Radiant Comics

On the replacing of things. That’s the subject on my mind tonight. It’s there because I’ve finally gotten around to replacing something of mine. My big 24×30 inch black portfolio case. Every art student knows what one is. It’s a basic art supply that’s on a freshman art student’s list of things to purchase that they receive upon entering college/art school. As a matter of fact the one I am replacing is my original one from way back in 1984 when I was a freshman going off to college. It’s a little worn out.

I never even carried it around much. It’s too big. Most students carried one around only rarely. Except there was always one or two kids in every class who had it with them all the time. For most of us it became a place to store our drawings and oversized supplies when we weren’t using them. That’s what mine became and has been since about 1984. It sits behind my couch with all sorts of big drawings and other things in it. Except it has practically fallen apart and doesn’t hold anything too well. Especially if I want to move it.

I have other black portfolio cases in various sizes and they are all much newer. Though they are in better shape they are not the right size for what I need out of my fallen apart one. I should have actually replaced the portfolio about ten years ago. The portfolio has a zipper that unzips it on three sides so it opens up flat. Of course somewhere about a decade ago the zipper separated from the pleather material the case is made out of. I can still zip it up but that doesn’t matter when the zipper isn’t actually attached to anything. Like I said, it’s in bad shape.

The portfolio isn’t even an expensive piece of equipment, I just bought a new one for thirty bucks, but who wants to spend any money on something that just sits there behind the couch holding stuff? And the stuff isn’t even very important. I don’t move things in and out of it often so I never even think off it. I moved it a couple of weeks ago and it nearly fell apart completely in my hands. That’s why it was on my mind to replace.

It also struck me that the reason I didn’t move things in and out of it too often was that it is hard to do. That thought came to mind as a result of having to replace my inkjet printer a couple of months ago. My old printer was very twitchy and a pain in the neck to get to work right. At least for the last couple of years of its life. I never realized, until I replaced it with a new one that worked flawlessly, how much I wasn’t printing anymore. I hadn’t made or printed out many of my photo collages because it was too much of a pain. I used to print them as I did them. It wasn’t a conscious decision to stop printing them. It was just that I didn’t want to deal with my temperamental printer.

The same could be said of my old portfolio case. Did I really not need to go into it that often or did I not bother going into it that often because it was too much of a pain? A question that only came into my mind after I got my new printer. Either way I decided to spend the thirty bucks so I wouldn’t have to think about it again. Sometimes throwing money at a problem does make it go away.

I’ve mentioned before about my easel that I’ve always toyed with the idea of replacing. It’s an easel I built myself many years ago and it doesn’t have the conveniences or features of some of the fancier store bought easels. But I like mine because I made it myself. I’ve been using it since about 1990. Paying work has slowed down this year so I won’t even be thinking about replacing it for a while. Damned economy. Maybe I’ll have to find some easel tackle and improve mine myself. I don’t want to replace it.

Replacing my camera is still on my mind. I almost did it earlier in the year but then my laptop and printer both broke. It cost me $300 to fix the laptop, $400 for a new printer plus an additional $180 to stock up on for ink for the printer. There went my money for a new camera. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There is a new camera coming out soon that looks interesting to me. If I had bought the one I wanted to back in March I would have missed out on this one. Of course I don’t have the money yet for a new one but what the hey; at least I don’t have buyer’s remorse. How’s that for the glass being half full?

I got a flat tire while cycling this week. Not the first time that has happened but they do seem to come in groups so I’m watching out. I had two flat tires earlier in the spring but they were so close together they were almost the same flat tire. I geared up and went to get my bike and the tire was flat. It must have been a slow leak since it wasn’t flat the day before. I changed out the tube for a new one and went for a ride. A couple of miles from home the new tube went flat. How annoying. I had checked the tread for debris so this was a whole new leak.

This weeks flat tire was also a few miles from home. My ride turns into a walk I say. I can tell that a tire is going flat because the ride gets rougher. All of a sudden I felt the bumps in the road more than I had before. Sometimes it’s just in my head but soon I know for sure. That flat tire feeling is unmistakeable. A flat tire will also fish tale on you if you happen to be going down hill. That is never fun.

Last year I bought a self healing type tube. I had this green goo inside it that was supposed to plug the leak if the tube is punctured. As long as the leak is small enough it says. I’m not sure if any leak is small enough for it.

When that tube went flat there was goo all over the inside of the tire tread and all over the outside of the tube. The goo had congealed a little but not enough to plug up the pinhole sized leak. I patched the tube and when I got another leak some months later the goo didn’t plug that one either. Now the tube has five patches on it and is empty of goo. I wanted to replace that tube altogether but when I went to put one of my new ones in it had the wrong valve on it. I’m not sure how I bought the wrong one.

The one I did put on was a “Thorn Resistant” tube. I don’t know who came up with the term “Thorn Resistant” but I find it a weird one. It’s a tube for a skinny road bike tire. Who is riding one of those over thorns? Maybe a person on a mountain bike might ride over some thorns but I never have on my road bike. It’s always a little sliver of glass that flattens my tire. At least it is when I can actually tell. Sometimes the glass embeds itself in the tire and sometimes I’m just left with a little hole in the tube and I can’t tell what made it. Maybe it was a thorn. But I doubt it.

The “Thorn Resistant” tube seems to be a tube with more thickness to it than a normal tube. As a matter of fact I had a bit of trouble putting it on before I got the hang of it. I’ve gotten pretty good changing tubes but the “Thorn Resistant” one was different. Normally I stick the tube in the tread and then put the tread on the rim pinching the tread so it sets down into the rim and then I blow it up. With the extra thick tube I had a little trouble pinching the tread into the rim. There was too much rubber in too little space. Eventually I put a little air in the tube to move it to the outside of the tread and then could set the tread in place properly. Let’s see if the extra thick tube lasts. Probably a little piece of glass can cut through it as easily as a thinner one.

I think all of these flats have been on the rear tire. The three or four this year have been. Probably because more of my weight is over that tire but who knows. One thing I do know is that I never hear a flat tire. If I hear a noise and think, “Oh no, is that going to cause a flat” it never does. Sometimes I hit little pieces of road debris just right and it is sent flying for a couple of feet with a little rubber twang or bang noise. It sounds like something could be bursting but nothing is. A tiny piece of glass cutting through my tire is always silent.

So there you go. One of the hazards of the road. A flat tire. I think they are one of the reasons I like to ride on a circular route. Years ago I’d ride a certain distance out and then turn around and go back the same way I came. Now I ride to the right in a big circular path. I don’t know how close it is to an actual circle but you get the idea. I’m never as far away from home as I’d be on a linear route. That way it’s easier to walk home if I get a flat. And flats do happen.

I have a fascination with the ending of things. From ancient civilizations to TV shows things that have ended can be interesting in that they ended. I know that’s confusing and everything eventually ends but some things that end before their time and other things that end mysteriously can be interesting.

Stories without endings always make me wonder what was the ending supposed to be. Even if I find out what the ending was supposed to be it’s not the same as what it would actually have been. The map is not the territory. And the territory is gone so we’ll never really know.

TV shows are easy examples. “Austin Stories” and “Firefly” are two of my favorite shows that only had about a dozen episodes each and then they were cancelled. How and why they were cancelled is a bit of a mystery to me. Sure it has mostly to do with money but it’s the “Mostly” part that is tricky. Lots of bad TV shows have lasted for years and years and they couldn’t have made much more money than these two. So there has to be more to the story and I’ll never know it.

“Firefly” has lived on in a movie, some comic books, a role playing game, and has a pretty strong fan base. I’m sure the story of its cancellation has been or will be told but I usually hear it was because of shortsightedness on the part of TV network executives. That’s really not much of an explanation though. What does it really mean? Some guys in charge didn’t like what the show was doing for them so they cancelled it. That doesn’t really answer the question “Why?” for me. Of course that’s what is interesting about the ending of things. Sometimes the why of things is impossible to know.

“Austin Stories” is a lesser known TV show. It was the first scripted TV show that MTV made back in 1997. No movies, comic books, or RPGs for this show. It just faded into obscurity. It’s one of the funniest and most interesting shows I’ve seen but only a few people agree with me. Of course not many people ever saw it. Why? I don’t know. Another mystery.

Each episode of these shows is special to me since their are so few of them. I’ve always wondered why they couldn’t go on. There is no answer to that question but it inspires thought. All things end but some things have a seemingly natural life spans and others don’t.

Ancient Rome, for example, seemed to live a natural life span. It was around for a while and then it lost it’s empire-ness. That seems normal to me. I am somehow more interested in civilizations that ended before their time. Like the Aztecs did when the Spanish conquered them or even the Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire) that lasted a thousand years after Rome fell before it was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. Those civilizations are tinged with loss and “What could have been’s” to me. And I find that interesting.

Ancient civilizations that we know hardly anything about interest me too. The idea that generations of people lived in ways unknown to us is amazing. They were the same as us in that they laughed, cried, loved, fought, ate, drank, and did everything humans have in common but we know virtually nothing about them. Who were they and what did they think about?

People always say, after a loved one dies, that the person will always be alive as long as they remember them. But we all get forgotten in pretty short order. Put a few “Greats” before grandmother or grandfather and we’ve already lost the thread of memory. Let alone after five thousand years pass.

All the TV shows, books, magazine articles, and web sites on ancient civilizations and other things that have ended where the ending is almost always emphasized leads me to believe I am not alone in my fascination. I think it’s all really a human fascination with our own deaths. We have a hard time believing we are going to die and in a hundred years not even be a memory. Each of us it the center of the world so how can the world go on without us? It doesn’t compute. We’re all going to end someday but right now the ending is missing.

Missing endings always make us wonder.

I like bags. Bags for putting stuff in and carrying it around. Not shopping bags or anything like that. More like messenger bags, portfolios, brief cases. That sort of thing. I’m not much of a fan of knapsacks these days. I used to carry a knapsack back in my younger years when I could be away from home for a few days but that doesn’t happen much anymore. I don’t need the room afforded by a knapsack and prefer to carry a bag in my hand. Al long as it’s light enough.

When I used to commute to Manhattan I always carried a bag. Nothing special. It mainly held my reading material, a few drawings or sketchbook, various drawing tools, lunch, and my music player. My last one was a, sort of, messenger style bag that I got to hold my then new laptop. It was okay and did the job but it wasn’t a bag to be reckoned with. There was nothing interesting or special or inspiring about it. Mundane is a good word to describe it. And most other bags.

I don’t have to carry a bag much these days since I haven’t been commuting but sometimes I go into Manhattan to sit in an park and draw. Or else I walk around and take photos. That’s a variety of tasks and on those days I carry a bag. I have a pretty nice bag designed to tote art supplies around that I bought a couple of years ago. I generally like it, as it is well built and has some special features, but it is sometimes a little large (it can fit 14×17 inch paper pads) and is made out of black nylon. I’m not a fan of nylon bags. I prefer canvas. They fell better to me.

One of my favorite movie bags is in the “The Ninth Gate”. Johnny Depp totes around what looks to be an army surplus bag of some kind. It’s made of green canvas, has a shoulder strap, a bunch of pockets, and is held shut with a pair of straps and buckles. I don’t know if the bag is actually any good but it looks good in the movie. Whenever I watch that movie I am envious of his bag. I’m not even sure why because it really doesn’t look that special or inspiring. Maybe it’s just because people in moves don’t carry around bags too often.

A couple of years ago I bought a canvas army surplus style bag (not actual army surplus) off of Amazon. I’ve been disappointed with it. It doesn’t have good pockets or compartments, the main flap is held closed by velcro and not a buckle or snap, it looks a bit too much like a purse, and has no handle. Though I appreciate a nice shoulder strap I mostly like to hold a bag by the top handle. This bag has none. Probably due to its small size. There might be a problem finding any small bag with a top handle.

I’ve been looking online for a new bag lately. I don’t even know why. I really don’t need one since the couple I have are still in good shape plus I’m not really going anywhere that I need to carry a bag. Yet somehow the search for one better than the ones I have intrigues me right now. I’ve seen a bunch online but none that really grab me. Some are too big, some too small, some are too cheaply made, and some are too expensive.

Oddly I have no idea where to look for a bag I might want in the real world. The local malls have plenty of stores but none that have many canvas bags. I think finding a local army/navy store might be my best bet but I haven’t been that ambitious yet. It really hasn’t been much of a search since the priority is low. It just another silly thing that’s been on my mind. It’s a good thing I like silly.

I had a bit of time this week and so I pulled out the oil paints for the first time in a couple of years. Oil paint was my main medium for two decades but for the last few years I’ve used acrylic paint. That was because I wanted to make more paintings in a shorter period of time. I wanted to explore a lot of different images. Instead of painting one large oil painting I painted ten small acrylic paintings.

The change served me well and I’ve made a whole lot of 8×10 inch acrylic paintings of a whole variety of images and used a bunch of new techniques and approaches. But now I’ve grown tired of the small size. At least for the moment.

I pulled out an old stretcher I had lying around and dusted it off. At 48×39 inches it’s a a good size. Just what I was looking for. The stretcher was from a painting that I did years ago that I must not have liked since I got rid of it. I stretched some new canvas over the stretchers and then primed it for painting.

Working on a large painting is different from working on a small one. Small paintings can be done quickly and I can try different images without worrying about any single one too much. That’s why I wanted to make small ones. I’d do six drawings, pick the four I liked best, and then work on four small paintings at once. It left a lot of room for change and variety.

When working on a large oil painting there is less exploring when it comes to the imagery. Or maybe it’s that the exploring is only in the sketch and drawing stage. It takes at least a week to do a large painting. More likely a week and a half or two weeks. That’s a lot of time to devote to one image so I have to like that image or everything breaks down. I don’t want to get halfway through and then have to start over.

So I worked on a drawing for a while. I looked through my book of drawings and marked a few off that I thought I could make into something. It took a while since I wasn’t used to thinking in terms of large paintings but eventually I got it. So I drew it in pencil and then drew it in ink. In ink I get a better idea of line weight but I don’t copy my ink drawing’s line weight to the painting. The painting isn’t about a pretty thick to thin line, as is an ink drawing, but I still need an idea of line weight.

After that I scan I the ink drawing and figure out my color sketch on the computer. This is one of the places a computer has replaced pen and paper for me. It is so much easier to try different color schemes on the computer. I can change everything around quickly without ever having to scrap things.

After all that work is done I transfer the small drawing I made onto the large canvas. I grid it up. A classic artist’s method. Draw a grid of squares on the canvas and a grid of squares on the small drawing. Now draw on the canvas what’s in each little square and you’ll end up with a bigger version of the drawing. It takes some time but it’s easy. Some people like to project the drawing onto the canvas but I like the grid method.

The painting then took me four days. From about eight until four each day. I thought I would be able to finish early on that fourth day but then I noticed a few things didn’t look right. I had to spend a couple of hours moving tiny bits of paint by millimeters. It was a mistake not to have everything nailed down before I started the actual painting but it had been a while since I did a big painting. With the small paintings I can wing it a little more but not with the big ones.

Now I’m in the waiting phase. Waiting for paint to dry. The painting is still not finished but the bulk of the work is done. Now the improvisational bits are left to do. I drop in more lines and brush strokes full of color on top of the image. It’s what makes it come alive for me but the surface of the paint is still to wet to put more paint on top of it. So now I wait. It should be about two weeks. I’ll let you know.