Radiant Comics

I got it in my head this week to write about pencils. Not just any pencils but he pencils I use and how I use them. Pencils are such a simple tool but there are a lot of different kinds of them. Some artists only ever use one type of pencil and I actually have more pencils than this but these are the seven that I use the most. These are the ones that are always on hand in the side tray of my drawing table. The other types of pencils that I have are tucked away in a box and only taken out on the rare occasion that I need them. Or the other pencils could be ones that I bought to try out and see what they can do but I never found a good use for them. I always like try out new pencils and new black markers.

The first three pencils on the left are all mechanical pencils. I used mechanical pencils a lot in my youth, didn’t use them very much in my twenties, and then picked them up and again used them regularly sometime in my thirties. Mechanical pencils are all identified by the width of the graphite (it has never been lead in my lifetime but I still call it that sometimes) that they hold. The yellow one is .9mm, the blue one .7mm, and the black one .5mm. That means that the yellow one has the thickest lead in it. That’s a fairly new pencil too. I bought it within the last five years. I don’t even think they made them that thick before then. At least I never saw them. It’s still a pencil you can only find in art catalogues.

The black mechanical pencil it the size most people have. It’s the .5mm size that’s found in every school supply store around. This particular pencil is a specialty drafting pencil that, I think, someone gave to me or found at a garage sale back when I was in high school. Functionally it’s no different than a cheap .5mm pencil that can be found anywhere but it’s much better made and feels good in the hand. The black pencil also looks a little different than the standard model. The yellow and blue ones are how a Pentel mechanical drafting pencil usually looks and I have some .5mm ones that look like that too but occasionally I find an off-model one like this black .5mm. I don’t know why it was made differently but I like it.

The blue .7mm pencil is the one I use the most. If I want a little blunter lead I grab the .9mm or if I want a little sharper point I grab the .5mm but it’s mostly the .7mm. I find the size suits me. As a matter of fact I think the .7mm size was responsible for me using mechanical pencils again back in my early thirties. I had mostly used the more common .5mm in my youth and it was okay but when I discovered the .7mm later on I liked it much better.

I use soft graphite in these mechanical pencils. Graphite goes from “B” which is soft to “H” which is hard. Numbers modify the letter too. So 6B is really soft and 2B soft while 6H is really hard and 2H is just hard. I keep 2B in these pencils. That’s very soft for a mechanical pencil and you wouldn’t even be able to find that graphite in a school supply store. You have to find it in an art store or catalogue. Most school supply mechanical pencils come with HB graphite that is right in the middle of the softness scale. I keep an extra one of each of these size pencils around with HB graphite in them just in case I need some harder graphite.

The fourth pencil in line is a wooden one that I use for graphite transfers. It’s a 2H which makes it a fairly hard pencil. I don’t like to draw with hard pencils. I used to use them all the time in my 20s because they’re what a lot of cartoonists use but they never suited me. I only use them now when I’m transferring a drawing using graphite paper. Graphite paper is sort of like old-time carbon paper except instead of ink the paper is covered in graphite. You put down a clean sheet of paper, set the graphite paper on top of it, then put a paper (usually an inkjet copy in my case) with a drawing on it on top. Then trace the drawing that’s on top. The pressure of the pencil transfers the graphite from the graphite paper to the bottom blank sheet. I need a hard pencil to get a good transfer line. That’s why I use the 2H.

The fifth and sixth pencils are the same. General’s white charcoal pencils. I use these to add highlights to my marker drawings. Plus I sometimes draw on black paper with them. That’s kinda fun. I put two of them in the photo to show you my improvised pencil extender. That’s the blue part on the bottom of the first white pencil. It’s an old “Click” eraser stick with the eraser used. I find that a short pencil fits in the end perfectly and I can hold the pencil easily again. I use one of these with all of my wooden pencils once they get halfway done. I’ve been doing that since my early twenties so that makes those plastic eraser stick holders over twenty years old. Time flies.

The seventh pencil, the green wooden one, is a 4B pencil that I start most of my drawing with. Sometimes it’s a 6B depending on what’s available but I like a nice soft pencil to start out with. The soft graphite is easily grabbed by the paper and I can use a light hand and move fast. With a harder pencil I was always pressing too hard, moving too slow, and gouging the paper. A soft pencil is harder to erase since the graphite is much darker but that’s okay with me. It’s much worse to press ruts into the paper with a hard pencil trying to make a dark line.

The eighth and final pencil is a General’s sketch pencil. Once again it’s a soft pencil, 6B, and there is no point to be found on this one. It’s blunt. I use this when drawing bigger. If I have a big 16×20 inch piece of paper I need to scale up my tools. This fits the bill nicely. I’ll switch over to a regular wooden pencil eventually but for the beginning sketch it’s the General all the way. There is no obsessing over tiny little detail when using this one. That’s what I need in the beginning stages of a drawing.

So there they are: pencils. A tool I hardly ever think about yet I use each pretty specifically and each developed their place in my side tray on their own. Interesting.

Once again I’ve been digging through some old paintings to try and find some dates. These are my eight inch by ten inch acrylic paintings on canvas. I started making these ones because I wanted to make more paintings. I wanted to create more images. Sure there is something to be said for painting large. Most famous paintings are measure in feet and not inches but my paintings are not famous and I was running out of room to put my large ones. Plus it takes a couple of weeks for me to finish a three foot by four foot oil painting and I wanted to be able create more images/paintings in that same amount of time. Of course they’d have to be smaller.

The earliest date I could find in my quick glance at my eight by ten acrylics is March 2005. There a few paintings that I have lying around that I think were the first ones I did but they have no dates on them. That’s because they were awful failures that I abandoned and didn’t bother putting a date on. Yeah, things didn’t start out so smoothly.

In my first example the image is no image. Well, not quite, the image is paint and brush strokes. I had been painting in oils and gouache for a long time by this point but I wasn’t sure what to do with acrylic paint. In general it dries faster and doesn’t hold a brush stroke the same way oil paint does. The failure of my first few acrylic paintings lead me to concentrate on just using the paint. For years I had already been using a fake writing style for some of my paintings and drawings. That’s when I make something that looks like ancient writing of some sort but isn’t actual writing. That’s what I started with here. The red brush strokes I did in a writing style and then layered the blue and the green on top of them. I liked the way this one came out and it helped me get used to acrylic paint. I have a few more like this one so it took a while for me to learn how to use acrylic paint.

With this second painting we have an example of the next stage in my acrylic painting. The image is of a face but it is done with minimal brush stokes and colors. I was stripping it all down to the basics before I built things up. I would often start these paintings by covering the canvas in one solid color. This was the opposite of the way I used oil paints. With oil paints I would first paint the black line on the canvas and then build up the color and push it towards the black line. The black line would end up looking like it was carved into the paint because the color was thicker and raised higher off the canvas. With these acrylics the black line would go on top of the background color. The black line is and looks like it’s on top of the blue. This one is very much about the image rather than the paint. Usually I have more of a balance between the two but this was early on.

The third painting is one from a few years later. October 25, 2009 to be exact. It has more of a balance between the image and the paint. It doesn’t even have a black line. Rather it has a brown line, a green line, a blue line, and even a red outline. Obviously I had figured out how to use acrylic paint by this time and had a much wider vocabulary of marks, paint strokes and techniques to use. I got the dry brush double frame strokes, the yellow tick marks, yellow square stokes, the transparent green grass, and the solid orange butting against orange shapes in the background. Overall this is one of my favorite small paintings that I’ve made. I’m a fan of simple and I think I’ve achieved that here. A lot of these small paintings can get really complex on me. Lots of different brush strokes and colors. I like that too but often it is the starker and more straight forward images that stay with me.

For my final painting I’m talking about this week I have one of my rare landscapes. Don’t ask me why but I’m not much of a landscape guy. I love the human form and I especially love faces so maybe there is not enough room for landscapes. But here is one that I like. First off I like spirals. I draw them all the time in all sorts of ways. Often I annoy myself by drawing them because spirals are not always easy to execute. Especially in ink with a brush as I often have to make them. In pencil, spirals are easy because I’m not looking for perfection. Then when I get to an inking stage I get mad at myself for drawing a huge complex spiral that I now have to make perfect. Or at least close. The spirals were a lot easier to make here, in paint, because I wasn’t looking for perfection. I want the imperfection of brush strokes running into one and other. It reveals the hand of the artist and creates a sense of time. You can see the strokes being made.

The brush strokes of the house are different than my usual ones. The blue strokes are dominating and defining the black strokes. Normally I’d use the black stokes as an outline to define the blue parts the house is made up of but here it’s different. I swapped the normal positive and negative shapes. That’s something I don’t find easy to do but I pulled it off here. There is a lot of swapping of positive and negative space going on in this painting. Maybe that’s what makes it work for me.

So there you have it. I guess you could say it takes me a day to do a single eight by ten inch acrylic on canvas painting but that doesn’t count the time it takes to come up with the image. That’s kind of immeasurable since I’m always working on drawings to use for prints and painting. Only a small fraction of them eventually get used. Plus I normally work on four of these small painting at a time. That speeds things up as I don’t have to wait for the paint to dry. I just pick up another painting and keep going.

It’s been a pretty good season of winter bike riding. There wasn’t a lot of snow this year so I got to stay on my good weather route for most of the season. After a snow storm I usually stay off my bike for a couple of days until the roads get cleared by plow and sunshine. But then I have a winter route that I ride on residential roads where I can cycle closer to the middle of the road to avoid the snow and ice that piles up on the sides. It’s a shorter route so it means riding three laps. I don’t like riding laps much. Once the snow melts and the ice disappears from the sides of the road I move back to my main route. It varies from week to week which route I ride. I’d guess I was on my bad weather route about half the time this winter. That’s not too bad.

Winter really beats a bike all to hell but it’s not the snow and ice. It’s the water, the salt, the sand, and the road grime. I don’t know what’s in that road grime but I bet it has something to do with saltwater breaking down the asphalt. Since my bicycle, like most road bikes, doesn’t have a fender on it water from the wet road get thrown up my back by the rear wheel. When riding on a wet road in the rain my orange wind breaker get covered in black water drops all up the back of it. It’s pretty gross I gotta say. I’ve always thought about getting a rear fender for my bike but never have. Most people don’t need a bike fender because they just don’t ride in the bad weather that I do. All that water and road grime also gets thrown up along the bottom side of my bike. I actually get sand build-up on my bike’s underside. And the road salt freezes my spokes in place. There is no sense in cleaning the bike either because it’s just going to get dirty the next day. It really needs a good spring cleaning at the end of winter.

I only got a couple of flat tires this winter. That’s not too bad but one of them was at the furthest point away from my house. That lead to long walk of a few miles back to home. That is never a fun walk. It’s a little awkward to walk while rolling a bike next to you but at least you don’t have to carry it. That would be far worse. Sometimes I think about carrying the tools to change a tire tube with me on my ride but that seems like a lot of trouble. I’d need a spare tube, small plastic levers to remove the tube from the rim, a small air pump, and a saddle bag to carry it all in. I have everything but the small pump and a saddle bag to carry it all in but I’ve never liked the idea of fixing my bike on the side of a road. It seems a little problematic and dangerous. So I just walk home.

I have had one mechanical problem with my bicycle over the last few weeks and it’s a new one for me. Normally I use only two gears out of my bike’s fourteen. On the back gear I use the third largest gear and I change the front gear from the big one to the little one when going up a big hill. I basically just have a low gear and a high gear. It works for me. A couple week ago the front gear, of which there are only two, started slipping. As I was pedaling the chain would slip off the big gear and onto the small one through nothing I’d done. If I looked down as I pedaled I could see the chain stating to come off the side of the gear. I couldn’t see what was causing it though. Usually when gears slip it has to do with the derailleur. That’s the part that moves the chain from gear to gear when I use the shifter on the handlebars. Or, as I found out last summer, it has to do with the gear’s teeth being worn down. I adjusted the derailleur, I inspected the teeth, and everything looked fine. Except the chain still slipped.

Of course the chain only slipped if I was pedaling hard. Back home on the bike stand the chain would never slip. So it was hard to diagnose the problem. I ended up not using the bigger front gear for a week or so as I tried to figure it out. I checked online and one of the things that was said that could make a chain slip was stuck links or a dirty chain. I tried to find a stuck link but couldn’t. I had never cleaned a bike chain in my life but I bought a chain cleaning kit and gave it a try. The chain still slipped. It was really annoying.

That’s when I decided to take off the whole front crank and look at it closely. I pulled out my large Allen wrench to remove the crank and that’s when I discovered the nut holding the crank on was loose. There was my problem. I had never had a crank nut come loose before so I wasn’t even looking for it. I tightened it up, went for my ride, and everything was okay. Until the next day. Then the chain slipped again. How could the loose crank nut not be the problem? I figured it was but now my derailleur wasn’t right. I adjusted the derailleur again and hoped for the best. Hope won out as the slipping stopped.

I still don’t trust my bike though. That’s the way it is with repairs. After I fix something it takes a few weeks of it working properly before I trust the bike again. I’m a bit wary before that. The slipping of the gear was always accompanied by a sound. I’m still listening for that sound just in case.

“Drifting and Dreaming” is the comic strip that I run every Sunday on this site. It’s not your everyday comic. None of my comics are particularly traditional but “Drifting and Dreaming” is the one of the three I run here that is the most far out. It’s also made in its own peculiar way.

When it come to making comics I’ve become a big believer in getting done whatever I can get done. By that I mean if I can’t get things done in a traditional or ideal manner then go nontraditional and make the less than ideal work. Between the choice of doing something and doing nothing I’ll take doing something. If I had my druthers I’d like to be one of those comic strip cartoonists from the 1930s to about the 1950s who got paid a ton of money, had giant studios, drew lush adventure strips, and got invited to all the swanky parties. It looks like that’s not going to happen.

To draw a comic like those old time ones took all day. It was a full time job. It’s not my full time job so there is no way I could ever make one as they did in those days. I had to figure out how to get something done that I could handle and be happy with. That is not an easy thing to figure out. It took a lot of false starts because inevitably things take a lot longer than I think they will. That’s pretty universal. Being unhappy with the results of something that has too little time spent on it is pretty universal too. Finding the balance of time and results sure is tricky.

“Drifting and Dreaming” started with “Art Cards”. Those are baseball card sized pieces of art. Drawings and paintings that you can hold in your hand. I heard about them years ago and since I have always been a fan of trading cards in general I started making some of my own. I had been making them for a while when I came up with the idea for a subset of art cards that I call “Cartoon Art Cards”. I start out by drawing borders and a word balloon on a 2.5×3.5 inch piece of paper and then I make a spontaneous ink drawing of a character underneath the word balloon. No pencil underdrawing is used because I want the drawings to be fast and weird. I want faces I wouldn’t otherwise draw when I’m meticulously thinking about it. The black line drawing of the faces is the fastest part of the process because I’m just going.

I usually do ten of these cartoon art cards at once. After the faces are drawn I lay them all down and figure out what they are going to say. All the cards are made up of a single character talking directly to the reader. I try to make them say odd, funny, or interesting things. I hand letter the cards. That makes these cartoon Art Cards the only time I hand letter any of my comics these days. I do my lettering on the computer now but for these I wanted the words to be on the original. I pencil out the lettering as I write the cards and then go over them with ink. I’m not very fond of doing hand lettering and it took me a long while to get comfortable doing it again. I must have gone through at least a half dozen pens and a hundred cartoon art cards before I settled on a pen that I liked for the job. I don’t know why it took me so long but it did.

After the cards are all written and lettered I break out my markers and color them. The first couple of hundred cards were all done with Sharpies and Bic Mark-It markers. I was going for a raw, low tech kind of look. Since then I’ve switched over to my Shin Han and Prisma Color markers but still don’t use my favorite brand, Copic, markers on them. I save the Copics for more sophisticated color drawings. That and I have all those other markers so I may as well use them. I draw all the backgrounds in color on all ten cartoon art cards first. Only after the backgrounds are colored do I start on the figures. The only reason I do this is because I like to get the most boring stuff out of the way first. It’s just my habit. Other artists do the opposite but I can’t work that way.

I had done a bunch of cartoon art cards before I got the idea for “Drifting and Dreaming”. I stumbled on it. I took two cartoon art cards and digitally sandwiched an art card with no words on it in between them. Then I decided the center art card needed a voice too so I came up with the Middle Story. That’s the small, three lined story that comes at the bottom of every “Drifting and Dreaming”strip. It doesn’t have a literal link with the center image but binds it all together. Two cartoon art cards talking to you, a middle card to look at, and a little story to read. It’s all about searching for some thread that binds the world together into something coherent as time slides by.

This time I’m making a whole batch of “Drifting and Dreaming” strips. I drew sixty cartoon art cards over the last week. That’s a lot. I don’t think I’ve done that many in so short a time before but I couldn’t stop. I just kept going. After being sick with a cold/flu for a week and then not being able to get anything done for half a week after that I was enjoying the sense of accomplishment that came with getting all those cartoon art cards done. Now I have to turn them into thirty “Drifting and Dreaming”strips. I already have plenty of art cards to choose from for the center panel but I am going to have to write thirty new middle stories. But I can get it done. If I couldn’t get it done then I wouldn’t be doing it.

I picked this next gouache painting to write about because it is an example of the second way that I use gouache plus it’s one of my oldest gouache paintings. One of the first examples from when I was learning to paint in gouache. It’s undated as is a lot of my work from the early 1990s but in looking through the sketchbook that I posted paintings from last week I found the original tiny sketch for this spider. I believe that puts this painting some time in late 1993. I had even forgotten this one existed (despite the fact that it’s posted on my website) before I stumbled on that small sketch. That’s what happens when paintings get tucked away for years after I make them. I like the little sketch I found in that old sketchbook and might rework it into something new one of these days.

There were three things that I was thinking about as I was learning to paint like this in gouache. The first was opacity. I wanted the color to be strong and since, unlike oil paints, there is no surface to deal with when painting in gouache I mainly wanted the paint to be opaque. I like the solidness of the opaque color. Of course the blue on the edges of this particular painting is a transparent color because not everything can be opaque or it losses its punch.

The second thing that I was thinking about was the art of ancient civilizations. I’m a big fan of history and like to read about the past. I’m also a big fan of the art of ancient civilizations. My favorites seem to be the art of South and Central America. I really like Maya and Aztec art. They have worked their way into my aesthetic over the years and here was when I was first thinking about them. The art of ancient Egypt has also crept into my brain. I’m not as big a fan of that as the South American stuff but still it’s there influencing me even when I’m not expecting it to. I’ll mention Japanese art too. I have a few books on old Japanese wood cuts and prints that I’ve thumbed through many times over the years. There are probably more ancient art influences than that but I’ll stop with those four as they’re probably the biggest four.

The third thing I was thinking about as I started my gouache paintings was another type of old art. Russian icon painting. Oddly enough I hadn’t actually seen a lot of Russian icon painting at the time but I liked the idea of it. They are generally small paintings, around eight by ten inches, of the face of a saint. They were done in a flat style that was not quite medieval but with lots of decoration and gold added to the wood panels they were painted on. I liked the fact that these icons were precious objects.

In looking at this spider painting the first thing that strikes me is that I have no idea why I tore the paper into the shape it’s in. Sure I was following the contours of the spider by why isn’t it rectangular? This might be the only painting that I did this with. I must have thought it was a good idea at the time. You can see the flatness of the drawing as the influence of most ancient art as painted on monuments and tombs. It’s not about the spider being in a scene of some sort but the spider being a symbol. And decorative. The negative space shapes that are colored in are an echo of the gold placement on the Russian icons. I can remember making all of those little white brush stokes/tick marks and wondering where they came from. I don’t know. I started making them on this painting all those years ago and have continued to do so.

This next eight by ten inch painting that is titled “King” has the date of October 1, 1996 on it. Obviously this is from a few years after I had started learning to paint in gouache. It also seem to be more like a Russian icon painting than the spider. It’s also not quite as flat as the spider painting and has some shallow modeling in the face as do the Russian icons but it also has a lot of decorative and flat elements. The stylized hair and beard are definitely different from the face. I like spirals an often use them in hair so that is familiar to me but the beard is a different sort of approach. I’m not sure what I was looking at when I did that but from the looks of the moon crown that he’s wearing I’d guess it was some sort of very old Northern European art. I don’t think I’ve painted many beards like that.

His collar looks much more ancient American than the rest of the painting and its flatness of color stands out against the face. By this time I was using brush strokes and tick marks to make patterns. The background is one big pattern of opaque color on top of a transparent green and is not the afterthought that such marks in the spider painting were. This also might be the most Russian icon-like painting that I ever made.

So that pretty much wraps up my beginning gouache years. These paintings are all on paper rather than canvas and much smaller than my oil paintings. I’ve worked on all different sizes of paper but most of it has been eight by ten inches at biggest. I’ve made a lot of five by seven inch gouache paintings too. It’s painted on watercolor paper. Almost all of the early stuff is on 300lb cold press Arches watercolor paper. That’s a really thick paper that has a rough surface. I’ve branched out to try a lot of different papers since then but that was my favorite in the beginning. I rarely go lighter than 140lb paper since any lighter and the paper can buckle too much as it gets wet but I’ve tried a lot of different brands and surfaces since these mid 1990s pieces.