Radiant Comics

This week I’m going to write about a painting that I just took off of my wall. It’s an 10×8 inch acrylic on canvas painting called “Dropped and Dragged”. It’s dated 7/10/09 and though it has been one of the paintings that hang on my wall I don’t think I’ve given it a thought since I finished it. I don’t know why that is. It’s probably my habit of always thinking about the next piece rather than the ones I’ve already finished. I guess this bit of writing is reversing that habit. At least for the time it takes to write this.

This was never one of my favorite images that I’ve come up with but as I look at it now I like it. It’s not really about a face as the face takes up less of the composition than is usual for one of my face paintings and it’s not so much about the body as the body is much more hunched and formless than many I have painted. So what is it about? It seems to me to be mostly about shape and color.

The first color that strikes me is the yellow background. It’s an unusual choice for a sky but it works well with the two tone orange sun that is on the right. The yellow continues the idea of the sun in the sky except in this case the sun is the sky. That little triangle of yellow on the left is what really completes the idea of the yellow being the sky. The color yellow is the brightest color in this painting and makes the background move forward in space more than one usually does. That makes the figure look like it’s sunk into the sky. That is an interesting bit of yellow.

The pink face is a shade less bright than the yellow but due to it’s position far from the mass of the yellow it sits forward in space without fighting with the yellow. The face is rooted in place solidly and hangs on as the only thing in the painting that my eye sees as undoubtably real. The rest of the painting tends to slide towards abstraction but the face remains real.

There is a lot of color in this one to look at. A lot going on. It’s not easy to make all those colors play nice together and I think the key to it all is only having a small bit of red. Aside from following my “Always make the lips red” rule the rest of the painting has none. Even the orange is toned down. The full strength orange of the sun is in a cage of purple, blue, and green and up in a corner. This is the strongest orange but it’s under control. The orange on the shirt has been toned down to almost brown and placed next to an actual brown to give it a visual anchor. The dots of orange on top link it to the sun without being overpowering. Color dots are goof foe that.

Blue and purple, being next to each other on a color wheel, are analogous colors. This means that the play well with one and other and blend into each other. Not that I’m doing any blending here but the blue and purple form an arch over the top of the brown/orange shirt. It’s a main thrust of the painting but a subtle one. The colors don’t leap out at you as the pink and yellow do. They sit back and form the main visual shape of the painting. The field of blue under the face is an interesting bit of color. It flattens out. The rest of the drawing follows some simple rules of perspective and makes a relatively real figure but the blue collar stands up where is isn’t supposed to. It changes the space in a way that I like. In a world where things are obviously not real some things are even less real than others.

The green hair is on its own. It has the same grey scale value as most of the blue around it and that helps it not stand out but it still does a little bit. That’s its point. It’s a little bit different than the rest of the painting but not so much that it calls out for too much attention. It plays a little bit of the game with the red lips that complimentary colors do when near each other. Complimentary colors fight for attention in our eyes and can make you bounce between them. That happens here but not as much as if there were more of the two colors.

The final parts to this painting are the dots and brush strokes of color. They get put on last and sit on top of everything including the black line. Mostly they are made up of the same colors already used in the painting but in this case one more color is introduced. The blue/green strokes on the left and throughout the person’s shirt. This new color brings everything into balance for me. It links the analogous greens and blues and makes all the colors play nice together. The color lines are there, in general, the help things out. They emphasize shapes and create gestures for the eye to follow. The brush strokes and dots become part of the decorative, abstract, and painterly nature of a painting but the strokes of color are more specific. They go in specific places as opposed to the brush strokes which can take up the whole top or side of a painting.

One final thing about this painting. The three purple boxes on the upper right are odd in that they nearly disappear to me. They are part of the cage that locks the orange sun in place but I barely notice them. They do their job and stay in the background. Sometimes you needs stuff that does that.

I like to write about the small things. The things in life that get forgotten. That’s what I wrote about on this blog for many years. A small incident here and there, a bike ride, an idea or observation I had about something, some TV shows that I watch, and something about whatever I happen to be working on. It might not be what most people are interested in but I like the small things that make up life. It’s a strange process coming up with things to write about though. Like any other writer I have often found myself wondering what I was going to write about for any given week. That’s not an uncommon thought as you often hear writers wondering where their next idea is coming from. People are also forever asking creative types, “Where do you get your ideas from?”. The answer is that you have to think them up. There is no reservoir of ideas to pull from besides your own brain.

This year I turned off my usual path of writing about the small things to write about my art. I figured it was about time I did. I wanted to write some stuff down before I forget it all. Nobody was asking me about it but that’s why I thought I’d write it down. I’m likely to forget long before anyone asks me about my work. But once again I was faced with that question, “What am I going to write about this week?”. It took me a while to figure out how to write about my art. Back in January I was struggling with where to even begin. I do a lot of different things and am not well known for any of them so I could start anywhere. I eventually decided on stating with the basics, drawing, and moved on from there to cover most of the mediums that I work in.

Now I’ve got it down when it comes to writing about my art. I know where to start and I know where to go. I have an idea on how things all tie together. It’s a good feeling to know that I can figure things out like that. I can take a random piece of mine from years ago, analyze it, and stick it into some sort of context with the rest of my work. It’s nothing I had even thought out to a large extent before. That’s what writing about things does for me. It lets me think about things and then organize my thoughts into something cohesive.

This week a funny thing happened on the way to me doing my writing for the week. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write about another piece of mine or take a break and get back to the type of blog writing that I had done in the past. I decided to sit back and rack my brain a little bit about the small things in life to see if I could come up with a suitable topic. That’s when I realized I was out of practice and couldn’t remember how to do that. The process was gone.

Writing about my art and writing about life turned out to be two different processes that worked differently. My art writing has turned into a matter of looking for a piece to write about, putting that piece in context, discussing a bit of its history, writing about technique, figuring out my intentions, and figuring out what the piece might be saying. That’s after all the stuff I had written about the mediums I work in generally.

Writing about everyday small things is a whole different beast. In order to do that I have to be more active about it. Sort of the old newspaper columnists question of “Can I get a column out of this?”. Since I’m writing about the small things that seem destined to be forgotten that doesn’t mean that I’m going out on adventures looking for stuff to write about but it does mean that I always have to have my eyes and mind open to let in things that I might write about. I have to notice how my socks are wearing out differently these days. Is it me or the socks? I have to notice that my bin of dice that I pick up dice from and arrange them as if they were a zen garden is getting too cluttered for me to see the dice properly. I have to notice that my comic book buying habits have changed in the last year and I’ve barely gotten hardcover collection this year yet have picked up many new monthly series.

Any one of those casual observations could turn into some sort of blog for me. But I have to notice them. When writing about such stuff for years that portion of my brain was always on the look out. Sometimes I’d have to turn it on though. I’d have nothing in mind for the week, turn on my brain, and then come up with something in a little while. Sometimes I’d even sit down with no idea what to write and see if something would appear. It often did. I have never been afraid that no ideas would come but I’d be afraid that they wouldn’t show up when I wanted them to. That has happened too. I sit down to write something, even if I had an idea, and nothing good would come out. That’s when I know to stop and come back later. Usually things will be better later.

I had forgotten this whole process this year. The different process of writing about my art pushed it out of my mind. I sat down to write about some small thing and nothing was there. I couldn’t figure out where my ideas had gone. It was weird. All I could think about was analysis. I eventually cleared that out of my mind and tried to get back to my mindset of small life observations. It took a while. I still not sure if both processes can play well together. We’ll see.

I’ve written before about how I’m a sketchbook junkie. I like books in general, I like drawing, and so I like making books of drawings. It’s not as easy as you’d think though. It’s not always the best choice to make a drawing in a book rather than on a sheet of paper. I’d say it’s usually the wrong choice. I have my inkbook sketchbooks that I’ve been drawing in for years. Those are simple enough in that I draw little ink drawings in them. Each 5.5×8.5 inch book has a hundred pages in it and it takes me a year to fill one. But I also have about a half dozen other sketchbooks for various tasks at any given time. Those tasks take a while and a sketchbook usually doesn’t get finished until it finds its specific purpose. Some never find a purpose.

I have a couple of blank sketchbooks that have been sitting on my shelf for about a year. I bought them both just because they were cool and I thought that, maybe, I could find a use for them. That’s what a sketchbook needs for me to fill it up. A use. The first of these two is an 8×5 inch watercolor sketchbook. It’s a beautiful book. It has a hardcover but opens up nice and flat and is filled with good watercolor paper. It’s made for traveling around and doing watercolor sketches in. Except I never do that. It’s such a cool book though I’ll have to find something to do in it. That’s what I keep telling myself.

The second sketchbook is a small but thick 3×4 inch sketchbook. I’m really not sure what I could ever use it for but it was only a few bucks so I threw it in with the rest of a big art supply order. It doesn’t open up very flat but is easy to carry. I’m sure it would have been more useful in my commuting days.

In checking on my shelf for these two sketchbooks I notice two more blank ones that I forgot about. One is a 5.5×3.5 inch watercolor sketchbook just like the bigger one I remembered I had. Once again this would come in more handy if I did watercolors on the road but I don’t. The forth sketchbook is a “Mixed Media Visual Journal”. It’s 5.5×8 inches, has a spiral binding, and is filled with 90lb paper. The paper isn’t as nice as in the watercolor sketchbooks but it will stand up to wet media. I might find a use for this one first because I like spiral bindings on my sketchbooks. They don’t look the prettiest but they are the easiest to work in.

I did finish up one sketchbook about a month ago. That’s because it had a purpose. It’s a hardcover spiral bound 5.5×8.5 sketchbook that I’ve been doing drawings for my “Message-Tee” comic in. On every page I drew a single figure that I eventually scanned in, inked, colored, and then added type to. The first drawing was done on 1/17/12 and the ninety ninth drawing was done on 6/26/13. I had to add a couple of more loose drawing in to get fifty two cartoons a year in. As you can see it took time to fill up the book but since I had a use for it it got done.

This whole sketchbook blog was inspired by another sketchbook that I pulled out recently and did a little drawing in. It’s one that almost had a purpose but things didn’t work out for it. It’s a “PresentationZen Storyboarding Sketchbook”. It’s one of these gimmicky sketchbooks that’s really not for me but is for someone who needs a little help to get organized and inspired. Some pages have inspirational quotes on them and some pages have little printed storyboard boxes on them. There was also a whole story about the book from the guy who designed it on how to use it. It piqued my curiosity so I got one.

The first page that I drew on in the Zen sketchbook is dated 5/23/11. There is a lot of writing on the page too. My original concept for this sketchbook was to make it a sort of crazy looking idea book. Just for fun I had recently purchased this little printer that printed stickers (It was in the clearance bin) and wanted to find a use for it. I printed some 2×3 inch stickers of my street photos and stuck them on some blank pages. I then wrote down some ideas for stories, drew some little drawings, and even drew on the photo stickers. It looks really cool except I never got one useful idea out of the book. It looks like I only drew four pages in it in 2011, fourteen pages in it in 2012, and three or four pages this year.

I did get a few character designs out of this sketchbook last year. I remember designing my three robots for a strip I never made and the initial designs came from this book. I had nearly abandoned the whole writing as part of the sketchbook idea and had been drawing tiny little character designs. Sometimes I draw really small if I want to strip away everything extraneous from a design. Details can be distracting when all I want is basic shapes.

When I pulled this sketchbook out about a week ago for the first time this year I had used up all the pages that had my street photos stuck to them. I filled up a couple of pages with small drawings of robot-like things. No writing, no photos, and no color at all. It looks kind of boring. I think I’m going to have to dig out that little sticker printer of mine and see if I have any paper left for it. Those street photos really didn’t serve much purpose but at least they made the sketchbook look a little more interesting. Even if the sketchbook hasn’t found its purpose quite yet I’d still prefer it to be interesting.

This week’s art writing on a piece of mine is going to be on three pieces. The only reason for that is I like to look at all three pieces together. These three are from this past spring and all three are done on five by seven inch 140 pound watercolor paper and drawn in marker. Though I made all of these marker drawings recently the faces themselves are based on old drawings of mine. It’s too bad I neglected to date when I made the original drawings but based on the dates when I first scanned them in they were made back in 2001. That was about when I was first learning to draw with only a black marker. I made a series of about a hundred drawings of heads with all sorts of strange markings on their faces. Though I never made any kind of finished product out of those hundred drawings I have used some of the faces over the years for other finished pieces. These three heads are an example of that.

This past winter and spring I made a lot of small marker drawings. I like the format. I can work with a lot of different images and I like the immediacy and instant color of magic markers. There is no need to wait for the color to dry. The color gets put down on the paper and is ready for another layer of color right away. Sometimes I like the wet on wet technique that watercolor offers but sometimes I want dry on dry and I don’t want to wait for watercolor to dry.

Though I present these three paintings as a series one of them came first. “Find Me” was made a month before the other two. My usual habit is to make these five by seven pieces four at a time. I dig through my inkbook for four drawings to work on, work them up as finished sketches, transfer the drawings to five by seven paper, use ink and marker to color them up. I find I can concentrate better when I have multiple images to work on. If I get bored or stuck on one of them then I move over to the next one. It helps. And they’re small anyway.

“Find Me” was among a group of four non-face drawings and it stood out. It was the first time I had worked with one of those old face drawings in years and I liked it. I liked the graphic nature of the face and the words written on his (or her, once again I’m not sure) cheek. I am a fan of words and pictures together and the way they worked well here intrigued me so I decided to dig back into those old face drawings from 2001 and find a couple more to work on. “Flight” and “Ram” were also done in a group of four but thematically belong in a group with “Find Me”.

The first thing I notice about this group of faces is that they seem to be pensive. Instead of looking straight out at the viewer, as is my normal habit, all three are looking off into the distance. I’m not even sure I noticed that as I was making them but it does make the words more prominent. Since the eyes are unchallenging it’s the words that get up into that mental space right in your face. It as if by looking away they are inviting us to read their faces because otherwise it would be rude to stare.

All three of the faces are drawn with he same technique. After being drawn in pencil on a separate piece of paper I transferred the drawing onto the watercolor paper. That’s an easy thing to do these days as I can run the watercolor paper right through my printer and print out the drawing on it and so not have to spend the time making the drawing a second time. After the drawing was on the paper I used india ink and a sable watercolor brush to make my black line. Sometimes I’d use a marker for this task but I prefer a brush. It’s a tool I can do more with.

In the original black and white marker drawings of one hundred faces that I made there was a lot of emphasis on the graphic nature of black versus white in the drawings. That’s gone in these ones as color takes over. While I have been using the markers for a while I used a different technique than usual for these faces. I used a scumbling technique where I roughly put down dark brush strokes of color on top of light ones. I wasn’t blending as is usual but creating a texture with the marker. The faces are not smooth. I find the texture brings them to life for me.

The two paintings “Flight” and “Ram” are further away from an actual face than is “Find Me” and have graphic elements drawn on them. I’m a fan of drawing arrows and like using them in my work. Usually they emphasize the direction of a shape and the way the eye follows the shape in a drawing. They never have any literal meaning in my work and exist only for their visual meaning. Arrows move things. In the original drawings the arrows and other circular and rectangular face marks were filled in with black making the overall drawing more graphic but here I left them open for color to round things out. The one graphical element left in these three is the black shirt in “Find Me”. That large are of black flattens out and sits back in space. And maybe the eyebrows in “Ram” too but they’re fairly small. Overall I didn’t want the flatness of large areas of black to overwhelm the space of the color.

The final thing thing that jumps out at me about these is the hair. I like that I used three different hair representations for these. Often in those hundred drawings the hair I drew was just a simple shape. That works okay for a black and white highly graphic drawing but not for a color piece. I had to find a way to make the hair work without just being a big shape or series of parallel lines. I think I did okay with that.

As an ending note I’d like to point out that I followed my “Always make the lips red” rule. Even on the green face. Sure “Flight” doesn’t have lips but if it did they would be red.

This weeks painting is called “By the Road” and is dated August 17, 2010. I’m not sure if this is the first large (46 x 28 inches) acrylic paintings that I made but it’s among the early ones. I remember that for this painting I bought a new brush. A kind that I had never used before. Over the years I’ve bought most of my brushes for either my oil painting or my watercolor (gouache) painting. That means larger (mostly flats and brights) bristle brushes or smaller (numbers two to five) sable hair pointed brushes. I used those same brushes for my small 8×10 inch acrylic paintings but wanted something I could make larger gestures with for my larger acrylics. I ended up getting a number five da Vinci spin brush. It looks sort of like a small watercolor sable brush but is much bigger. The synthetic bristles are about two inches long and half an inch wide and come to a point. Not a sharp sable brush point but a point none the less.

The first thing I notice about this painting is the orange. It’s a Windsor Newton orange of some kind that’s now discontinued. Ain’t that the way. I really liked that orange and the one they made to replace it is pretty good but I like this one better. That the discontinued one is better might all be in my head though because I use the new one all the time. The orange has a strong glow to it because it is put on thinly over a white ground and the orange pigment is strong. A lot of light bounces off the white ground and passes through the orange paint on the way to the eye. The orange is so transparent so that if you step up and look at the painting closely you can see the pencil grid that I drew on the canvas in order to help transfer the drawing to the canvas that’s underneath the orange. The rest of the painting is opaque and the grid can’t be seen. I like that little visual hint into the process.

The second thing that strikes me is the image. Usually that is the first thing I notice about any painting of mine but here the orange is so strong and the image a bit unusual that it takes a second look to see what it is. And what is it? I’m not absolutely sure. It’s the profile of some sort of character walking by. It’s odd because it has all the indications of being a cartoon character, big eyes, big nose, wild hair, without those features actually being there. The “Eye” is a shield shape with no pupil, the “Nose” is a dome, and the “Hair” is made up of horn shapes. I like the image but it’s different than my usual ones. Normally I love to paint and draw weird faces. Here I took the weirdness a step further by obscuring the face. Plus it is not looking at the viewer as the people are in a lot of my paintings. Different.

I also made the color work differently than it usually does. In most cases blue, being a cool color, recedes and orange, being a warm color, comes forward. That doesn’t happen here. The blue is in the front and it stays there for a number of reasons. The blue is opaque and has more “Objectness”. That is it looks solid on the canvas. The orange is thin and in the sky. In out minds the sky is not an object and so it sits in the background while the solid heavy blue looks like an object and we see it in the foreground. And, of course, there is overlap. A teacher of mine once said, “Forget cool recedes and warm comes forward it’s overlap that is best at creating a sense of space”. I’ve found that to be true over the years. The brown shapes that act like a fence behind the figure plus the building on the right add more layers of overlap to the space of the painting. All that makes the orange recede into the background a bit. But it’s still strong enough to be the dominant force of the painting.

The new brush I bought for my large acrylics comes into play with the lines of color that are on the top layer of the painting. I originally wanted to do some of the main drawing with the brush but found that I couldn’t use the brush in that way with the flourish that I wanted to. I needed the precision of my usual bristle brushes for most of the line drawing in this painting. The flourishes were saved for the end. The wavy green motion lines, the light purple and orange swooshes on the top of the fence, and the yellow and green outlines around the body were all done with that new spin brush. It was able to give me the action I needed for this painting. That type of mark was missing from my previous paintings. I found it a little limiting though and it hasn’t shown up in a lot of paintings after this. But I like it here. I was trying to bring a little more spontaneity into these large paintings of mine. That’s why I started making some in acrylic rather than oil paint. But they still take a lot of planning.

One final note on this one. That blue box in the upper left corner defines the space of the rest of this painting. Everything else behaves but that blue box doesn’t. The dark blue is almost like a deep hole. It fights the rest of the colors. At the same time it wants to sit up in the foreground and move to the background. I like playing with space that way. The yellow fake writing is also key to the behavior of the blue box. That may have been the final thing I painted. It’s actually the yellow lettering that brings that box forward. The blue by itself wants to be a hole and sit back in space but the yellow letters make it go from a hole to an object like a piece of paper. It’s sort of like that old positive and negative space “Is it a face or a vase?” picture. The use of positive and negative space to bend things has always been interesting to me. Here you can see it in action.