Radiant Comics

This week I decided to present some under-drawings. These are the type of drawings that I mentioned last week but I had no examples of to show. That’s because they’re almost always erased as I draw the finished drawing on top of them. The reason theses weren’t erased it that they are also a type of drawing called “Thumbnails”. That means that they’re small. These ones are the size of baseball cards so they’re a bit bigger than the nail on your thumb but they’re still small.

Thumbnails aren’t always under-drawings as well but sometimes they are for me. Most of the time thumbnail drawings are used to figure out basic composition and therefor are drawn using only the most basic shapes. The shapes I’m using here are fairly basic but often in thumbnails the shapes are so basic that only I can tell what’s going on. An artist’s thumbnail drawings are generally illegible to anyone else. Now that’s basic.

So why are these ones so legible? Because every artist has a scale. That’s what one of my teachers told me back in art school and it’s true. Most artists have a size they are comfortable working at and working at a much different size makes for bad art. My scale is mostly big. Big as a wall big. I’ve been working on marker drawings that are twenty by thirty inches and I wish I had bigger paper. A lot of my painting is done on three by four feet canvases and they’d be even bigger if I had the room.

It takes planning to make a piece that big. Often the planning is fairly big too but starts out smaller if not small. I have a hard time working things out when I draw small to medium size yet at a very small size I can get things going. It seems my scale is big or very small. When trying to work out a basic drawing at too big a size I get caught up in things that don’t matter yet. As you can see from these drawings none of the people have any faces. That’s because all I was trying to do was figure out what their bodies should look like. Yet if I was drawing these any bigger I’d get hung up on drawing their faces just right. I know I would. It’s happened many times before. I’m not the first person to start out doing one task only to be distracted by another. Cutting down on the distractions is key for me.

Drawing very small works for me because it limits my choices to the most basic ones. I can’t noodle around with faces. (I love drawing faces by the way. It’s one of my favorite things.) The point of a pencil, even a small mechanical one, is fairly big compared to the paper so I can’t get too detailed with the drawing and have to work on simple shapes and lines. These drawing are not from life so whatever is going on in them is coming from my memory and imagination. That leaves a lot of room for interpretation so working small at first helps make that room a little more manageable. It helps me focus.

As I look at these drawings I’m reminded of what my cousin asked me years ago. He was probably fifteen or so at the time so I was in my mid twenties. He was interested in how to draw and he wanted me to show him how to draw a picture. I obliged and made up some kind of figure drawing out of my head. As you can see from the drawings up top there are some heavy pencil lines and a of of light pencil lines. The drawing I did for my cousin was larger, around eight by ten inches, and had a lot more of the light pencil lines. That’s how an under drawing is done. You sketch around drawing a lot of light lines until the drawing comes into focus and you darken the lines you like to bring the drawing together. There are often lots of light sketchy lines all over the drawing.

After watching me go through this process my cousin asked me a question I had never heard anyone ask before. He asked, “How do you know which light line is the right one to follow?”. I was a bit taken aback. I didn’t know how to answer that question but I guess the answer was “Experience”. Knowing which light grey line to make into the dark grey line is what drawing is. It’s certainly what under-drawing is but how does one explain that process? Not easily.

The above under-drawings aren’t even my final under-drawings either. I still have to blow them up bigger and get them to work at that size. My next size up is for them is about eight inches tall. That’s another thing about art and scale. What works at three inches tall might not work at fifteen inches tall. Blowing something up that much bigger reveals some of its hidden flaws plus often things don’t work not because of flaws but because of literal space. The negative space between an arm and a torso might work perfectly at three inches tall but blow it up and that negative space might be too much. Size does matter.

So I fully expect things to change in the next round of under-drawings. Just look at the hands and fingers. They’re barely there. They’re mostly just gestures that when blown up will look as unfinished as they are. But that’s the point of my drawing so small. I don’t want to sweat the small details at this stage. Most of these drawing will never even go passed this stage. That’s also the nature of thumbnail drawings. You have to do a lot of them to get a couple of good ideas. Most of them are just, “Well, I wonder what this’ll look like?” sort of things that are meant to be briefly contemplated and then put in the good or bad pile. The bad pile is always the bigger of the two and gets tossed away never to be seen again.

This week I’m continuing my writing about art by showing an example of my drawing. Here is another example of me learning to draw. It’s probably from just before the first drawing I showed you which puts it in the SPring of 1987. It’s an art school life drawing. Usually such drawings are done on large sheets of newsprint paper which are then thrown out and lost forever. You can see why. It’s not a particularly good drawing. I didn’t even know it still existed until I looked in my old sketchbooks in order to write this piece. I must have not had my normal newsprint pad this night in class and so I drew in my sketchbook. I don’t remember ever doing that but I also don’t remember drawing in orange charcoal. And why does is say “Oh Well” on it?

Anyway this is an example of learning to draw from life. It’s one of the ways they teach you to draw in art school. They put a model in the middle of the classroom and everybody gathers around the model and tries to draw him. The teacher than wanders through the class and tries to teach an overall lesson to the class while helping individual students too. It’s not an easy way to teach or learn. Sometimes a student will get a bad view to make a composition from and that’s tough to overcome. Life drawing isn’t easy and breaks a lot of art students.

This is also a type of drawing that’s never meant to be seen. It’s student work that is about the student learning to make art. It’s a classroom assignment like in any other subject. No one would look at classroom math work and expect it to be anything but a person learning math. That’s where the expectations are different with drawing. We expect the student making the drawing to know how to draw. It’s an odd thing. Back in those days I would sometimes here a person say they wished they knew how to draw. Take a drawing class was usually the answer but then the first person would say that they can’t take an art class because they don’t know how to draw.

As bad as it is figure two is even the best of the figure drawings that I found in my sketchbook. The rest are more awful and show that I really couldn’t draw back when I took this life drawing class but I picked this one without even thinking about it because you never want to think that you can’t draw even when the whole point of taking life drawing is to learn to draw from life. So that’s my takeaway from this. Even when drawing is about learning we still want it to be good first. Even if it can’t be that’s the desire. The call of art.

Now I have to get out of my student years for at least a moment. I think this drawing is more interesting than the example of my student drawings but is along the same lines of drawing something. Starting with an idea of what to draw and then executing that idea. That isn’t the only type of drawing but it’s the easiest place to start. It’s where most of us begin

This is a drawing from somewhere around 2005 I’d guess. I’m not sure of the exact date since I only have this scan of it handy. Once again this is the type of drawing where I am trying to draw something. I was trying to draw a female figure. I was trying to do a little more than just a normal female figure by using various geometric designs to frame the negative shape of her body. I was drawing around her body to make her body. That’s a different approach for me but as a drawing I think it succeeds pretty well. Except it failed me.

As I said before drawing is usually not finished artwork. It’s one of the steps in the stairs that lead to a finished piece of art but it’s usually not a finished piece itself. As much as I like this drawing as an image I was never able to make anything finished out of it. I tired to make it into a print but couldn’t and it was the same for a painting. I couldn’t even make a “Finished” drawing out of it. You might ask why I couldn’t but I have no answer for you. I still like the drawing and still might try to make something out of it but as of now I look at it and sigh.

That is the nature of drawing and especially the nature of preliminary drawing. It’s there for the artist and not the viewer. That’s actually a hard lesson to learn when you’re learning to draw. I know when I was learning to draw I wanted everything to be beautiful and presentable. I wanted everybody who looked at my drawing to be amazed by them. Of course my drawings were no where near that good. That part I understood but the part that I didn’t understand was that they weren’t supposed to be that good. Not that they were supposed to be bad but they were supposed to support what I was trying to accomplish whether that was working on an a larger piece of art or just learning to draw. It’s not supposed to impress an audience.

Figure 3 isn’t exactly what I’l call a “Working Drawing” it’s more like a finished working drawing. A working drawing is a couple of levels of sketchiness below a finished working drawing. There is often a lot more figuring stuff out in them than you see here. I don’t have any examples on hand right now because those type of drawing often get drawn over and they are never meant to be shown. Other artists usually love to see them though. They are sometimes referred to as the guts of a work. Often you can really see the mind of the artist at work in such preliminary drawings. You can see the decisions the artist is making as they are being made.

This week I want to finally start writing about art in general and my art specifically. I guess it could be my New Year’s resolution but it’s only a coincidence that I came to this conclusion so close the the start of a new year. Though it’s tough to figure out where to start. I’ve made a lot of art over the years. All different kinds. I think writing about it will help me and others to see the threads that runs through it. At least that’s what I hope to accomplish. That and making it interesting.

I’ve decided the only place I could start was with drawing. I’m big on definitions so the first thing I’ll try to do is define what drawing is. I’m also big on trying to find the simplest definition for a concept. I think understanding comes with simplicity and from that complexity is easier to make sense of. The simplest definition I can come up with for drawing is “Putting lines on paper in an interesting way”. Sure it can be lines on other surfaces too and sure “Interesting” can be a subjective word but I’m going with “Interesting” having context rather than being subjective. Plus it’s still the simplest definition I can think of. Feel free to come up with your own if you don’t like mine. It’s not easy.

I’m starting with drawing because it is usually not an end but a means. Often drawing is done in the service of a finished piece of art and isn’t a finished work itself. That’s not always the case but the vast majority of my drawings are the first steps in the process of making art. That’s why I’m beginning with it. My definition of drawing “Putting lines on paper in an interesting way” is actually an advanced definition. I could never have thought of drawing that way when I was starting out. When a person is first learning to draw it’s all about drawing something. Anything. A nude figure, a dinosaur, airplanes, a building, a super-hero, a cat, or whatever else the drawing is about portraying the thing you’re drawing. If you’re drawing a horse you want people to know it’s a horse. That’s what matters. “In an interesting way” barely even exists at that point except as a vague and far off concept. Learning to draw is a long process and making things interesting isn’t always in the early steps of learning.

To illustrate this point I’ve pulled one of my old sketchbooks off the shelf and scanned a drawing from my college days. This is probably from Fall 1987. The hardbound black sketchbooks I bought back in those days were definitely a good idea. I don’t use those particular ones anymore but none of these old drawings would exist if I didn’t draw them in a book. As individual pieces of paper they would have long disappeared. They’re not very good and I’m sure I would have lost track of them or thrown them out but it’s easy to keep a book. Books, in general, have value to me so It’s tough to just throw them away. Hence I still have this sketchbook named “Snow”. I did and still do name my sketchbooks by closing my eyes, opening a dictionary, and pointing to a word. That’s how in 1987 this one became “Snow”. My latest one is named “Host”. They’re not always four letter words. I swear. “Snow” is pretty battered since I carried it around a lot but I reinforced it with duct tape way back then and those black hardbound books are pretty rugged to begin with.

This page is dominated by me trying to figure out how to draw some hands. There are a few of them on the page and it looks like I was trying out various gestures. The drawings aren’t very interesting except in context of me working on figuring things out. It looks like these were done for a comic strip I used to make back then. One character carried a saxophone and I don’t think I’ve ever drawn a sax except then. I can tell that the large hand on the page was drawn by looking at my own hand in the mirror. That would be the only way I could get the level of realism in the drawing. I couldn’t draw that out of my head. This was also the days before digital photography and internet images searches made finding reference of hands or anything else easy to find so I kept a mirror in my studio at college. All the drawings on this page were about trying to draw something.

It’s important to point out that because I say this drawing isn’t very interesting doesn’t mean it’s not a drawing. It’s just not a very successful drawing. I find that when it comes to art people often have a hard time with definitions. They’re expected to be binary. They want to know if something is art or isn’t art. The concept that something can be bad or mediocre art escapes a lot people. They’ve been taught that all art is good so if something is bad it must not be art. That’s not true. There is good art, bad art, and everything in between.

With my page of drawing of hands I tried to put lines on paper in an interesting way but in the context of all the other drawing I and others have done I didn’t really succeed at the interesting part. Maybe I though it was good back then but it’s really mediocre student art. That’s its context. If a person’s context is that theses are the only drawings they have ever seen than they could be very interesting to that person. It could be that this is the greatest art that they have ever seen. But show that person drawings of the great masters and context puts my hand drawing right back into the dull category. Now I think I have to dig up something good to show. I’ll be back.

Sometimes I wonder where things go in life. Sure that thought passes through my mind as it does for many others when I contemplate the nature of time and where the past goes after it happens but this week that thought was more concrete and specific. I wondered where some of my comic books went.

I have a lot of comic books. Somewhere around the ten thousand mark and that makes things hard to find without some sort of order to them. I have them in order. A good eighty percent of my collection is real easy to find and it takes me only a minute to find something but for that other twenty percent I rely on my database. Like a lot of comic book collectors I have my comics cataloged on my computer. Importantly my catalogue also includes the location of where each comic is located on my various shelves or boxes. Where is my copy of Spider-Man 200? Bedroom bookcase A shelf 2. Easy stuff. Until it’s not.

A few years ago I was filling in holes in some of the runs of comics I have that were some fairly obscure series. Mostly small press stuff from the 1980s. One of the series I was contemplating completing was “Crossfire” by Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle. For some reason at the time I decided not to find the seven issues out of twenty six that I was missing. I put them away and didn’t give them another thought for years. Until earlier this week that is. I decided to look them up at an online store and check their price and availability. They were cheap and available so I puled up my database to see what issues I was missing and noted them.

The map is not the territory. That’s a lesson I’ve learned when trying to fill in missing issues of comics. In other words double check the database with what is actually on the shelf. I decided to do just that. I wanted to make sure of what issues I had and what issues I was missing. Then a funny thing happened. All the issues were missing. They were not where my database showed them to be. No big deal I thought. Sometimes I move things and forget to update my database. So I stared looking around.

A solid eighty percent of my comics are on shelves and I can get to them easily. I looked all over my shelves but “Crossfire” was nowhere to be found. I didn’t quite believe it. The other twenty percent of my collection is tucked away in short boxes. By the way never use comic book long boxes. They’ll break your back eventually. If one of my comics is in a box that means I really don’t want it but it’s too much of a bother to find a home for. Comic book collectors can’t just throw out comics so there they sit in my closet. I pulled ten boxes or so out of the closet to look through just in case “Crossfire” was in them. It wasn’t. So where did it go? I’m not sure.

I have gotten rid of plenty of comics over the years. Some I gave away to friends and some I gave to my local comic shop. They are virtually worthless so I didn’t try even sell them. I give them away. My criteria for getting rid of a comic is to ask myself the question, “Will I ever read this again?”. If the answer is no then out it goes. I generally remember what I’ve gotten rid of and what I’ve kept except for one comic. About ten years ago I discovered that I was missing a chink of my “Iron Man” collection. I still had all my favorite issues but not the full run I once had. I have no memory of getting rid of those ones but I must have.

Did I get rid of “Crossfire”? I have no idea where they are but I don’t think I purged them. About six years ago I got rid of some stuff by selling it on Ebay. That was a big pain for not much money. That’s they only time I think I could have gotten rid of my “Crossfire” comics but I doubt I would have. It was an incomplete series that there is very little demand for. I don’t think it’s something that I would have sold at that time but maybe I did. I just don’t know.

The opposite of “Crossfire” is the series I discovered on my shelf called “Cyberforce”. I have all thirty five issues that were published between 1993-1997. I must have liked it because I bought it off the stands but as I flipped through the comics nothing was familiar. I didn’t remember a single thing about the book. None of the covers even looked familiar. I know that 1997 was a long time ago but c’mon. How is it possible that none of the covers triggered a memory?

One series that I am filling a gap on I discovered in one of the boxes in my closet. It’s a Richard Corben series from the 1980s called “A Rip in Time”. I’m more of a Corben fan now than I was back then. I was excited to see them since I forgot I even had any of them. I have issues one through four of a five issue series. Seeing them reminded me that I missed out on that fifth issues back in the 80s. It never made it to my local comic shop and was no longer available by the time I noticed I didn’t have it. I don’t remember the story at all but I remember the disappointment of not being able the get the final issue.

One final 1980s back issue I just got was “Edge of Chaos” numbers one through three. I only had issue one way back when but got rid of it years ago. It was a Gray Morrow comic and I remember it being wordy and boring. My appreciation for Morrow’s art has grown over the years so for a buck a piece I decided to get all three issues. First off what a difference the paper stock has made over time. The first issue was on newsprint and is yellow and faded. The second and third issues are on white “baxter” paper and are as bright and clear as they were decades ago. That said the comic is still pretty boring. The art is nice but the writing is wordy. I mean wordy for the early 80’s let alone now. But I did enjoy the Gray Morrow art and I’m glad I was able to revisit it again. I wonder where my original first issue ended up? Who knows what becomes of things?

A bit of a trying time this week do to my motor vehicle and a deer. Yeah, for the first time in my life I hit a deer with my car. Not an experience I’d recommend and I’d guess the deer was not too fond of it either. It was just after sunset, about 5:30 PM, and was only a couple miles from home. I was on my way to my local comic book store on my usual weekly trip when it happened. I had driven down my street, made a left, drove about a mile and bam. Hit a deer.

I have good vision. In my youth it was even better but it’s still really good. I’ve never had to wear glasses and see well at night. I write that because I usually see deer in and around the road. This one came out of the dark at a full run and I barely caught him out of the corner of my eye before I hit him. I was decelerating but there was absolutely no chance of missing him. Zero. We were just on intersecting paths and neither of us could stop. I can’t speak for the dear but it was a pretty startling and confusing experience for me.

I hit the deer with the car’s driver’s side front bumper. Or bumper cover as I find out they’re called now. Cars no longer have actual bumpers. Being that my car is a Civic that has a short hood the deer was surprisingly close to me as I hit it. I saw it clearly in front of me and then clearly go flying for six or eight feet. I was going about thirty MPH when I started decelerating and that’s better than 60 but that’s still going pretty fast. And I had no idea what to do after I hit the deer. It lay there for a moment and then got up and trotted off. I’m not sure if it lived long after that because that was a hard broadside hit it took. And before it got up I really had no idea what to do. If it just lay there and died in the middle of the road am I supposed to leave it there? Drag it off the road somehow? Call the police? I was glad it got up.

After that I still had no idea what to do. I decided to pull over on the nearest side street and inspect the damage. Inside the car I hadn’t felt much Impact but there had to be bent or broken stuff on the outside. I was on a dark unlit street so it was hard to see anything but I felt the front of the car and there sure were bumps and scratches. I wasn’t sure if I should go home or drive but decided to keep driving to the comic shop just the see how well the car worked. It drove fine. I wasn’t posotive if it was my imagination or not but one of the headlights seemed misaligned. When I made my first left and put on my blinker it was making that blinking noise too fast so I knew there was something wrong with my directional. Turns out the bulb broke on impact.

When I got to the comic shop I was a little freaked out. I still had no idea what to do. I had never been in an accident before nor had I ever had reason to call my car insurance company. I had no idea if car insurance covered deer. It’s just a bill I pay every six months. My friend, who I met at the shop, and I went out to inspect the car in the better light. Plus he had a flash light. I could see more damage now. The bumper cover was popped out of the quarter panel on the driver’s side. The hood was dented. Yeah, it would need to be taken care of.

The car was still driving fine when I got home and I was still a little freaked out. I called my car insurance company and they walked me through what I had to do. At first I was going to use a local body shop that a friend recommended. That would mean I’d have to set up an appointment to have my car inspected for an estimate, bring it a couple of towns over for the inspection, bring it back to local shop, and then have my insurance company cut a check to the shop or me. I’m not even sure which. I set up the inspection with them and then hung up. After about ten minutes of thinking about it I called them back and cancelled that inspection and set up another one through a program they told me about that I declined at first.

Instead of using a local shop I could use one of their official approved ones a couple of towns over (different town than the inspection shop) where they will inspect my car, make an estimate, and then have the shop fix it. The insurance company will pay the shop directly and guarantee the repairs since they oversaw them. Once I had a moment to think about it this seemed like the best idea. I called them back and they set it all up.

A few days later when my appointment was finally up I was amazed at the damage. It really didn’t look so bad. You could walk by the car and not really notice it but parts would have to be replaced to get it back to normal. All totaled it was the bumper cover, the hood, the grill, the compression foam (which is behind the bumper cover), and the left front quarter panel which would have to be replaced. It was $2800 worth of damage. I though I was on the hook for a grand of that but it turned out to not be collision damage but under the comprehensive part of my policy and I have to pay $250. That made my money worries a little easier.

So as I finish writing this my car is still in the shop. It takes a little while to fix these things. I hope the deer made it through okay but who knows. What I know is that I don’t want to hit any more of them. It’s too expensive.