Radiant Comics

I’ve been hitting the computer hard these last couple of days doing some non-creative work in service of creative work. It’s more fun to do creative work but sometimes I have to do other non-creative stuff to further the goals of the creative stuff. This time it was setting up my “Dreams of Things” covers to comic books that don’t exist so that they can be made into prints.

All of my “Dreams of Things” covers are done physically. I draw them on paper with pencil and ink and then color them with markers. After I’m done with them I scan them into my computer so I can use them digitally.

I’ve done 250 “Dreams of Things” cover over the years and I always meant to set them up so that I could make prints out of them. Until last May I never did. They just kind of sat there on my computer without me ever working on them. That’s because it’s a lot more fun to make new covers than to set the old ones up for printing.

Last May when I decided to start setting them up I made some Photoshop Actions to help me with the process. Those are macros or automatic actions that can help with repetitive tasks. They are really helpful.

When making the “Dreams of Things” cover I print out the logos and trade dress right on the paper I will be drawing on. I like the way these mechanical logos look against the hand drawn comic and real comic book covers were done that way too. The mechanical logos were pasted on after the artwork was done in real covers but the end result was the same. Mechanical logos on the art.

The problem with doing the logos this way and then making a print is that a printed out logo that is then scanned back in can make the logo a little fuzzier than I want it to be. Plus on a lot of the covers the black color of the logo isn’t quite as dense as I want it to be. I think I was having problems with my printer at the time and just had to go with the slightly grey logos.

As a result of the grey and fuzzy logos I decided to digitally paste a new version of the logo over the old one. It had to cover the old one perfectly so I had to fiddle around until I got the logo just the right size. I knew this part of the process would take the most time but I also knew that it had to be done for the prints to look good.

Sometimes the covers have a horizontal logo and sometimes they have a vertical one. So I had to set up a template which had both on different layers so that I could chose to copy either one. Step one of my action is to choose the correct logo.

To set up the covers I have three files open in Photoshop. The file with the two logos, the file of the cover to be set up, and a file for the set up cover to go in and be printed out of.

I choose the correct logo from that file and then move over to the scan of the cover file. I hit the button to start the action and it pastes in the new logo and also types the issue number and month of the issue. I’m replacing those too because they are a little bit fuzzy. The action also does a little bit of color correcting to get the color more accurate.

The logo and numbers get pasted in but they are always a little bit off. I have to nudge them into place to cover up the old logo. Sometimes this takes ten seconds and sometimes it takes a few minutes. I also have to type in the new number and month because the action can only type in place holder text. It doesn’t know what month I want.

After the logo is covered over with a new digital version I save the document with all the new layers in it. That’s in case I have to go back and changes things. After that is saved I flatten the image so that the layers are gone and everything is flat and on the same level. I “Save As” that document and put “Flat” as the end of the file name. This is the one I need for the next step.

Now I start the action with the flat art files open and it copies the art, closes the file, and then stops and asks me to choose the printing template. After I chose the printing template it pastes the cover into it. The top layer of the template has a border and I have to shift the art slightly so that it matches the new border. I do this ten times until I have ten ready for printing 11×17 inch prints on ten layers.

I’ve been doing them ten at a time and it takes about 45 minute to an hour to get ten of them done. Sometimes I can go fast but at other times things come up that can slow one down.

One of the things that has slowed me down is missing scans. It seems they come in batches too. Usually after I finish a cover I scan it into the computer. Turns out I didn’t do that all the time. About every thirty covers there are missing scans. I don’t know why they come in batches but I’ve had to scan in three covers at a time about three times. It was getting weird.

The last step is to hit an action that turns the 11×17 inch prints into 8.5×11 inch prints. This is the size that I was printing them out at last May but since the art and original scans are at the larger size it only made sense to set them up that way first. I may not be printing them out at the larger size right now but when I’m ready to they’ll be all set up. That’s always a good thing.

When I need to commute into the city I need to carry a bag with me. Just like everybody else I have to carry stuff. Mostly it’s food, water, an iPad, two cameras, and art supplies. I don’t like to think about food during my commuting work day so I always eat the same thing. I have a banana, two pieces of bread, a bag of carrots and cucumber slices, two granola bars, and a small bag of nuts. That’s what I’ve settled on over the years,

I also have a small bag of art supplies in my carry bag. It’s only about six by eight inches and contains various pens, a 5×7 inch pad of paper, some small art card pieces of paper, and some markers. I used to carry a second larger bag of art supplies too but I didn’t use it much so I’ve stopped packing that one. I also used to have a commuting schedule with more down time in it to draw but not anymore. So I don’t need the extra bag of supplies.

I don’t like backpacks. I prefer sling bags or messenger style bags. I like the bag to be over a shoulder but I don’t like it on both shoulders. The only explanation I have for that is that I find it clumsy to put on a backpack. I find it easier to put on a one strap messenger bag.

Last spring (2024) I started to have a problem. I started to have a little bit of pain in the back muscles of my shoulder. It wasn’t tremendous pain or anything like that but it still hurt. In the past I’ve had different shoulder pain and it was always related to my work posture. Usually my work posture when working at the computer. Even more specifically I can think of two cases of shoulder pain where I got new equipment that changed the way I stood at the computer and I eventually had to adjust my posture to make the pain go away. This time the pain came when there was no new equipment.

Eventually my Spring semester ended and I didn’t have to commute for the summer. The pain subsided. It usually came and went anyway. But then I decided to head down into NYC to take some street photos. Soon after I put the bag over my shoulder the pain came back. Now I knew what was causing it. I almost always carried the bag over my right shoulder. For years and years. There was my problem.

The bag I had been carrying was a backpack style bag with only one strap. I had to unhook the strap on the bottom and move it to the other side so that I could carry it on my left shoulder. As soon as I did this the pain went away and I was okay for the rest of the day.

I started to think I needed a new bag and it would have to be a backpack so that the weight would be on both shoulders. I looked online at various backpacks and bookmarked a couple of them but never bought one. I just didn’t really like any of them because I don’t like backpacks. I was thinking about keeping on using the one I had and just switching shoulders but I was kind of done with it. Then I thought of switching back to my old art bag.

My old art bag is one specifically designed for artists. It’s a big messenger style bag but it’s a little bit larger than a regular messenger bag so that you can carry 11×17 inch pieces of paper. I always liked this bag but it was wearing out. Years ago I had to sew one of the sides of the shoulder strap on since it tore off. I was afraid other parts of the bag would wear out soon so I switched off it. It was also an expensive bag. I think I got it for half price a long time ago but I see it now listed for about $150. That’s a lot.

While looking online for a new bag I saw one at an art site that seemed like my old art bag. It was on sale at a big discount too. Instead of around $75 it was $25 ($35 with shipping). I decided to take a chance on it. My gamble didn’t pay off. Win I got the bag it was clearly inferior to my old one. But it wasn’t terrible. All my other bags have a pocket on the side of the bag that could hold a water bottle. That’s essential to me. The pocket this one had on the side was too narrow to hold even the smallest water bottle. It had various pockets on the front under the front flap and it took me a moment to figure out that one of those could fit a water bottle and the side one was for an umbrella. Whew.

I packed this new bag and carried it for the first day but then I bailed on it. The real deal breaker turned out to be to be that it had no handle on the top. That’s something I always look for but didn’t on this bag. Besides carrying a bag over my shoulder I also like a handle on the top so I can carry it like a briefcase with my hand. This bag only had the shoulder strap. Maybe I can figure out how to sew a handle on top but until then I just didn’t like carrying this one. Too many times I reached for the handle and it wasn’t there.

I ended up switching back to the 11×17 inch art bag with the sewn on strap. I just couldn’t go back to the one that hurt my shoulder and I wanted that 11×17 inch size again. Sometimes I have to carry paper that big and that’s when I used to either switch back to this bag or strap another 11×17 inch bag to my pack. I got tired of doing that.

So that is the story of my everyday carry bag. I will probably stick with my worn down art bag for a while until it wears out completely. Then I might have to save up and buy a new one. Or sew a handle onto my other new one. But that’s a problem for another day.

Earlier in the summer (it’s September 2 as I write this) I mentioned that I bought a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 camera (http://radiantcomics.com/art-writing-photos-bryant-park-and-time/). That’s a small 3-Axis stabilized camera that I’ve mostly used to shoot video as I walk on the streets of NYC. The video it shoots is really clear because the camera has a one inch sensor. All of my other digital cameras have smaller sensors so the video on the DJI really stands out for me.

Though it’s mainly designed for shooting video the camera can also take still photos as well. I’ve taken some photos with the camera but not really a lot of them. I mostly take street photos these days and I like a big zoom for taking those. I have a 40x zoom on my pocket camera that I carry so the DJI’s 2x zoom is pointless compared to that. But this Labor Day weekend my friends had a get together so I decided to try out the DJI’s photo abilities and see how good they were. Here is how it went.

A photo taken right from the DJI.

First off this camera is weird looking. My friends kept making references to “Men in Black” and getting their minds wiped. So people are going to notice it. They are especially going to notice it because with only a little bit of zoom and short lens you have to get right up in their faces with the camera. Often I like to take candid photos of my friends so I’m in the background a bit with my camera. Not with the DJI. With that one I’m up in everyone’s’ business.

I’m also not used to the interface of this camera. I’m used to a regular camera that has a menu but also has a physical dial so that I can check the settings at a glance. The DJI only has on screen settings and it’s a fairly small screen. It’s also a touch screen so that makes things easier but I’d have no hope of changing any settings without my reading glasses.

Not knowing the settings very well got me into a little trouble late in the day. There is a small joystick on the camera that can move the lens on the gimbal up, down, or side to side. That’s how I like it but you an also change the up and down on the joystick to work the tiny 2x zoom. Sometime duty the picnic I accidentally changed the setting and then I couldn’t move the camera down as I was trying to do. It was annoying because I was in the middle of taking photos and couldn’t stop and fiddle with the camera.

What tied into that problem was me trying to take photos in selfie mode. When the camera goes into selfie mode the lens spins around 180º to face me and it kicks on a facial lock mode too. So the camera’s lens will follow my face around. When this happened I’d use the joystick to move the lens up or down a little to get my friends in the selfie too. But with the joystick in Zoom Mode I couldn’t do this and was stuck. As I learn the controls better this will only be a minor inconvenience but yesterday it was a real pain in the neck.

One feature I really miss on this camera is burst shooting. That’s when I press the shutter button once and it continues to take photos as long as I hold it down. That is good for candid photos especially. If I hold the shutter button down on the DJI then the camera powers down. That can be a bit of a problem. I don’t know if there is a setting I can change so that doesn’t happen. I just don’t know the menus that well. I almost always shoot in burst mode on my other cameras.

I mentioned before that this camera has a big one inch sensor. As my friends were checking out the camera one of them asked if it took better photos than his new iPhone. That’s a tough question to answer. I haven’t seen the photos from a new iPhone to compare them side by side but I know that the latest version of iPhones, in general, take nice photos. But they often also use automatic software to make the photos even nicer than they are. The one inch sensor in the DJI really adds a clarity to the photos that my other cameras can’t match but is that good? Or are software enhancements better?

When I got home I transferred my photos to my computer and backed them up. Then I looked at the photos with my iPad. One of the things I’ve said over the years as I’ve gotten older (I turned 58 this summer) is that low resolution is my friend. Seeing myself if full HD with that one inch sensor can be a little bit startling. In my head I don’t look 58 but in the hires photos I sure do. I could probably use a little bit of the automatic iPhone software to make myself look better.

I actually have some plans to take the photos and edit them a bit on my iPad but that hasn’t happened yet. On first glance I can see that the candid ones I took were full of awkward facial expressions and questionable composition. What’s good about burst shooting is that if a person has their eyes closed in one photo they might be open on photo four. It gives me choices. What’s good about the one inch sensor is that I can re-crop the photos and still have a lot of detail to work with.

Of course sometimes there is too much detail in our now old faces. That’s the story of life though and I can always give us all a little bit of a blur to take some of that detail away. But usually I don’t edit every photo I take. I edit the ones I eventually do something with. So maybe we’ll all just have to stay old for now just like in real life.

Last week I wrote about having a cold for twelve days and how that just killed any momentum I had for making art. It stops it dead in its tracks and whenever I get sick I fear I’ll never be able to capture my artistic drive again. Life drains that drive out of almost everyone and I always fear that I’ll be next. So this week I decided I had to get started on something.

I was just looking at my calendar and saw that the last Big Ink Drawing that I made was back in January of 2023. It’s August 24, 2024 as I write this so it’s been a long time since I made one. Of course, the first thing I had to do after deciding to make a Big Ink Drawing is to decide what the drawing is going to be of. I have a few different ways of doing this but the one I didn’t want to use was starting from scratch.

I have made a lot of drawings in my life and most of them never turn into anything finished. Since I scan in all my drawings right after I make them I have a whole folder full of thousands of drawings, a lot of them finished pencil drawings of some sort, so I can look through the scans for something I can work with. Then I remembered my drawer of drawings.

Underneath my drawing table I have a couple of drawers. In one of them I put finished or nearly finished drawings that I might work on in the future. Except for one the last couple of years I stopped using this drawer. I don’t know why. I used to go into it a few times a week to add drawings or take them out but over the last two years that kind of stopped being my habit and the drawings that were in there just sat there. I think it was during the week that I had my cold that I remembered it again and looked through it for the first time in ages. Then I sat down and rested again.

As I was trying to figure out what to make a Big Ink Drawing of I thought of the drawer. I looked through it and two drawing jumped out at me. One was of a female figure and the other was a man’s face among a bunch of design elements. I thought I could combine the two drawings into a new composition.

Here is a tip that I didn’t learn until I was around thirty. Always date your art. Whether it’s a finished piece or a working drawing put a date on it. In my twenties I used to be able to remember when I made things. But as I made more and more stuff and time went by I eventually forgot. Did I make this drawing in 1996 or 1998? I sure didn’t know. That’s when I started to write dates on everything. Also put names on things so you can tell one from another.

I mention that now because that’s how I know how old these drawings, that were in the drawer, are. The female figure (named “Run Around Now”) is from February 6, 2009 and the male face (named “Cleaning Windows”) is from July 5, 2010. They’ve been hanging around for a decade and a half waiting for something to be done with them.

Also the names of the drawings have nothing to do with what the drawing is of. They’re just random names I thought of as I was naming them. If you sit around waiting for the perfect name to come to you then you’ll never name anything. That’s what stops people from naming things. They think if the name isn’t clever and appropriate then they shouldn’t name it. I say to just give it a name so you know what to refer to it as (such as when I’m writing down in my calendar what I worked on that day) and don’t worry if the name is meaningless. You can always change the name later anyway.

After I picked out the two drawings I went to find the scans of them that I made way back when I made the drawings. Since I dated the drawings it was easy. I looked in my folder of scans for the “Date Created” of the digital files and looked for the ones created around the dates on the drawings. They were right there in it took about thirty seconds each to find them. I was ready to go.

I took the scans of the two drawings and combined them in Photoshop. The drawings fit together nicely and this part was really easy to do. Then I printed out the new drawing composition in blue line on an 11×17 inch piece of paper. My intention was to refine the drawing even more to be get it ready to be blown up and transferred to a big 22×30 inch piece of paper. It was then that I came to a complete halt.

It turned out that I didn’t want to refine the drawing on that 11×17 inch piece of paper. I stared at it and just couldn’t’t do it. I decided I wanted to refine the drawing at full size on the 22×30 inch piece of paper. I usually don’t do that with my Big Ink Drawings but this time I wanted to. So that’s what I did.

First I blew the drawing up to 20×28 inches (I want a one inch border around it) and then printed the drawing out in pieces on eight 8.5×11 inch pieces of regular inkjet paper. I taped the paper together and then taped the printed drawing onto the 22×30 inch piece of paper. I got my graphite paper, put it between the two sheets of paper and used a hard pencil to transfer the drawing onto the big piece of paper.

The transfer is never perfect but it usually good enough to start drawing with ink over it. But this time I still had some refining of the drawing to do so I got at it. It took me an afternoon but eventually I got the drawing refined enough in pencil to start drawing in ink over top of it.

That’s where I am now. I’m almost finished with stage one of the inking. I’ve got the basic lines down but next is figuring out where I want to put black areas, areas of texture, and patterns of line. That’s all the fun and unplanned (as of now) stuff that becomes the technique of the drawing. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve had a summer cold for the last week and a half so I’ve barely gotten anything done. The cold hasn’t been especially bad but it comes with fatigue and a lack of concentration. As I’ve written before I can trudge through a day and get paying work done because I have no choice but any art of my own is nearly impossible.

Today (Tuesday the 20th of August 2024) was the first day I got a “Dreams of Things” cover done. It took me about twice as long to marker color it than it usually does. Yesterday it took me all morning to get a three marker ink drawing finished and that usually takes an hour. Lsat week I don’t think I got anything done except for one “Dreams of Things” cover that I inked. I must have had a bit of energy that day. Mostly I tried to rest and watched TV.

I’m not much of a binge watcher of TV but when I’m sick I don’t have anything else to do so I’ve been watching a couple of shows. I actually have been rewatching a couple of shows. Sometimes it’s easier to rest when I have something on that I’ve seen before.

The first show is one on Apple TV called “Severance.” It came out back in 2022 and it only has nine episodes. It’s a bit of a mystery show that also has a little bit of science fiction in it. It’s about a group of people who work at an office job but the job has a twist. The twist is that they have to undergo a process called severance in which their memory is cut in two. Their work selves have no memory of their outside selves and their outside selves have no memory of what they do at work. Why would anyone do this? They have their reasons and some of them are part of the plot of the show.

It’s a stylishly done show with interesting sets that have a lot of liminal spaces. Hallways galore. I like the look and feel of it. The mystery is what the heck they are doing there? They’re got some shady bosses and their actual work is on computers and is removed from whatever else is going on at the place. The office is very buttoned up but the four people who work in the department start to get curious about everything.

As I mentioned it’s a mystery show and here is a funny thing about me watching it again. After I watched it in 2022 and some of the mystery was revealed I wanted to watch it again with this new knowledge in mind to see what the show was like a second time through. The problem is that I waited two years and forgot how the season ended. So watching it again this time was almost just like the first time.

The second show that I’ve been rewatching is the show “Lost.” I watched it back in 2004-2010 and really had no interest in rewatching it again but I heard of a different version of it. A fan cut. To me “Lost” started a whole new genre of show in which the plot was, “What the heck is happening on this show?”. It was a mystery show but instead of a show in which a mystery was solved the whole show was a mystery. We didn’t know anything about the characters on the show, what they were doing on that island, and why were so many strange things happening on the island.

One of the reasons I never had much interest in rewatching the show is that they just stacked mysteries on top of mysteries and I didn’t think there were many satisfying answers to the mysteries. I enjoyed the show and never really expected satisfying answers (I know how TV shows are written) but when it was over I was done with it. But then I heard about a fan cut of the show.

I believe “Lost” just made it to one of the streaming services for the first time this summer so it must have made it into my social media algorithm. That’s how I heard about the fan cut, “Chronologically Lost.”

Since “Lost” has a lot of mysteries and we know nothing about the characters’ pasts there are a lot of flashbacks in “Lost.” That was one of the big complaints back in the day. People wanted the plot to move forward and it was forever moving backwards. There was even time travel in the show near the end. Talk about moving backwards. So some fan somewhere decided to re-edit the show so that it was in chronological order. All the flashbacks are at the beginning. Then they released it onto the internet.

I would not recommend watching “Chronologically Lost” if you’ve never watched the show before. Stick with the real thing. I’m enjoying it as a curiosity but it might be hard to follow if you’ve never seen the show before. As I said there are a lot of flashbacks in the show and it takes about twenty five episodes that are all the flashbacks before we reach the plane crash that was in episode one of the real series.

The episodes made of these flashbacks that were created for the fan edit don’t really have the same kind of dramatic structure as real episodes. The fans did their best and it’s well done but it’s not always like watching an actually TV show. It’s often just watching the events in the character’s lives in chronological order rather than a TV drama with first through third acts. I like it but I’ve seen the show before so I know what’s going on.

One final show that I’ve been watching random episodes of is a favorite of mine. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Yes, I’ve seen all the episodes multiple times but as I was resting sometimes I just needed a laugh. Sunny is always good for that.