some money. The shipping show is the same thing except they’re bidding on shipping unusual items so they can make some cash. All the shows are really about the different personalities of the bidders and shippers and how they compete with one and other. They also love to make bad jokes. Once again it’s not good enough to concentrate on but is okay background noise. Some of the shows’ characters are more amusing than others.

A new category that I’ve discovered in recent months is YouTube comic book shows. These are shows about comics books made by comic book fans who want their own TV show. They mainly talk about Marvel and DC comics which I don’t read but it’s an entertaining way too keep up with what’s going on. I was watching “Dan and Dale’s Comic Book Show” which is two guys from the UK talking about comics but they just stopped doing their show. I also check out “Pete’s Basement” which is a show done out of Brooklyn. The accents are Brooklyn and there is a lot of cursing. They put on a good show. The third show I watch is “Pryde’s Picks” which is a woman in Florida who also curses a lot as she talks about comics. The last show I watch is the “Merry Make-Up Geek”. This is another woman who talks about comics. I guess she started talking about make-up and changed over.

Most of these comics shows are only ten to twenty minutes long and sometimes I actually watch them but most of the time I have them on in the background and glance over now and again. All these video podcasts have people who really like comics. There are lots of shows to be found on YouTube by people who just seem to want to break into show biz and must see this as a way. They don’t really seem to like or know a while lot about comics and I find those shows boring. Or maybe the hosts are just less interesting.

The second category of YouTube comics podcast that I’ve discovered recently is the “Showing off the Comic Book Haul” videos. This type is for real comic book geeks only. Basically a person shows off the recent comic books he or she has purchased. Normally they’re done so that the camera isn’t even on the person. They point the camera at wall or other flat background and then show off their comics one by one as they place them in front of the camera. Usually the narrator tells you a little something about the comic. The reason for getting it, how much it cost, and what condition it’s in. They’re fun little videos that people make to share their excitement.

I find the “Comic Haul” videos interesting because of all the reasons people have for getting certain issues. Most of the comics aren’t worth a ton of money but these guys are finding a lot of what they call “Key issues”. Usually that’s a first appearance of something or someone. Some are obvious like the first appearance of Spider-Man or Wolverine but others are less well known like the first appearance of Anita Hill (Correction: Maria Hill. See, that’s how little I know about key issues).or Amanda Waller. When a new movie is getting made like “Ant-Man” all sorts of new key issues come to the front. Even the guys making the videos don’t always think the key issues amount to much but they still like finding them.

One final thing I find interesting about these “Comic Haul” videos is how old a lot of these comics now are. A lot of the key issues are from the early 90s (if not 80s) which seems like yesterday to me but was over twenty years ago. I think a lot of the people making these videos are in their 20s so to them these are books from long ago if not before they were born. Books that I passed over with disinterest at the time are exciting to them. They’re equivalent to comic books from the 50s and 60s to me. I find it neat to see and hear their different perspective.

One last YouTube video topic that I often have on in the background is weird conspiracy and mystery documentaries. JFK, Atlantis, Oak Island, Knights Templar, and whatever else they’ve got I’ve played them all. When I want some real com fort food video I throw on “In Search Of…” with Leonard Nimoy from the 1970s. Good stuff. I also like documentaries about actual history but they’re often good enough to sit down and watch.

Earlier today I was on Facebook remembering my youthful days as an art student. Specifically it was being a student and buying art supplies that I was remembering. It started with a comment that mentioned technical pen cleaner which brought me back to a quote from my typography teacher sometime during my first week of college. It was, “Technical pen cleaner. Better known as soap and water.”

I sometimes refer to myself as an art supply geek. I like art supplies. I like finding new art supplies to try out and see what they can do. Some artists are like that but I’d have to say that most aren’t. Most artists I know learn the tools they need to get the job done and work along happily with those tools. It’s the same as with any other part of life. Some people are always looking to try new things but most aren’t.

This is the story of my first big art supply purchase. I’ve had plenty of them since them but I still remember this one. It was the summer of 1984 as I was preparing to head off to college and study commercial art a couple of counties north of here at what is now SUNY Sullivan but was then a mere community college that specialized in commercial art. Over the summer as part of whatever orientation package I was sent came a list of art supplies that I needed. Being the prepared type I saved up my money and at the end of the summer went to the local art supply store to fill my list of supplies.

I still remember the store. It was at the Nanuet Mall and was part of an art supply chain of stores called Koenig’s Art Emporium. I had been in the store many times before but only to buy little stuff. I can’t even remember what. Probably some cheap paper, pencils, and markers. And not art markers I’d guess but markers that any high school kid might buy. I always liked going to the art store but all the stuff in there was expensive and a bit of a mystery to me. But now I had a list.

I can walked into the store and found a couple of things on the list but then I was baffled. I don’t think I even knew what everything on the list was. I ended up asking one of the employees for help and she tried to help me fill the list but she must have been a high school kid too because she had to call over someone who knew more. “He has a list” I remember her saying to the man. She said that with a bit of amazement as if no one ever came in with a list.

Art supplies are expensive. That’s something that all artists learn pretty quickly. And mall art stores were especially expensive. I’m not even sure that mall art stores exist anymore. They’ve probably all been put out of business by the big box arts and crafts stores. I can still remember the sticker shock of the final bill when filling that list but I can also remember being resigned to paying it. If it was what I had to do it was what I had to do. I think the bill was well over two hundred dollars. I don’t think it reached three hundred because I would probably remember a number that big. I’ve spent over two hundred dollars many times on art supplies over the years and it’s still a lot of money to me but it was a whole lot more money back in 1984. Still I forked over the cash and had my supplies.

I don’t remember everything that I bought but a few of the things I still have and use. The architect’s scale/ruler comes to mind right away because I still use that whenever I have measure something. The one I got that day was in inches and I bought another later in the year that was metric. I still use them both. I also bought some plastic triangles and a T-Square that day. I don’t remember what happened to the T-Square but the the triangles are in my closet. When they finally got too chipped to use sometime around 1999 I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out. I wrote the date on them and stuck them in a closet. They don’t take up much room so they’re still there.

The most expensive items I bought were probably the technical pens. They’ve long since worn out and have been replaced multiple times. I don’t use tech pens much anymore but still occasionally do. I imagine I also got all kinds of drawing pencils too. One thing I specifically remember getting was a pad of newsprint paper. It was the first time I had ever had a pad of paper that big, it was 14×17 inches, and never in my life had I drawn on newsprint.

Where the quote I started this piece with comes in is my first week and maybe even first day (who can remember?) of school. I was taught to be prepared. The school sent out a list of supplies so I got those supplies. Then I learned that most people aren’t prepared at all. At least half of my class had no supplies at all. They had the same list I had but didn’t bother to get anything on it. Turned out that was to their financial advantage too.

On that first day our teacher said, “Oh, they sent you a list? Let me see it”. He then looked at the list and told us what we would really need from it. Two of the things he mentioned were Art Bins and technical pen cleaner. Art Bins were basically a box with compartments for carrying around art supplies. I had already bought mine art the art store but it turns out that you can buy a fishing tackle box to do the exact same thing for half the price. It was only then that I noticed my Art Bin looked exactly like a tackle box.

Then of course he said, “Technical pen cleaner. Better known as soap and water.” Boy was he right on that one. I had purchased about a twelve ounce bottle of technical pen cleaner for I would guess about three or four dollars. When I finally got around to using it I noticed it looked and smelled exactly like a giant two dollar bottle of 409 spray cleaner. That was the last time I ever bought tech pen cleaner. And after that they couldn’t fool me with airbrush cleaner either.

A screen-grab of a page in progress.

I ran afoul of one of my truisms this week. “Things take longer than I think they will”. That’s not always the case but it seems to be true a whole lot of the time. This time is was about my “Little Red Sketchbook” project. In and of itself the project is taking longer than I thought it would but by now I’ve settled into the idea that it isn’t getting done quickly. But this week it was part of the design process that was taking so long.

The design process itself has been taking a while. I thought I had it down but then I went and changed things. I’m designing this whole book for the iPad and originally I designed it so that the iPad was held horizontally and two pages of the sketchbook would be one page on the iPad. The left hand side would be text and the right hand side would be the drawing. Turned out that didn’t work for me. It was too small. So I redesigned it to be vertical and show one page at a time. First you see a page of text and then as you turn the page you see the drawings. I liked that better but now the size of the sketchbook was too narrow.

I went back and widened the book background to a suitable size but I couldn’t just stretch the artwork too. So now I had to figure out what to do with the extra inch or so of space on the page with the art. Of course my answer was “More art” but that meant making more art. I didn’t have that in me so I instead decided to repurpose some art I already had made. I ended up using some of my “Message Tee” drawings from a couple of years ago, minus the type, and had them peering through the page at the viewer. That worked for me. It took a while to get done but I got it done.

That was half of the eighty two pages done but I still had the other half to go and that was the half with the most design work. My concept for the book wasn’t just a page of type on the left hand side but type and some small images. I wanted to used some little photos and drawings in with the type. But which small photos and drawings? That was the work. But before even that I had to decide on if I wanted borders around the photos and what they should look like. These are the details of design that always take up more time than I think they will. Design is like that. So much of it is paying attention to small details.

I ended up deciding on hand drawn borders for the small bits. That took and is taking way longer than I thought it would. First of all I tried drawing the borders digitally. I used my Wacom tablet and pen and drew some rectangles in Photoshop. Somehow I failed at this and after about twenty minutes I decided to draw them on paper and scan them in. It took no time at all to draw about ten different shaped boxes and scan them in. Then I decided I needed even more boxes and drew and scanned another ten. So with twenty boxes to use as borders I was ready to go. Almost.

That’s when I discovered that I liked the line quality of the boxes but some of the shapes were a bit off. I had to spend some more time straightening some of the lines without making them too straight. They had to still look hand drawn but without any distracting curvy flaws in them. These are the kind of design details that take time and drive me crazy. They’re just boxes but it’s important that they’re done right. And it’s tedious and boring to do them right. It’s not like making a drawing where I’m trying to make something interesting. It’s a boring box that I’m trying to get to blend in and not stand out and be distracting.

After a few hours of making boxes I had twenty of them ready to go. That still wasn’t enough. I’ve found that sometimes I need one that was a little wider or a little taller so I adapt one that I already made. That at least takes less time then making one from scratch. It was at this point I also have to decide which photos and bits of art to use in the boxes amongst the type. That takes time but at least is a bit more methodical. I open my photos, pick one, decide if I want to apply one of my filter recipes, crop it, and add the border. Same with the bits of art. Then I got the idea to add some bits of type in.

Along with the story on the left side of the book (which I still haven’t finished writing by the way that’ll take more time) I wanted some small bits of type that looked like hand written notes or some such with cryptic bits of writing in them. You want to know another thing that takes up more time than it should? Try picking out fonts that you want to use. It’s insane. I first tried looking on the internet for fonts that I wanted to use. Sometimes this is easier than looking through the ones already on my computer.

Font management on a computer is and always has been a nightmare. Font management programs barely make it easier. I’ve used a variety of them but the always fail me in the end. I’m back to using the default Apple program “Font Book” but the problem with it (and others like it) is that the fonts have to be open to sample them. I have thousands of fonts and to have them all open all the time slows things down too much. I keep only the ones I use a lot open at all times. The best viewing solution ended up being the “Cover Flow” view of the Mac OS. When viewing the font file that view gives you a couple of sample letter and then a sample alphabet. But then I have to scroll through endless font files. That takes a long time. And don’t get me started on why Font Book won’t even open some fonts. You drop them on and it does nothing. I had to spend more time finding a work-around for that. Lots of things take a long time. Way longer than I think.

This week I pulled out a print of mine at random from my pile of prints. I’m glad I pulled this one because it’s one I like. It’s called “I stake my claim to the awkward middle ground” as you can see by the fact that the title runs up the left side of the print. According to the date on the digital file I finished this one on September 14, 2011. That seems like such a long time ago but it’s only a couple of years.

Though this is one of my prints that features words and images the words are less prominent than on most of my other ones. That’s the way things work out sometimes but in this case I also think it fits the phrase very well. When someone is claiming awkwardness I don’t think it would be done in a bold way. Awkward pairs more with shyness and the type here is a little shy. It’s off to the side and small. There isn’t even much type-work to the type. It seems to be just the font being itself. I may have changes the spacing a bit as I often do but if I did it was subtle. The type is content to be off to the side.

The image itself is interesting in the way it came about. You could almost describe this as a serendipitous print. In a way it came about by chance but in another way it didn’t since I was looking to make a print. I just didn’t make it in my usual way. That’s because I drew this face back in February of 2009. I drew it, I inked, I scanned it, and there it sat for two and a half years. That’s what happens sometimes. I will draw something with all intentions of making a finished piece out of it and it never happens. In this case, by the way it turned out, I’m guessing that I was bored with the usual way that I’d color the face to make a finished piece. I didn’t want to go through the same old process.

This coloring process comes from a different task entirely. During the first few months of 2011 I was making some stuff I call “Lo-fi Found Art Photography”. I’d scour Google images for obscure snapshots that people posted, run them through a Photoshop filer recipe I made up, and add some type to them. I enjoyed doing that and posting some of them for a little while and then stopped. But, of course, the series of Photoshop filters that I used were saved as a Photoshop “Action” and sat there waiting for me to notice them some future day.

One day I decided to pull one of my two year old face drawings out to try and finish it. Who knows why but it probably struck my fancy that day. I still didn’t want to color it up in my normal way so I must have remembered my recently abandoned filter recipe. First I laid down some basic colors in Illustrator and then I brought it over to Photoshop to run the filter recipe on it. I ended up liking the results. Here we can also say that the results were a bit serendipitous because the way the filter recipes work I control the color like a blunt instrument rather than my usual sharp one.

After the basic colors are chosen when I run the filters it first ads the dot patterns into the color. It’s almost like the dot patterns in old comic book printing that Roy Lichtenstein made famous but even a bit cruder. Plus they are right over top of color rather than being the color itself. After the pattern down I choose a rectangular selection in Photoshop and then change the color in that particular selection. Hence the block of green hair becomes magenta hair. A light transparent outline is also added around the rectangle. I repeated this process four times to get what I wanted.

The first thing I notice on this face is the eye. The ol’ window to the soul. It’s got its own box around it making a bullseye of a lighter orange color on top of magenta. Once again the person in one of my pieces is staring hard at the viewer. I’ve also got a half-face again. But instead of a half-masked face, as is my habit, I went with a peek-a-boo bang. Once again it’s an androgynous face but I think of this one as a woman. Maybe it’s the red lips.

I like the basic shapes in this one. The swoop of the hair and the jutting of the jaw work for me. I also like that the hair comes out of a black hole in her scalp. The triangles of the spiky hair make for a nice counterpoint to the sweeping curves in the rest of the piece. The low-slung ear balances out the nose. This seems to be one of my more precise face drawings and the coloring technique emphasizes that.

That coloring technique brings order to chaos too. I’m not quite sure how it does it. There are a myriad of colors in this piece and they’re not entirely literal but somehow it all becomes harmonious. I’m used to being very precise with my color and knowing exactly why something works but with this technique it’s a bit more of a mystery. When selecting the color changes in the boxes I have a lot of choices as I move the slider from right to left so I end up picking one I like but I just kind of go with what my eyes tell me. That’s different than my normal way of contemplating each color individually. But I was looking for something different now wasn’t I?

A soft and subtle bit of words and type and a staring image full of restrained but chaotic color. That’s how I’d describe this one in a sentence. I’ll take that.