Radiant Comics

I got some working thoughts in my head today. Or maybe they’re more like thoughts on working. The end of the year is always a hard time to get my own art done. I end up spending a lot of time making things for presents for my family plus there is all the holiday running around. Also with the new year starting there is a lot of “What’s going to happen this year?” stuff going on in everybody’s heads. Including mine. All that adds up to December being a tough month to get things done in terms of my own art. I end up doing a little of this and a little of that and thinking about things in general. Hence the thoughts about my work in my head right now.

The first thought in my head is never throw any of your bad photos away. My whole style of photo making developed from saving all of my photos that weren’t good enough to make it into my photo album and then cutting them into pieces and making a good photo out of the pieces. So back before the days of digital photography I had a box full of photos that I’d go through when I wanted to make a good photo. Now I just never delete my bad photos. They stay in my folder of raw pictures.

I mention this because one of the things I’ve been working on is my Little Red Sketchbook project. I’ve been working on it for a while now. Since 2012. That year I filled a little red sketchbook with drawings in red pen and I want to write something to accompany it and turn the whole thing into a book. I started the writing but have been having a tough time finishing up the whole visual concept. One of the things I ended up doing was using some of my street photos as material for a border around the sketchbook pages. The blurry and out of focus photos seem to work best. That sent me scrambling to find some more bad photos of mine. I found myself actually disappointed that most of my street photos were in focus. How is that for a weird reversal? You never know.

I knocked out another six of my “On the Rough” color drawings one day last week. They are to be my go-to project these days when I can’t concentrate and get anything done. They seem to be able to get me to stop fretting about other stuff and just draw for a little while. It helps that they only take a short time to make. Individually they’re not a long term project but put them all together and they might add up to something more. That’s a good feeling and it seems dependable for now.

Right this moment I remembered I had to count how many pages I have left in my ink-book. I want to get this one finished and start the new one in January and I was right on track last I checked but time has a way of slipping by. Especially when in comes to my ink-book. I fill about eight pages a month in it but often I will draw four pages in the first week or so and then forget for two weeks. I think I’m ahead of things but then time slips by. I now have three pages left in the book and four days left in the month. An easy to meet schedule since each page will take about an hour but where did the month go? That’s December for you.

There are some things I want to get back to. My large black marker drawings for one. It was October or November 2012 that I was making large black marker drawings. They were on 20×30 inch paper. They have a very graphic and stark style. I liked them. I thought they had something special about them. Then something derailed my momentum. I can’t even remember what. Just life I guess but I want to go back and make some more of them. That I’ll make happen.

One more thing I want to get done is some acrylic on canvas painting. Sometime in late 2012 I bought about eight to ten 18×24 inch pre-stretched canvases. I wanted them lying around the place so I could pick one up and start a painting anytime. No excuses. I think it was this past summer when I used the last one and I haven’t made a large painting like that since. I need to buy some more of those canvases. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a good deal on them lately. I squirrel away art supplies when I get the extra cash but haven’t been able to do that too much the second half of this year. Oh well, I still have plenty of paper and ink for those large black marker drawings.

On thing I had fun making this Christmas was stickers for my family. Way back in 2011 I bought a Polaroid Pogo printer that made these little stickers. I think the printer failed in the marketplace so I got it cheap. It was a little fun but I never found much use for it. This month I dug it out again and played around with it a bit. I seemed to like the stickers best when I used one of my Photoshop filter recipes to make a photo into a more graphic image. The little two by three inch stickers had more impact that way then as regular photos. That gave me the idea to make some stickers for my mother and sister out of some old family photos. They came out pretty neat. I’m going to have to get some more of that Polaroid Zink sticker paper and make some more stickers.

And that’s it of now. December has officially worn me out. All that running around and hubbub is tiring. It’s time for things to get normal again. Of course routine can wear me down too. But that’s a thought for another day.

It struck me this week that I should write about a single page in my ink-book. That’s what I call my sketchbook since I don’t really sketch in it but draw in ink spontaneously. I draw without initially having an idea of what I’m gonna draw and just start putting lines down and then I make things out of those lines. Well, first I draw a little box and then I draw inside the box. But this isn’t so much about how I made the page but what I see when I look at it as it relates to how I might uses the drawings.

This page is number forty from this year’s ink-book. I drew it on 5/15/2013. There are nine boxes on this page. Sometimes I draw seven boxes, sometimes eight, sometimes nine. I’ve drawn fewer boxes than that on a page too but these days it seems to be one of those three numbers.

Box 1 – This is one of my basic portrait type drawings. A face and upper body of a person. He’s got some crazy stringy hair and is wearing a decorated outfit. This is the type of drawing I’d pick out and turn into a 5×7 inch marker or gouache drawing. I like to do small decorative portrait like stuff at that size. I could also go a little bit bigger and make it into a painting along the lines of an old religious icon painting.

Box 2 – A weird and vague figure drawing. This one is mostly using the human figure as a design element within a geometric structure. I like using geometric shapes in my art and that is what this one is all about. It exists in a very shallow and modernist space. Though I like this little drawing I’d have to do a lot of work to turn it into something finished.

Box 3 – This one almost exists in a landscape but not quite. I’ve made some drawings similar to this theme. A small figure paired with a monumental figure in a landscape. It’s a weird little niche of mine that I like to use every now and then but this particular little drawing doesn’t do it for me. The large figure is a bit obscure and confusing and the landscape is almost not there. Once again this is one that would take a lot of work. But they are only small sketches to begin with.

Box 4 – This is another fairly common theme of mine. A close up on a cropped face with a second figure behind. The face is fairly standard but that figure is pretty darned whimsical. I’m not quite sure what it is. Are those four arms or a cape? And his head is glowing or some such. This drawing intrigues me. That might be enough to make me try and turn it into something. I’d have to add more height to it though.

Box 5 – Weird little creature and a fancy background. I like the designs in this one and think I could turn it into a finished piece easier than most. That his arms and legs are hidden under some sort of cloak makes for a tighter design. That could be good or bad but with all the crazy stuff going on in the background I think it’s good.

Box 6 – One of my weird faces. I like drawing crazy faces. I use them for drawings, paintings, and prints. I could easily make this one into something. Sometimes I draw faces and make them into large finished ink drawings that may or may not be used in another piece. I can never have enough weird face drawings.

Box 7 – This one is more of a half figure than a portrait. It’s okay. Mildly interesting. I like the face with the spikes coming out of the chin and the horns around the head. I could work with that collar and chest piece too but the shirt and arms have nothing going on in them. They’re blanks that I’d have to start from scratch with. Overall the top half is good and the bottom half is, eh.

Box 8 – This one is reminiscent of box two except now with a full figure and a little more of a landscape background. The pointy-footed posed doesn’t do much for me so I’d have to find a way to make it work. Or maybe it’s the hips that I don’t like. It’s hard to tell. And the design elements aren’t as strong as in boxes two and five. This might be the weakest one on the page. I’m guessing it’s destined to never be made into anything but you never know.

Box 9 – The final one is really weird. I didn’t notice until I gave it a second look that it’s a giant head/mask on top of a woman’s waist and hips. In glancing at it I didn’t like it but now it’s growing on me. There might be an idea there. I’m not sure exactly what and I think she’ll need some arms but maybe this will at least spark something.

So that’s my process. This page is from book fourteen. I fill up one of these 5.5 x 8.5 times a hundred page sketchbooks a year with drawings. When the calendar turns to January I’ll be starting a new one. It takes from an hour to a hour and a half to draw one of these pages. So that means I get about eight pages a month drawn. That takes a bit of doing. Sometimes they come easy and sometimes not but in the end I have to do them either way. That way when I want to find something to draw I can grab one of my sketchbooks off my shelf and look through them for something that catches my eye. Just like I looked at this page. It’s weird too because sometimes I realize I must have had a really good day in the past because I’ll use three or four drawings from a single page while the pages around it have yielded nothing. Easy or hard it’s a method that works well for me.

I’m tired of writing about my art this week since that has been my year long task. Now I’m going to take a moment to write about some video games. I have no real reason for writing about them except that’s the subject that crossed my mind as I’ve been playing a few of them lately. These days I tend to play all of my video games on the iPad. I’ve owned enough videos game systems over the decades that I’d need at least two hands to count them all but since I bought my iPad 2 that has been what I primarily play on. I still have my X-Box hooked up and running but I mostly use that to watch TV with. It’s networked to my Mac and so I can play video files that on on my computer through my X-Box which is hooked up to my TV. Now I play games on the iPad while I watch TV via my X-Box.

My number one game for at least the last year has been one called “Subway Surfer”. It’s a game that falls into the “Endless Runner” category where you control a character that is constantly running. There is no stopping just jumping and dodging. I played a whole lot of different types of endless runners before settling on “Subway Surfer” as my favorite of them. “Temple Run” was the first of them and I played that one for a good long while. The main difference between the two games is that with “Temple Run” you tilt the iPad left and right to make the character turn while in “Subway Surfer” you swipe with your finger left or right to make your character turn. At first I enjoyed the tilting of the iPad but it soon got tedious. I prefer the swiping of my thumb these days. It’s a smaller and easier to make and control movement.

I must have played at least half a dozen different endless runners over the last year but none of them was better than “Subway Surfer”. One of the main reasons that I like it is that is stops speeding up after a certain point. With a lot of arcade style video games they have the same basic gameplay except they speed it up round by round until the game becomes impossible to play. “Subway Surfer” does speed up but not to the point of impossibility. I usually play the game for about ten minutes at a time but if I really wanted to I could go on and on with a single game. I played for half an hour straight late last week just because it was relaxing me. Games that speed up to the point of impossibility don’t relax me.

A game that I’ve been playing the last couple of weeks is a puzzle game called “Harmony”. It’s a fun little game where you move squares of different colors around the screen to try and get them to line up in a certain amount of moves. Though I like the game I find its attempts at making money rather crass. First off it’s a pay game. It only costs 99¢ which isn’t much but I still don’t expect pay games to want me to spend even more money. Especially since they want you to pay money for undoes and to skip levels. They want 99¢ for ten undoes and $5 to make the button to skip levels work. That’s crazy. Right now if I’m trying to figure out the puzzle and I make a mistake I have to start over. If I want the convenience of an undo I have to pay for them individually. I like the game but that’s insane. I’ll just start over thank you.

I’ve played a couple of other games this year that I’ve liked but were, to me, ultimately flawed. “One was Riptide GP2”, a racing game, and the other was “Block Fortress”, a tower defense strategy game. I liked both of them but ultimately there was a game mechanic I didn’t like. It’s a common game mechanic and it’s called “Leveling Up”. That’s when when play a game and as you go along you gain experience points and money and use that stuff to get bigger, stronger, and faster. That sounds okay but usually plays out in a boring way. At first you start out and you’re not strong enough. Then you manage to win a few hard fought races or battles, gain some points, and start to be competitive. After that the game is easy until you move up to the next level of competition. Then you’re starting out again not strong enough. Lather, rinse, repeat until bored. Like I said I enjoyed both of those games until I got bored having to compete in too many races that were too easy so I could gain points or races too hard until I leveled up.

A lot of “Endless Runners” are not games that you finish. You run for the sake of running. But not all of them are like that. I played one called “Rock Runners” that was fun. It’s basically a side-scroller except you can’t stop your character. He keeps on running. You run and jump and avoid obstacles and clear levels. That’s how it’s like a typical side-scroller. You run through a whole level and that level is cleared and over. I had enough fun with this one that I played it until the end. I cleared all the level there were to clear. Fun game.

One final game of note is another “Endless Runner” called “Ski Safari”. Like “Rock Runners” it’s a side scroller except there are no levels to clear. You just keep going as long as you can. Except that unlike “Subway Surfer” where you can play forever as long as you don’t screw up in “Ski Safari” all of your little mistakes add up after a while and a giant avalanche comes from behind and gets you. It’s not quite the “Speeds up until it’s not humanly possible to play” model but close. It’s not humanly possible to play it as perfectly as you would need to in order to continue. But still it’s a fun game. There are a lot of different boards, settings, characters, and power-ups to keep things interesting and I still dig this one out when I get tired of the zen of subway surfing.

I have to mention one other game that I spent a dollar on. It was a game where you guide a ball down a winding track by tilting the iPad from side to side. The game is called “Impossible” and for me it was just that. I could make two or three turns before the ball would fall off the track. I was really bad at it and don’t play it much. I guess I should have payed attention to the name.

As I was thinking of pieces to write about for this week I remembered a series of words and images I did a while ago. According to the dates on the computer files I have of them I made these back in July of 1997. Those look like the dates I finished them so I guess I was working on this series of drawing all through the first half of 1997. There are sixty four drawing in the series all together. They’re from my “Mail Art” series. I think I had only just heard of the concept of “Mail Art” back in those days. That’s basically when you make a piece of art and mail it to someone. I read about a lot of people who were into it and the marks that got on the piece of art in transit all become part of the art so they said. I kind of though it would be cool to mail pictures to friends.

In looking back at these images I’m remembering what paper they were drawn on. Marvel Comics scrap bristol. These were days I was working in the production bullpen at Marvel. One of the things comic book companies do is have special drawing paper printed up with blue line guides on them to give the artists to work on. This way the artists drew things the correct size. The paper is called bristol board and the paper company would print three sheets of 11×17 inch paper on one sheet of 22×28 inch paper. After the three sheets were cut apart that would leave a single sheet of 5×11 inch bristol left over. Those scraps got shipped to the Marvel offices with the 11×17 inch paper. Since there was no official use for the scrap paper and yet it was still good drawing paper everyone in the office would get some and make drawings on them. I must have used a thousand sheets of that scrap bristol over the years. Anyway that is the paper that I drew these pictures on. Two to a sheet.

The original drawings are small: about 3.5×4 inches. With the words added on they become about 5×4 inches. I have no idea why I chose this size. It’s an odd almost square size. If I were making them today I think I would make them 4×6 or some other standard size. 1997 Jared may have had an explanation but I don’t. These are also the early days of Photoshop for me. I had probably been working in it for about two years at this point and I don’t see too many novice coloring habits in them but I can see some.

I was also using my early Surrealist automatic drawing method to make these drawings. I would draw the box first which would define the boundaries of the composition, close my eyes, scribble on the paper with a pencil, and then open my eyes and see what I could find and draw in those scribbles. It’s a way of making images that would be hard to make with the conscious mind.

The first two I’m going to look at are Mail Art numbers 20 and 19. I must have scanned them in together since they were on the same sheet of paper and never separated them when I colored them. Once again I don’t know why I did this but why separate them now? Number 20 is a nude woman in front of a rock. Who doesn’t like a nude? She is the main interest in this drawing but the rock has some nice bold brush work in it to beef things up. There is some Photoshop “Add Noise” texture in the rock to give the piece a little more visual interest. Those parallel lines in the back are not computer generated but made with my Haff hatching machine. It’s like a little t-square arm that you press a lever on and the arm moves down that exact amount. So if you set it for three millimeters and press the lever the arm moves down exactly three millimeters. That makes it easy to make parallel line patterns. Number 19 is a man riding a monster steed. It’s kind of creepy looking. The background is one of my sky/fence/grass motifs and its boringness makes the main figures a little more strange. That thing’s teeth match the color of its tail. Weird.

The second sheet of drawings holds numbers 33 and 34. Number 33 is a baseball player. I haven’t drawn many baseball players in my day but here is one. A pitcher pitching. It’s pretty straight forward except for the strange grip he has on the ball. That seems to be the hidden centerpiece of the drawing. Everything else looks fairly mundane to me except for its leaving me with the question, “What kind of weird pitch is he about to throw?”. The colors are light and basic with a little bit of airbrushing thrown in. It’s all sunny day calm except that grip on the ball. Number 34 is a dog flying a kite.For some reason that seems more normal to me than the pitcher. The drawing of the dog doesn’t have a ton of detail in it but the Add Noise texture makes up for that. The background is also bland but I like the black sky. All in all this one seems like a typical weird drawing of mine.

The final sheet we’ll look at contains numbers 45 and 46. This is a latter one and I can see my latter vector coloring style starting to emerge in number 45. A woman’s head with some kind of necklace around her neck. It’s colored not with any gradations but by creating shapes out of three different values of color. It looks fairly clumsily done to my eye because I went on to use this technique a lot more and got better at what shapes I created from my colors. Still it has its charms. And a pattern in the background. Number 46 continues this pattern theme as I put some stripes on the car and in the background. This kind of unites the two areas but not really. Leaving the windshield a solid color is the key to getting the right amour of separation. And it’s a man driving a funny car. That is not a car I could ever draw without the Surrealist method.

I haven’t looked at these in a while. My website has a section on them when, years later, I made them into individual pieces and typed out the words but I like these original versions best.

I think it’s that time of year again when I look back on what Fall TV I’ve been watching. I tend to watch two hours of TV a night. That’s without commercials so I’m talking about two hour shows and one half an hour show. Or some combination of that. I know people who watch a lot more than that but to me it seems like two hours a night is a lot. There a bunch of new seasons of old shows that I continue to watch and I don’t have much to say about them except they’re solid. I tend to like quirky detective and police shows so Castle, Bones, The Mentalist, Grimm, and Supernatural are on that list. I also like fast paced and a little out there sit-coms so It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Eastbound and Down, Web Therapy, The Simpsons, and Modern family are on that list. The one reality show I watch is Comic Book Men. Occasionally I also watch old 1970s detective shows. The Rockford Files is my favorite but I’ve also watched Cannon and Banacek lately. Friends and Cheers are my go-to nostalgia sit-coms when I need a pick-me-up. So what is new?

Back in the Game – All of the new sitcoms from last year that I liked got cancelled so I tried a bunch of new sitcoms this year. This is one of them and it’s already been cancelled. It’s an okay show and that’s about as much praise as I can lavish on it. It’s nothing great or revolutionary but James Caan is good in it as the crotchety old father/grandfather. I’m not surprised it got cancelled but I’m sorry to see Caan go. Who doesn’t like to laugh at a crazy violent grandfather?

The Blacklist – I’m a little behind on this one have seen only the first four episodes but I like what I see so far. It’s another variation on the quirky detective genre except this time one half of the detective team in a guy (James Spader) who is a criminal mastermind. For as a yet unexplained reason he turned himself in to the FBI and offered to help them fight crime. He insisted on teaming up with a new female agent for a, once again, unexplained reason. I think this one is doing pretty well in the ratings and it’s a decent show. It’s dark and the criminals they go after are the super-bad ones. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of it so far.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine – This one took a few episodes before I started to like it. It’s a half hour comedy about a precinct of police in Brooklyn NY and has an ensemble cast that stars Andy Samberg who I know only from some of the Saturday Night Live digital shorts that he made. Terry Crews is also in it who is a guy I always find funny. After about ten episodes the cast of characters is starting to gel a bit and it’s much funnier than when it started. There are about eight characters and now that I think about it it’s a bit like Barney Miller. Except they leave the station more often and have more women in the cast. I hope this one grows and lasts.

The Crazy Ones – Sarah Michelle Gellar and Robin Williams star in this show as a father and daughter team of ad executives. It’s better than I thought it would be. I find that Robin Williams can be annoying but here he tends more towards charming in this so that’s a win. Plus the cast of about four other character besides the main two are pretty strong. So far the plots have been fairly unmemorable but there are still laughs to be found. Lot’s of product placement a name dropping as they work in an ad agency and are always mentioning the product campaigns they are working on. We’ll see how it does.

The Michael J Fox Show – I’ve read that some people have a hard time watching this show because of Fox’s Parkinson’s disease. That hasn’t bothered me at all because they just made it part of the show, joke about it, and move on. That and Fox is the best part about the show. He’s as likable as ever. It’s a family comedy but the problem is that most of the family is dull. The little brother, the sister, and the mother/wife are all generic. They don’t have much to do. I like the oldest son. He’s a college age kid who quit college and now has to live at home with his parents. He’s ambitious though and is looking to make his way in the world. Fox also has a sister in the show who lives downstairs and fills the role of the quirky neighbor. She’s pretty generic too. Overall the show is just good enough to watch for a little longer to see if it goes anywhere. But it might get cancelled before that ever happens.

Inside Amy Schumer – A comedy sketch show starring Amy Schumer of course. Like most sketch shows it’s uneven but I found enough funny in it to watch all ten episodes. She’s got lots of stuff in there about sex and relationships and some woman-on-the-street interviews about sex that are funny. I’ll be back for more if there is a next season.

Agents of SHIELD – I’ve heard a lot of complaints and disappointment about this show but it’s okay. I never expected greatness from it so it hasn’t disappointed me and it has steadily gotten better episode by episode. I understand people’s complaints though because it’s a fairly generic show with a cast of young and pretty people. Typical television that there is not a whole lot of character to. But I like a lot of the dialogue if not the plots so I’ll stick with it a little while longer.

Sleepy Hollow – I’ve heard good things about this one. Mainly that it’s a fun show. So far I’ve only seen the first two episodes but I’ll check out some more. There are supernatural monsters, Ichabod Crane (time traveler from the Revolutionary War), and a police officer. I like its straightforward nature. By that I mean there is no “Lost” type “What is really going on here?” mystery that so many shows have copied. We got good guys and monsters trying to take over the world. Sure we don’t know everything about the evil plot and monsters but we know that they’re monsters and therefore will naturally plot evil. No complicated (and boring) mystery within a mystery stuff.

So there is the new stuff I’ve been watching. How much of it will last? Who knows? It already looks bad for the sit-coms.