Radiant Comics

I’ve been inking a bunch of stuff this week. Mostly I’ve been inking stuff that is going towards making my “Organics” comic that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago but I also inked a couple of drawings for prints that I’ve had lying around. That I’ve been inking stuff all week is a sign that I haven’t been able to get a lot of other stuff done. Some weeks are like that. Creativity can run out for a while. Ideas and purpose can disappear. This is a state of affairs that is terrifying for an artist in his or her twenties but is less scary in your forties. When I was young and I thought I lost something I feared it might not come back. As I got older I realized that’s the ebb and flow of things. As much as I want to I can’t always be on. Though no matter what your age it’s still an empty feeling when you search yourself for what you want to do and nothing comes to mind. It’s a good thing I have a lot of old unpurposed drawings lying around that I can always pick up, ink, and at least have the brief feeling of accomplishing something.

Inking is something that I find takes less creative energy than other tasks. The hardest part of figuring out how a drawing is going to work is already done and what is left is finishing the drawing in ink. There is a lot of craft to inking in that I have to figure out which of my various pens and brushes to use and how exactly I want to use them to make the finished drawing. Craft is all about knowing how to make something. I’ve used the tools before, I’ve inked lots of drawings before, and now I have to finish this particular drawing using that knowledge and experience. In a drawing there is more figuring stuff out going on. That’s when things often don’t work so I have to erase and try again. With inking all that is done and I just have to make it look good. Sometimes I don’t have the energy for thinking so much but I can go on a kind of autopilot and do some inking. That’s where I’ve been this week.

Last week I was working on some pages for my new “Organics” comic but I ran out of energy. I had been penciling and inking a bunch of pages based on some of my automatic drawing methods and completed quite a few of them. It was a good run but all runs end. This week I started making some more pages based on a different method. I started digging through my pile of drawing to see what I could find and use for pages. Just like as this week I’ve been inking some weeks I just draw. That’s part of my process. I’ve got a drawer full of somewhere between fifty to seventy five pencil drawings that were finished but never turned into anything. They mostly sit there waiting for me to look through and maybe use one someday.

This week I did uses some. I decided to take a few of the drawings and turn them into comic book pages. Or half pages as things went. I’ve also been trying to incorporate some of my five by seven marker drawings into my new “Organics” comic. I’ve been having some problems figuring out how to do that. All the pages I’m doing are ten by fifteen inches so the smaller marker drawings will just be a piece of that larger page. But I don’t know what the other pieces should be. That’s where this weeks inking has come in. I’ve been picking from my pile of drawings and making those drawings into parts of pages. The problem is that I still haven’t quite figured out how those newly inked panels fit with the marker ones. It’s all a work in progress but still I got some inking done.

I’ve got a few basic inking tools that I’ve been using for years. The main one is a Winsor Newton Series 7 number 3 sable hair brush. This is the classic comic book inker’s brush and I’ve been using it for decades. It’s my favorite. I also use a few pens too. A lot of inkers use a Hunt 102 crow quill pen for inking but I never warmed to that one. I use the much harder to find Gillott 1950 pen. Those are both old fashioned dip pens. You have to dip them in a bottle of india ink to use them. Waterproof india ink is what’s used to ink comics.

I also use a variety of markers for inking. Twenty years ago there weren’t many good markers to ink with and I mostly used technical pens but these days there are a ton of markers with high quality archival waterproof ink in them. I still use one technical pen to ink. It’s one of the larger sized and lays down a thick wet india ink line that I find a marker can’t easily duplicate. All the thinner technical pen lines are easy to duplicate with the much easier to use markers.

I did revive one pen technique this week for these pages. It’s more of a pen modifying technique actually. Y’see I like sign pens. I first started using them years ago with the Pentel Sign Pen but have since found another Japanese brand that I like called Computer Sign Pens. The only problem with them is that the ink they use is not waterproof nor is it archival. They’re not really meant for artwork. Back when I only knew about the Pentel sign pens I used to refill them with india ink. If you pull off the back plug on the pen you an take out the cylindrical sponge inside that holds the ink. Refill that sponge with drops of india ink and the pen will keep on going. At least until the tip eventually wears down. The only problem I had with this method is sometimes the india ink would be too thick to flow through the pen properly over time. Eventually that got a little annoying and I stopped doing it. This week I started doing it again because I recently purchased some technical pen ink. You can use regular india ink in a technical pen, as I had been doing for years, but technical pen ink has a little bit of glycerin in it that acts as a surface tension breaker and makes the ink flow easier through a pen. I used some of this ink in a sign pen and it worked beautifully. It flowed much better than my regular ink. I think I’ll keep doing it.

Art Cards. I’ve made a lot of them. Why? I don’t even know but I liked the concept when I heard of it years ago. Art cards are baseball card sized drawings and paintings. That’s 2.5 by 3.5 inches. They’re also known as sketch cards in some circles. I first heard of them as sketch cards back in 1997 or so. Trading card companies were hiring artists for a couple of bucks a card to make one of a kind sketches that would be randomly included in a pack of cards. That still goes on today but the art cards I make are of a slightly different variety.

It was probably the early 2000s when I first saw the term “Art Cards”. It was used to describe the small baseball card sized pieces of art that artists would make and either trade with other artists or sell to the general public for a few bucks. An Ebay there is a category for it: ACEO. That stands for Art Card Editions and Originals. I thought that was a pretty cool idea so I made a bunch of them. Turns out that no other artists I know ever makes them and no one ever really cared to buy them either. Ahh well, at least I eventually figured out a way to make some comic strips from them. See my “Drifting and Dreaming” strip. I post it on Sundays.

I’ve made all sorts of art cards over the years. Pencil drawings, ink drawings, marker drawings, watercolor drawings, and even a couple of colored pencil drawings. I almost never work in colored pencil. They seem to fall into two general categories: Ones I make for sale and ones I just make. What’s the difference you ask if I never actually manage to sell any? Well with the made to sell ones I draw things that other people seem to be interested in: pretty women, super heroes, and random pop culture characters. The other ones that I make are just me drawing whatever I want to at the moment. A lot of my usual weird stuff goes on in them.

One of the reasons that I still make art cards is that I’ve got the paper. I often work on paper that’s 11×17 inches. That’s a standard size for drawing comics on so I got used to working at that size. Plus that size paper fits on my scanner and in my printer so that I can scan in and print out my drawings in blue line at that size. Except the pads of bristol paper that I buy are 14×17 inches. I always cut that paper down to 11×17 and end up with an extra 3×17 inch piece of paper. For years I couldn’t figure out what to do with all those extra long and narrow strips and ended up tossing most of them out eventually. Now I cut them up into art card size pieces. As an old by-hand paste up artist I’m used to working with an X-Acto knife and a straight edge so it’s easy for me. I’ve got lots and lots of pieces of 2.5×3.5 inch pieces of bristol now so I may as well draw on them. And I do.

I weird though because not all of my usual habits apply to making art cards. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Usually I’m a methodical artist. I start at the beginning with step one and then go through all the necessary steps to complete a piece. Sometimes I do that with art cards. I decide to make a bunch of them and go about doing it. I decide on the medium, draw some out, maybe ink them, and then maybe color them. But that’s not always how it goes. Often I’ll pick up a pencil or a pen and just draw one. Then it’ll sit there unfinished for weeks until I decide to put some color on it. Some never get finished and get thrown away because I don’t like them. They’re not all winners. Art cards sit around unfinished for longer than any other of my paintings or drawings.

I’ve developed a few different art card styles or themes over the years. The first one that leaps to mind is my orange/blue/black drawings. I happened to have three markers that ended up in my desk tray. Most of my markers have places in my sets or groups of markers but these three didn’t: an orange retractable Shaprie, a black thin lined drawing pen, and a Tahitian blue Copic marker. Since they were always sitting there I stared doing some art card drawing with those three colors. I never would have thought of that color scheme on my own but it ended up working. I’ve made a few drawing with those three pens.

The next odd little theme that leaps to mind is my green paper drawings. Way back in 2005 I bought an iPod shuffle. It came in a bright green box. I liked the color and paper it was made out of so I cut up the box into art card size pieces and made a few drawings on them. The paper was coated so it was super smooth and the green was really strong so those art cards were as much gimmick as anything else but they came out okay. I think I still have a few more pieces of that paper. I’ve cut up all different papers into art cards including black mat board but in the end I rarely draw on anything but the bristol.

Art cards are one of the few places where I’ve done finished pencil drawings. Usually pencil is just a stage of a drawing that I make and eventually the finished piece will be in paint or ink. I don’t do many finished pencil drawings because of that. Some art cards I set out to do a finished pencil. It was interesting. They’re not magnificent or anything but not bad.

So there are some unfocused ramblings on art cards. The cards taken as a group tend to be unfocused so I think that’s appropriate. Since I number the backs of them I know how many I’ve done and it’s 937. They may be unfocused but that sure is a lot of them.

Words and pictures. That’s been my path. I don’t always have words in my pictures but I often do. My comics always do, my prints often do, and my paintings sometimes do. I like the way words and pictures work together to create a unique space in my head. A space that either one of them alone can’t create. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a new words and pictures thing. On my iPad of all things.

I bought my iPad back in the fall of 2011. It’s an iPad 2. I got it because I though it had some creative potential in the area of photography. Since I digitized all of my negatives years before and have been carrying them around on my iPod touch since 2007 using the iPad as a photo album was a no-brainer. But there was a hitch. Y’see I’m picky about the presentation of my photos. I hate looking through bad snapshot photography so I took the time to edit all of my photos before I put them on the iPod touch. I didn’t do a ton of editing on them but I cropped them and made them presentable. The problem was that the iPad was a much higher resolution than the iPod touch so all the photos I prepared were no longer presentable. Youch!

Since I didn’t want to re-edit all those photos again I just dumped my raw scan master copies onto the iPad. They weren’t nearly as presentable and I had to start using one of Apple’s photo management programs, which I don’t like, to handle all the photos so the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. The iPad never became the creative tool that I hoped it would be and I mostly ignored it as a photo album too. That is until recently.

Over the past nearly two years I’ve been buying or trying out lots of photo apps for the iPad. Some, like Hipstamatic, help in taking photos and some, like Snapseed, are about editing photos. Since the iPad 2 has a really bad still camera I haven’t taken a lot of photos with it and therefore don’t use the photo-taking apps all that much. It’s the photo editing apps that I’m most interested in. Since I’ve been working in Photoshop on my computer for almost twenty years I know my way around a photo editing software pretty well. There is not a huge learning curve for me but most photo editing apps didn’t offer me much. They seemed to do one gimmicky thing and that was about it. I’d get a new app, try it out, figure out what it could do, and then it would sit there. Then a few weeks ago I finally hit some kind of tipping point.

As I said before I like words and pictures together and that’s what I’ve been doing with some of my old photos. I’m an everyday moment snapshot photographer. Since the late 80’s I’ve been taking pictures of my friends at our social events and in everyday life. Those are all the photos that are on my iPad. I’ve been taking them and pairing them with some words. We’re all familiar with what “Memes” look like these days and my photos and words look like that except prettier and not seeping into the publics consciousness. I post them on Facebook for my friends to see but the point isn’t for them to somehow go viral. They’re for my friends and I to enjoy.

I use about six different apps to make the photos but I don’t use them all at the same time. Snapseed, now Google Snapseed, was one of the early ones I like and still one of the best. It has all sorts of filters and you can easily make basic adjustments and use special effects. It’s such a good program that Google bought it. I also use Etchings and ToonCamera which are photo-filter programs that kind of just do one thing. They make photos look like etchings or cartoons as the names imply. I recently got two pretty good masking programs, PopAGraph and ColorSplash, that help mask out photos so that color or effects can be applied to specific areas rather than the whole photo. I’ve been messing with them a bit this week.

The two apps that put me over the top were “Over” and “Tangent”. “Over” is the program that I use for putting the words on top of my photos. It’s a nice app. It gives me all sorts of controls over the type and is easy to use. “Tangent” is the one that I seem to like best. It’s an app that lets you put colored patterns on top of photos using various masks and opacities. This program was a bit more unfamiliar to me than all the rest and it took me a little while to get the hang of it but after I did I really liked it. You can take a circular mask and add a dot pattern outside or inside the circle, make the dot pattern a color, scale the pattern up or down, and change the opacity of the color. Since I like pattern and color it helps me add areas of visual interest to my photos. I try to use it subtly since it can easily overwhelm a photo and that’s not what I want.

One side effect of me using all these photo editing apps is that after ignoring them for years I’m actually looking at all my old photos. That’s fun. I flip through the photos on the iPad until I find one that interests me and then I spend a few minutes editing it with whichever apps I think will work. It doesn’t take a ton of time and mostly I do it when I’m sitting down taking a break. I then come up with a caption for it. Sometimes that takes a few minutes and sometimes a few days. Thankfully it’s usually closer to minutes. I drop the type on and post about one a day on Facebook right from the iPad.

It’s taken a while but this is what I originally thought I’d be able to do with my iPad. I didn’t expect it to replace my computer and Photoshop but I hoped to be able to find something creative the iPad was good at doing. I can edit photos in a fun and easy way with it. Someday I’ll get a newer iPad with a better camera and then I hope to find something similar in the way of taking pictures. Until then I’ll stick with this.

Once again I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing. Seems like I’m always doing that in one way or another but this week I’m talking about making comic books. I’ve been making comic strips and my Message Tee comics for a few years now but I haven’t made and comic book material in a decade or so. It comes down to the fact that it’s too much work for something I won’t get paid for and I’d rather spend that time on other projects. I think I have more to say with my painting and prints. Still, over the years, I’ve attempted to figure out a way to make some comic book stories that say something unique and don’t wear me out making them. I’ve never quite done that.

This week my interests in making comics were revived once again but the revival was because of comics I made in the past. About fifteen to twenty years ago I used to do a comic that I called “Organics”. They were all eight to ten page stories and they were weird. They were non-literal comics. By that I mean the pictures didn’t match the words.

I used to make the comics by first ruling out the panel borders on ten pages. Then I would scribble in pencil all over the paper. After that I would look into the scribbles and draw what I would see. It was sort of like finding faces in clouds. This was my way of using “Surrealist Automatic Drawing” to make comics and, I think, the first time I used that method of drawing extensively.

After drawing all the pages in this way I’d put them all in front of me and look at them. Then I’d put them in the order I wanted them to go in and I’d find the story that went along with the pages. The story was always some sort of narrative but there was no literal connection with the pictures. I tried to connect the stories with the rhythm of the pictures and make something that was different than usual. I liked them but most people didn’t get it at all. A few people liked them but most people didn’t relate to them. Eventually I grew disinterested and stopped using that method.

This week I decided to give it a try again. I was tired of drawing like I’ve drawn for the last ten years or so. That’s been mostly spontaneous small marker drawings, then pencil drawings, followed by ink/paint/marker. I decided to go back to finding faces in the clouds. Part of it was also me wanting to make some comics and remembering a time when I made some unique comics that weren’t a huge struggle. They were the ones I could do without worrying if they were good enough because people didn’t get them anyway. I wanted to be able to draw without thinking as much as as usually do yet also get something finished.

I’m still not sure if, in the end, I’ll have anything finished but I did pencil and ink two pages of my new Organics. I ruled panel borders for two pages, scribbled all over them, drew what I saw in the scribbles, and then inked the pages. I even partially wrote them. I was writing stuff down on index cards of all things as I was going along. I only have part of the story but that’s more than I’ve had in ages.

I also stumbled onto some of my past failed attempts and I think I can work some of that in too. I found a couple of pages from last year where I tried to make another new Organics strip that I completely forgot about. Instead of using my old method I tried making up pages by drawing spontaneous ink drawing as I often do. The pages were more literal than my old Organics one but still not wholly literal. I can see that I was trying to figure out a way to do them efficiently because they’re on 9×12 inch paper rather than my usual 11×17 inch paper. I didn’t like them in the end and stopped after finishing just two pages. I still don’t like the way I finished them but I see something in the early stages. I think I can go back and work them into something that can work with the two new pages I did.

Another idea that the non-literal nature of Organics opened up for me is to tie in some of my other weird drawings that have no place to go. I have a lot of finished ink drawings that never even got made into prints. One of them that I made last week was sitting on my easel and I thought that maybe I can make it into some sort of splash page for my Organics story. I’m not sure how but I think it can be done. I have a lot of orphaned stuff to choose from. I’m going to continue to draw some new pages but also think about where to put old things.

One more thing that has leapt to prominence with this new Organics work is my little red sketchbook project. I made little red drawings in my little red sketchbook last year and then last month tried to write a story that went with it. It didn’t quite work out how I wanted it to and I abandoned the story. I haven’t come up with a new one yet but I came up with an idea to tie the sketchbook drawings into my new Organics story. It’s not what I had planned for the little red sketchbook but I think it might work. We’ll see.

That’s where this whole project is at right now. It’s in the “We’ll see” phase. But I drew two pages. That proved to me that I will get an eight page story done. I’m not sure if any of my other ideas will get incorporated but I will get eight pages done. I’m sure of that now. That’s the surest I’ve been about making a comic book story in a decade.

Here is something I have done yet in writing about my art. I’m going to write about a painting that I finished just a few hours ago. My freshest one. It’s an 18×24 inch painting that is done in acrylic paint on stretched canvas. It’s the last canvas in a set of six blank canvases of that size that I bought last year. I haven’t made a painting this size in a few months (they’ve been small ones lately) and I decided to just dive in and paint before I lost the habit entirely. That’s what happens sometimes when I lose the ambition to make larger paintings. I have to decide one day to put everything else aside and do one otherwise I fear I’ll never do one again.

For this one I picked an image that I had already worked up a drawing for. I made the drawing a while ago, on 12/28/2011 to be exact, and it’s been sitting near the top of my pile of drawings because it’s one I like. It’s called “The Left Rotor”. I’ve seen the drawing so many times as I’ve flipped through the pile that it’s really familiar to me. I may have even done another small piece with it but I cant remember. It could be that it’s so familiar that I think I did something else with it. It’s a drawing of a masked face. Or half a face, if you will, because we don’t get to see the whole thing. Half of the face/mask is covered with hair or is cut of by the end of the canvas. There is a big eye on the mask/face so this is one of my paintings that is looking back at the viewer. The eye might be on the mask of might be looking through the mask. It’s unclear.

Since I had the drawing all worked out already I just had to make a color sketch of it. I do that on the computer these days so it’s easy to try different colors. Since this painting had mostly large shapes in it the color sketch went quickly. A blue mask, green hair, pink skin, a purple shirt, and brown eyes. And let’s not forget those red lips. Nothing too complicated there. After that I transferred the drawing to the canvas by use of a grid. I draw a grid on the drawing and draw a grid on the canvas. Then I use all those little boxes as a guide map for drawing the same thing only bigger.

The painting process starts easily enough. First I take a brush and dark purple paint and paint over the lines of the drawing on the canvas. After that dries I fill in the various shades of different colors from my color sketch. It’s sort of the same as coloring in a coloring book at this point. I even type on top of my digital color sketch what paints I used for what color. That helps me if I have to go back and fix something. I have about six different shades of green paint mixed and I can’t always tell exactly what shade I used the day before on any given area. Paint is a slightly different color in its wet and dry states and more than once I’ve put a brush stroke of the wrong shade in the wrong area before I started always keeping track.

I’ve heard it said before that a painting should look finished at every stages it passes through. I think that’s total crap since why would anyone ever finish a painting then? If it looks just as finished after three hours as thirty then why ever paint for thirty? That and at this stage in the process my painting looks its absolute worst. I’ve been worrying about getting the basic color down and right and not in making it look finished. If I were to try and make it look finished at this stage it would take three times the time and all that work would be covered up as I actually finished it.

Now is when the the middle part comes. I’m not quite finishing things yet but I’m getting there. First I build up the base layers of paint a little more to get the opaqueness that I want and then I work on the lines. I stared with a purple line but I don’t want to end with one. I lay down orange, blue, red, and whatever other color lines I like down next to the purple ones. They cease being lines that just hold a shape and become a bit of a shape themselves. It’s almost becomes a blurring of the edges technique not because anything is blurry but because which edge is “The” edge becomes a question. At one point the pink edge seems to be “The” edge and at another point it’s the purple one. I’m also working and reworking the areas of color at this time where they interact with the edges of the line. Sometimes I get overzealous with those lines and they have to be knocked back.

The final part of the painting is all those little brush strokes of color that sit on top. I think I developed those because acrylic paint doesn’t have the same texture as oil paint. When I paint in oil I use the texture of the paint a lot as part of the painting but acrylic doesn’t hold a brush stroke in the same way. So instead I somehow ended up using these tiny brush strokes of color to be the texture of the painting. Figuring out where they all go can be a bit tiring because it takes a while.

I really don’t have a describable technique for figuring out where they go because it’s mostly me looking. I look at the painting and see where it needs some brush strokes of color. Oddly enough the process is usually linear. I see a place to put down a series of green brush strokes so that’s what I do and then I look again and the place to put down a series of blue brush strokes jumps out at me. This goes on for a couple of days. When I’m in the middle of it I always wonder if I’ll know when to stop but I always do. I stop when no more places to put color jump out at me. It’s an odd thing but this is the improvisational part of the painting.

So that’s the painting I finished this afternoon. Not much to say about the image since it’s similar to many of mine except that in a painting like this I have to pay special attention to the eye. I used a bit of a different technique on it than usual and I like the way it came out. If the eyes and lips don’t work on a face like this it all falls apart. I kept the lips simple and the eye complex. I think that worked out okay.