Radiant Comics

Once again I get in the Way-Back Machine to write about my art. I dug up some old slides I took back in the late 80s of my student paintings I made way back in the spring of 1988 (excuse the scratches and dirt on the slides). This was the second semester that I got to work on “My” painting. After spending the first semester on a series of twenty four by thirty six inch painting I scaled things up. These two paintings that I’ve posted here are about four feet wide by three feet tall. That makes the figures about life size. This was about the largest size I could fit in my studio back in art school. It’s still about the largest size I can fit in my studio these days but I hardly ever make paintings this big anymore. I don’t have the room to store them.

Once again these are all about me learning how to paint. I learned slowly and methodically. One of the things I added this semester was drawing from life. Instead of drawing my comic strip characters or other characters out of my head I drew this figures from life. Mostly from me in the mirror with strange heads added on but in my final semester I used live models a few times. That changes the nature of the imagery a bit and grounds the figure in real life a bit more and makes the weird things going on around it a little weirder.

Unfortunately these paintings defy reproduction. You really can’t tell from the scans of slides but all of that white paint is painted. It’s probably about an eighth of an inch thick with white paint and the direction of the brush stroke is a uniform up and down. That’s another thing I was working on as I was learning to paint. Brush strokes and what to do with them. In the beginning here I kept them all the same. Up and down. But as I learned to paint I varied the way I laid the paint down. The same color paint put down with a horizontal stroke looks different than if laid down with a vertical stroke. That’s because of the way the light hit it. The paintings I made actually had a “Grain” like a piece of wood that I could control. Surface is a very important part of painting. That’s what people don’t know if they only see reproductions of paintings.

The second aspect of these paintings that get lost is the black line. First off I was using mostly a single weight black line. Sure that was some variation in the line weight because I couldn’t resist adding some but I was trying to avoid using too many drawing techniques because I didn’t want these to be about the drawing. Clearly I had a lot of learning to do in the drawing department but I wanted these to be about me learning to paint so I cut back on the drawing challenges.

The black line also has less surface than the white. I painted the black line in thin watery paint so it only has as much surface as the gessoed canvas. I then took the white or color paint and applied it after the black paint was dry. The white and color paint has the consistency of soft butter and I pushed it up to the black line and then drew my brush away from the line. This paint pushing technique was suggested to me by a teacher who said that’s how the painter Mondrian often put down paint. It works well when you need a clean paint-on-paint edge and has served me nicely all these years. It also leaves a bead of white paint next to the black line that emphasizes the change in surface. If you could see these paintings in person in looks like the black line was cut out of the white paint.

My use of color gets more complex in these paintings too. Sure it’s still limited to just a few colors in a few shapes but I’m playing with the space that the colors create a lot more. For example the way I use color in the round bubble in the first painting distorts space in such a way that the eye has a hard time settling it all down. The smaller orange space drops back against the yellow while the light green moves forward against the blue. All while the image of that little creature in the bubble tries to sit still in space. That’s the main intersection in this painting.

There are less dramatic things happening elsewhere in painting as I was trying to push and pull on the space using the geometry of the color shapes and the composition in general. In treating the paint surface as I was with all that heavily applied white paint I was also trying to use the negative space, the space around the things, to define the space. In that first painting with the bubble I tried to make the space on either side of the main figure (the man holding up a stick) as important as the figure itself. I tired to make it like there were three columns. The pace between the couch and the man, the man, and the space between the man and the edge of the canvas. Like three tick marks on a pice of paper but blurring where the tick marks end and the paper begins. Hardly indistinguishable but maybe a little blurry.

I have one more thing to say about these paintings. Something a teacher told the class once that I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Overlap creates space. Forget cool colors recede and warm colors move forward overlap is the best way to create space”. I had never heard that said before and he was right. Draw something in front of something else and it creates a space between them. He was talking about literal things but I used that with my blocks of color. Put a block of color behind something and it sits behind it. Make that color block just the right color and shape and the eye moves it forward in space fighting against the space created by the overlap. This was another concept I was working with and learning as I made these paintings. I like learning.

I want to do some writing about painting but I’m not sure where to start. I don’t think I want to write a “How To” painting piece but “How To” does have a lot to do with painting in general. Since this is about my painting I think my best bet is to go back and dig out some of my earliest paintings and try to figure out what I was doing. I gotta say that’s a little daunting on a psychological level but I think that’s how I’m going to do this.

I just dug out photos of three of my oldest paintings. Remarkably these photos were a lot easier to find than I thought. I photographed all of my paintings in 2006 and they were on my hard drive right where they were supposed to be. I wasn’t sure they would be since 2006 is a long time ago and I haven’t had any reason to look at these particular photos but it took me less than ten minutes to find them. There is some advice for you: develop and practice good organizational skills. They’ll help you find things when you need them.

These three paintings were from my senior year of college. I actually has a senior year and a half since I was a transfer student. These were from the Fall semester of 1987. I did two more semesters after that and graduated in December 1988. I made about fifteen paintings that Fall semester all in this same style that eventually became the main style that I painted in for years. It still echoes in my current paintings. I gave away the other ten or twelve paintings to my classmates that year because I didn’t have the room for fifteen twenty four by thirty six inch paintings and my classmates wanted them. I also was done painting this particular way and wanted to move on.

These three paintings plus the missing ones were all exactly the same size and nearly the same composition. Each was of one of my cartoon characters that I was drawing for my comic strip in the school paper or some other oddball character I made up. The round headed guy with the line splitting his face was called Mr. Rude but I don’t remember the name of the other guy or the child showing half his face. I remember choosing to use all those characters just to have something to paint. It’s hard to remember as I’m older now but in art school I had no idea what or how to paint. Just like every other student. This whole series of painting was about me learning to paint.

I had been studying fine art painting for a year up to that point (and commercial art for the two years before that) and it was just then that I was ready to figure out what I wanted to paint. That is not an easy thing to do. I decided to take things slow and one step at a time. I chose to make a series of paintings all the same size so that size wouldn’t be a decision I’d have to make again. I always liked figurative work but chose my cartoon characters because I already knew how to draw them and wouldn’t have to rely on live models as I was learning how to paint. Setting limits is often the best way to learn.

The other limit I set is easy to see. Color. I limited my use of color to help me learn how to use it well, it fit the style I was using, and it worked well with composition which is my most natural strength. Composition is pretty much all I had in those days when I was learning how to paint. “I always know where to stick the Ottoman”, as Norm on “Cheers” once said.

This was also before the days before I knew anything about Surrealist Automatic Drawing and pulling weird images out of the corners of my minds. I was making up those strange little things that surround the figures more consciously than I do these days though not with meaning. They are really there to make the overall image more interesting and to add some search for meaning to the painting. I didn’t care as much for actual meaning as much as I cared about searching for meaning. That’s why all those objects have little symbols or some kind on them too. They look like the mean something but what? I want to know too.

It’s not easy to write about a painting that you’re supposed to stand in front of to see because any reproduction of it can’t capture the surface of the painting. That’s what people who don’t see actual paintings might not know. Paintings, especially since the Impressionists, are as much about the surface of the painting as they are about anything else. How the paint is put on the canvas matters to the painter. Is the paint thick or thin? Textured or smooth? These are the decisions that are lost in reproduction.

In these paintings the white in not blank or empty. The white is all painted with paint the same thickness as the color. It’s so thick that the black line actually has less surface than the white. It looks like the black line was carved out of the white. That’s gives the white space more weight than it would otherwise have. There is so much surface texture to these paintings that people would often tell me that it looked like they were painted on wood.

The blocks of color are all uses spatially. They affect the composition and they move other things forward and backward in space. This is how I learned how color affects the space of a painting. For example the green block in the painting with the swing looks like it’s behind everything but it doesn’t want to stay there. It’s not even actually a rectangle but two separate irregular shapes that our eyes make into a rectangle. And as our brain connects the pieces it moves it in front of the swing’s rope.

Of course all of that doesn’t just happen. The swing has to be in the right place, the negative space around the swing has to be just so, the arrows help move the swing and the space in our minds, the color has to be in the right place, and it has to be the right color. The images look fairly simple but each of these painting took me about a week. I spent most of that semester working on this series and I was learning a lot. Now you’re back at the beginning with me.

This is my final piece of writing on drawing in general because that’s all I can think of for now. Well, I can actually think of one more thing, drawing from photo reference, but I don’t know how interesting that is. It’s not really hard to draw from a photo but there are a couple of quirks. Plus I don’t do that a whole lot. But maybe another time I will write about it.

This piece is related to the last one I wrote about Surrealist Automatic Drawing. It’s about one of the main ways that I draw now and have drawn for the last decade. I’ll tell you about my little sketchbook drawings. It was back in January 2000 that I started drawing this way regularly. I bought a 5.5 x 8.5 spiral bound sketchbook to make spontaneous ink drawings in. They are like the automatic drawings that I mentioned last week except I don’t scribble in pencil first. I just start drawing in ink and see what comes out.

I have a lot of good things to say about drawing in ink without any under drawing. Especially in the early stages of figuring things out and especially if you like to find new things in your drawings. I “Think in ink” a lot better than in pencil. With a pencil I’m hesitant. We all have the luxury of an eraser when using a pencil. Therefore I’m always thinking about erasing as I’m drawing in pencil. At least it’s in the back of my mind. “Is this line right? Should I erase it and start over? I’ve go to make this look good or erase it.” All that chatter in my brain goes away when I do the basic drawing in ink. There is more thinking about the line I am making rather than if it should be there. If I make a mistake I just keep going. It’s not like I can fix it so I move on. It’s the way to go for me.

In looking back at that first sketchbook (randomly named “Clipper” by opening a dictionary and pointing to a word with my eyes closed) I can see how I was still working things out. First off it took me about a year and a half to fill the one hundred page sketchbook. I was never much of a sketchbook guy so it’s no surprise it took me so long to fill it but that’s slower than I would have thought. Of course I don’t think I ever actaully filled up a sketchbook before then. Most of my old sketchbooks peter out and end with a quarter of the pages still blank. Not being very good at sketching (rather than drawing) I’d get tired of looking at the mediocre sketches in my sketchbook and get a clean new one. A lot of young artists have that same habit. These days it takes me about a year to finish one of these sketchbooks (or inkbooks as I call them) which is a long time but much shorter than the first one.

I also notice that I didn’t start dating the pages until about half way through on page fifty four. I do that as a matter of course on my sketchbook pages now but it took me a full year, until 1/22/01 to start doing it then. Now that I look closer I do see some dates on the front of the page. It’s now my habit to date the back of pages. I can see by theses dates that the front half of the book took me a year while the back half took half a year. It took time to change the way I drew.

A page from my earliest Inkbook that's quite different from how I draw in them now.

The way I draw in my small sketchbook now is to first draw a small box in the upper left hand side of a page and then draw a spontaneous ink drawing in that box. Repeat this process about eight or nine times a page. All I’m trying to do with this process is pull images out of my brain that are new and different. I don’t decide what I’m going to draw ahead of time and just start. I used black markers, mostly a Pentel Sign Pen, for this part. Sometimes I draw with a purple marker. I just start somewhere in the small box and draw a line. I let that line lead me to the next one and the next one. Somewhere in this process I decide that the drawing is actually of something and work it into a recognizable image. When I make that decision is variable. At times after one line and at other times after ten lines. It depends on what comes out of my pen.

It’s not easy to draw this way. It takes a lot of practice to clear my mind and just start drawing. Plus most of the little drawings are useless. They’re never going to be turned into something other than the boring little drawing that they are. But they have to be done. I have to do a lot of drawings using this method in order to get some good ones that I can make a finished picture out of. Though it is strange how sometimes I can get on a little roll and make a few good little drawings in a row. There have been some pages in my inkbooks where I pull three of four drawings off a single page to make into prints or paintings while the pages all around it are a wasteland of uninteresting little drawings. I don’t know why that is but it happens on occasion.

A page from my very latest Inkbook that's only o couple of weeks old.

In looking back at my first sketchbook I can see my hesitation with this process. I didn’t start out drawing little boxes all the time but used them about half the time. Plus there are usually two or three larger drawings on a page with a lot more black shapes in them rather than the line work I use now. It looks like instead of coming up with a lot of basic images I was finishing the drawings a lot more. But there was no need for them to be finished. It was a different process at first.

So that’s what’s become of the Surrealist Automatic Drawing method for me. It’s my own little automatic drawing method now. I remember being at a barbecue once and I had my inkbook with me. I was describing this process to a person and its relationship to the Surrealist Automatic Drawing method. This person had an interesting observation about the pencil scribbles I used to make to draw this way. This person said that the scribble lines were still there except they were only in my head now. I think there is some truth to that.

This week I’m writing about a different type of drawing than I’ve written about before. It has nothing to do with drawing from life. It’s a type of drawing that I didn’t really get into until I was well in my late twenties and it didn’t fully exploit it until many years after that. For me it’s all about pulling images out of my imagination that have never been seen before. It’s how I come up with so many of the weird things that I draw. I first learned about it back in my art school days and it was called “Surrealist Automatic Drawing”.

Back in the 1920’s and 30’s the Surrealists were looking for some new ways to draw stuff and “Automatic Drawing” is what they came up with. To me it’s basically scribbling or doodling mindlessly on paper. Salvador Dali used it for his dream-like paintings and Paul Klee used it completely differently for his child-like paintings. The key is to draw with no idea in mind of exactly what you are going to draw. This is not an easy thing to do. It takes practice. In the same way that clearing your mind takes practice so does this.

When I first started drawing this way I’d begin by drawing borders on my paper and then scribbling. The borders aren’t absolutely necessary to the method but since my natural talent is for composition I almost always start any drawing by defining its edges. That’s the way my brain works. Not everybody does this but I find it helpful. Then within that box I just scribble lightly. After a while I discovered it was helpful to close my eyes as I scribbled. I didn’t want my conscious mind making the decisions of where I was moving the pencil. Over time I learned that my hand, even not guided by my conscious mind, would tend to repeat some of the same scribbles. So I would turn the paper sideways or upside down to mix things up. I would also use my left hand at times to add to the variety. It takes a bit of technique to scribble mindlessly.

After I made a lot of scribbles on the paper, the automatic drawing phase, I would look at the paper to see what I could see. I would try to find the drawing in the lines. It’s a bit like finding faces in clouds. The scribbled lines intersect, split off, and makes shapes both positive and negative. It’s from those shapes that I pull the images out of my imagination. Weird creatures and strange worlds that don’t necessarily have a relationship with the real world. These are the things I’m looking for when I do this type of drawing. Something that I couldn’t have come up with by a more traditional method.

The drawing stages from scribble to ink.

I can remember a moment from years ago when I was giving a talk about art at a school. I think the students were around thirteen. A friend and I were giving a talk on drawing and it was mostly about the traditional type of drawing that I wrote about before. I had only been doing my take on Surrealist Automatic Drawing for maybe a couple of years at that point. My thoughts on it weren’t especially clear at that point but I did a demo of it anyway. I scribbled on the chalk board and then made a weird drawing out of it. Then we had all the kids try it. Since it started with scribbling it was easy for them. Except for one kid who couldn’t see anything in his own scribbles. That’s when I first realized exactly how much practice that type of drawing takes. A fair amount. I saw something right away in the kid’s scribbles and drew a picture for him from them.

For years I mostly used this particular method of drawing to make a comic strip. The strip was made up of a running narrative over a series of non-literal pictures. They were about eight pages long. I would make them by first ruling panel borders on all eight pages in whatever layout I thought was interesting. After that I would scribble over all the pages. Right hand, left hand, sideways, and upside down I would use all my tricks to keep the scribbles as varied as possible. Then I would look at each individual panel and draw what I would see there. With six to eight panels a page there was a lot of drawing to be done. Being that I often had my eyes closed when scribbling I couldn’t see the panel borders and that helped unify the drawing over the entire page.

After I had all eight pages drawn I would lay them all out before me. This is when I’d come up with the story I wanted to tell. This is also when I’d put the pages in order. That’s how non-literal the pages were as I was doing them. The pages didn’t even have a numerical order until I was done drawing them. The first page I drew only had a one in eight chance of being the first page of the story.

This type of comic was too far out for most comic book fans that I knew but some people liked them. They were strange and dream-like. They really did give me a chance to do a lot of automatic drawing. I’d have to look but I think I did at least ten of these type stories. At eight pages a piece that’s about five hundred automatic drawings. It was certainly a good start and gave me a chance to really delve into that type of drawing.

At around that same time I started learning how to paint in gouache. That’s when I started using this automatic drawing method to create single images. That’s something I hadn’t done with it before and it caused me to get even more illustrative with the weird images I was pulling out of my brain. That’s one of the odd things about this method of drawing. Since I’m starting the drawing with no idea of what I’m going to draw in my mind I often have no idea where the image I draw comes from. I surprise myself. I like that.

For this next part of my writing about art I want to talk about basic drawing. This is not about basic drawing lessons but about how a person perceives basic drawing. It’s a bit of an oddball subject for basic drawing and one which I have never seen addressed but it’s important to me because it took me until I was about thirty years old to realize that all the basic drawing methods I had learned were wrong for me. I didn’t see things in the way that the lessons wanted me to see them. I’m talking about the very first lines that I put on paper after I have an idea of what I want to draw.

Lets say I get it in my head to draw a man standing and leaning on a cane. How do I start? If I’m drawing from life I get a model and have him stand there with a cane. Or I could take or find a picture of a man with a cane. I’m ignoring those choices for now. For this thought exercise I am not making a drawing using any reference. I am drawing from my imagination. So how do I start? Usually with proportion. I indicate the top of the head and the bottom of the feet with the crotch usually right in the middle of the body’s height. That’s about what every type of basic drawing starts with. The standard idea of how the body will fit on the paper. Life drawing classes, study, and observation usually come before this stage so you can learn the proportions but once again that’s not what I’m talking about right now.

The basic drawing technique that is usually taught is to think of the body as a series of basic shapes. It makes sense. The arms are tubes, the joints are small spheres, the torso a cylinder, the hands a series of small blocks, and the hips are blocks. The circle, square, and triangle. That’s what basic drawing is made of. Like I said it makes sense but I always struggled with it. It was too complicated for me. A body made up of about a dozen or more parts was too much. I struggled with this method for about a decade and it never helped me as much as it could have. It’s in just about every drawing book too. You can open up any drawing book and see basic shape and skeletal figures running, jumping, dancing, fencing, and doing all sorts of stuff. I could never do any of that and had no idea why.

I remember trying another way of putting down those initial lines. It didn’t work either but at least it wasn’t the same old one. It was the method used by the comic book artist and excellent draftsman John Buscema. I don’t remember where I saw him do it. It might have been an appearance he made or it might have been on video but either way I remember watching and listening. He would start all his drawings with scribbles. I had never seen anyone do that before. Nor have I since. He didn’t draw basic shapes and connect them with tubes. He built the body out of the forms he created from scribbles. It was fascinating to see. The basic type of drawing I’m speaking of here is often called “Structure drawing”. But John Buscema’s structure drawing had structure unlike anything else. He saw things in a different way than everybody else.

I can remember trying this method many times over the years but it didn’t work for me any better than the geometric way. My scribbles always looked like scribbles and I couldn’t build three dimensional form off of them like John Buscema could. I’d always end up drawing some geometric forms inside my scribbles that would make the scribbles superfluous anyway. It didn’t work for me at all but it at least let me know that there are other ways to start a very basic figure drawing other than the geometric shapes way. It didn’t help me find that way though since it still took me another ten years.

I’m not even sure how I stumbled onto my own little way of doing things. It evolved somehow from the geometric method. It turns out that I see things most clearly in terms of triangles. To me the whole human body is made up of triangles. Flat triangles are how I now start out every drawing. If I was going to draw a man standing with a cane the first thing I’d do is draw him as one triangle. The top of the triangle is where his shoulders would be and the bottom his feet. I’d put an oval on top for his head of course. Then his arms and legs I draw as elongated triangles. As I further break the basic gesture down each arm becomes two triangles and so do the legs. The hand is made up of fingers which are a series of triangles. The feet are triangles.

A little robot that I drew out of triangles.

From there I build everything thing out as more realistic body shapes with more dimension but the whole thing comes from triangles. For some reason on the most basic drawing level that’s how I see things. I don’t know why but after I discovered that and started using it as my most basic way of drawing my skills and confidence improved dramatically. A lot of young artists who are trying to draw cartoons of the human figure have a hard time making the drawings look lively and natural. “Your figures are too stiff” is the phrase most often heard in critiques. But no one ever has a way to make them un-stiff. Ever. I think this is because the problem lies in the basic way an artist makes a drawing. What shapes get put down first. My figures were often too stiff when I started with the standard three shape geometric approach but that’s all I knew. I didn’t even know that was the problem. But when that somehow evolved into my triangular approach I learned to avoid the problem with stiff figures that so many of us have.

I don’t know how many other basic ways of drawing are out there since the three shape geometric one is the one that’s in all the books but it’s important to know there are others. From John Buscema’s scribbling to my flattened triangles it’s more important than I ever hear mentioned to figure out how you see the world as you make a very basic drawing. It’s the key to making advanced ones. At least it was my key.