Radiant Comics

Ink Dreams #1

I’m ending the year 2021 in a similar fashion to how I started it. I’m working on some color ink drawings. Back in January through March of 2021 I bought an art supply that I have never used very much. Color ink. I’ve been using black India ink for decades and occasionally used a color ink here and there but I never developed a style with them. When I used color ink it was usually just one color and I used it just like black ink. Or I thinned it out and used it like watercolor.

At the beginning of the year I worked on a bunch of color ink drawings ignorer to come up with a new technique. They were mostly small, 9×12 inches and under, and they were mostly made up of multiple stokes of different colors. I wasn’t going for realism or even simplicity. They were all about building up a complex line drawing with many brushstrokes of color. In the end I thought they were okay but limited.

One of the roadblocks I ran into with the color ink drawings was their lack of surface. Ink and paper are totally flat. When I’m making a painting with acrylic paint and canvas the painting has surface. That’s how thick or thin the paint is and how the paint is applied to the canvas. That is a huge part of painting. The surface of the painting affects how it’s seen. An artist has to manipulate the surface to get what he or she wants.

In my book surface is the difference between a painting and a drawing. A painting has surface and drawing doesn’t. Even when the painter chooses to make the surface of his or her painting smooth and level that’s a choice. It takes technique and craft to make a painting “surface-less.” With a drawing that happens naturally because ink, pencil, or whatever sinks into the paper and doesn’t build up on top of it.

Scent Armor

When I was making the ink drawings at the beginning of the year I eventually reached a dead end. I didn’t love the technique but I also didn’t hate it. I thought it just wasn’t there yet. And it made me want to paint. I missed the sense of surface. That’s when I bought five 24×36 inch canvases and spent the summer (and part of the Fall) painting them. The ink drawings were swept aside.

I finished the last of the five paintings in mid-October. It’s a lot of work to make one of those painting. Each one takes about a week. So I was burnt out on painting by the time I finished the fifth one. Plus with a bunch of paying work to do and the Holiday season right around the corner I had no energy or ambition for anything big. So I spent most of my time working on smaller things. Mostly my “Covers to Comic Books That Don’t Exist” series plus the Paste-Up Mash-Up cards that I recently invented.

After a while I got bored doing the same sort of stuff over and over so I looked for something else. I like to skip around from medium to medium so this wasn’t unusual. That’s when I got it in my head to jump back into color ink drawing. I don’t think I touched the inks from about July to December so they were fresh to me again.

Hypno-Love Girls #16

I didn’t feel like making a new pencil drawing so I decided to look through my vast archive of drawings that I’ve made over the decades. I have then all scanned in and digitized so I can easily look through them on my computer. I picked one out, a nude drawing of a woman, and printed it out on a 9×12 inch piece of drawing paper. Then I got to work with my color inks.

I started with the 9×12 inch size because I remembered that the in drawings seemed to work best at that smaller size. But after doing the drawing I felt constrained by the small size and so decided to move up to an 11×17 inch piece of paper. I think doing those five 24×36 inch paintings made me more ambitions about the ink drawings. I think I was more tentative in the beginning of the year but now wanted to open things up more.

The second drawing was also of a nude woman and I think it works better at the 11×17 inch size. The color and brush strokes are both bolder. Overall I think the drawing has a better flow to it and is more impressive.

I decided to keep working at 11×17 inched and so that lead me to the idea of reworking one of my faux comic book covers. I made about 15 “Hypno-Love Girls” covers over the years but I haven’t worked on one in a while. That’s because they were middle of the road quality for me after I finished them. I always liked the concept but the execution wasn’t there. I was never sure what was missing from them. So I decided to try making one with color ink.

Tanya Dakin Portrait

I still don’t think it’s 100% there yet but I think it works better than the one in just black ink. The drawing is much livelier and fits the “Go-Go” theme better in my eyes. I’m going to keep working on this series.

After that I wanted to do a portrait. I dug out a drawing I did back in 2009 of model and photographer Tanya Dakin and blew it up on an 11×17 inch of paper. Then came the brush and color inks. I like the way this one came out. I think this is a good technique for portrait drawing. The multiple color brush strokes give the drawing a feeling of energy and life. This is my favorite of the ink drawings so far.

The last color ink drawing I did was another of my faux comic book covers. The Enigma Prism #4. This one presented me with a lot of lines in the clothing outside the figure and empty space inside. It started as sort of a reverse silhouette. At first I was going to leave the inside of the figure empty but as I went along I knew I needed something in there. I went with a lot of thick brush strokes that almost become objects.

Enigma Prism #4

I’m not 100% sure of what I think of this one. It’s different than the others and in some ways it’s a success but in others it’s a failure. I almost like it. The problem is that I have no idea what I could have done differently to make me really like it. It’s solid but not spectacular. The Tanya Dakin portrait is much more spectacular. Maybe because it was a better drawing in the first place. It’s tough to figure this stuff out when trying a new technique.

So there it is. My end of the year work. It harkens back to the beginning of the year but has a little more skill to it. We’ll see if I can totally crack this nut next year.

I got a fourth 24×36 inch painting finished in the beginning of September. In the late Spring I bought five 24×36 inch canvases with hopes of making five paintings over the summer. I originally wanted to get ten canvases but beside it being too expensive for me at the time I knew I would never get anywhere close to ten painting done. One painting takes about a week to complete. Ten weeks of painting wasn’t going to happen.

The name of this painting is “Green Berries” and I made it from scratch. That means I didn’t look through my backlog of drawings that I’ve made over the years but instead I started by making a new drawing. I wanted to do a face so I pulled one of my inkbooks off my shelf and looked through it for an old ink thumbnail drawing that interested me. I found one.

I was in kind of a weird, impatient, and nervous mood as I was making this painting (not one of my usual moods) and in hindsight I think that shows in both the drawing and the painting. I wanted to draw and paint a face but the face came out with an intensity to it that isn’t usually in my faces. I’d say my faces are usually a little more happy, calm, or passive.

Years ago, back in my student days, I once had a teacher observe that my paintings could make the viewer uncomfortable because the people in the paintings were often looking at the viewer more intensely than the viewer was looking at the painting. I had never noticed that before but I’ve noticed it since. This painting has a particularly intense look on the guy’s face.

I often draw androgynous faces but usually think of them as being male or female. You may see them differently than me and that’s okay. Despite me having long hair all my life I often think of my long haired androgynous characters as female. This character definitely has long hair and in the beginning of the painting I saw him as a her but by the end of the painting I saw him as a he. That doesn’t happen very often with me and my paintings. Even if they are androgynous.

I think something in the intensity of the face changed for me as I was painting it. It the beginning I saw it as my usual passive face looking out at us with a little intensity but as I worked on it I think I put in my own intensity. Usually painting and making art in general calms me down and focuses me. But my weird nervous mood continued as I worked on this one.

I made the painting in the usual way. I made a drawing, transferred that drawing to the canvas by gridding it up, and then I pained in the line with a dark purple. For the other three painting I tried something new and used a purple acrylic ink for the line but I switched back to purple acrylic paint for this one. I was almost out of the ink and now I’m almost out of the paint. I have to buy some more dark purple paint and ink.

I didn’t make a color sketch of this one on the computer as I usually do. Instead I took a photo of the purple line painting and figured out the first colors using Procreate on my iPad. I’ve used that method later on in my process but for this one I used it from the start. I think I figured out the blue and pink face first with the orange hair second, They were the easy bits. The blue eye, purple behind it, and red triangles took a while longer. I think the green of the hat was the last of the main colors that I figured out. Often the colors come easy to me but not with this one. I tried a lot of variations.

In general this one didn’t pull together until the very end. It has a lot of paint on it. Little marks of paint. They’re what made all the color work. Though I like it now as I was working on it I wan’t very happy with it. That could have been my weird mood too.

What vexed me the most was the hair, green hat, and the giant eye. It took a long time to get those right. I started the hair by laying down four different shades of orange. Two shades for the hair behind his face and two shades for the hair in front. But I had to do the front ones twice because the shades of orange didn’t have enough contrast so I made one of them lighter. I think I changed the other one too. Then I went over the purple lines again but with more vigor. It was only after I added a third shade in the front hair and red tick marks plus green tick marks in the back hair that it come together.

After that I slowly built up the brush strokes on the rest of the painting. The green hat came first as I put down a purple line and purple marks. That was fine but the yellow squiggly lines are what really made that area work. They may be the best lines in the whole painting as they stand out so well.

The big eye on top took a while too. I count six concentric half circle rings of tick marks but it took me a day to get them all in there as I worked on the painting. One ring of marks would get done and as I worked on other parts I would see that I needed another ring of color in the eye. Five times I came to that conclusion as I worked. I really like the way that big eye came out. I wasn’t sure it would ever pull together but it did.

My fake writing along the jawline of the face is another thing that helped a lot. I often work with flat color but something like that fake writing can get me some depth. Just that small change in color makes the jawline bend back in space a little and gives a more three dimensional look.

The last thing I painted are those small circles on the face with spirals in them. They finished it off. I don’t think I’ve ever used those particular designs on a face but they work for me here. I dig ‘em. The rest of this painting was dogged determination and work. Some paint here, sit back and contemplate it, more paint here, take another photo, use that photo to make yer another color sketch in Procreate, and then put down those colors in paint. It takes a while but I like it when it’s done.

I’m feeling nostalgic so I want to write a “Friends” walkthrough. I like watch old DVD copies of the show. I find “Friends” less nostalgic when it’s in high definition. I originally watched it on an old CRT tube TV so that’s how it looks best to me. Or at least the most nostalgic.

Let’s see where I am in the show. Season Five Episode 19: The One Where Ross Can’t Flirt. I remember this is the one with the cute pizza delivery woman. It first aired on April 22, 1999. Let me check my calendar to see what I was doing that day. On that day I was in my studio working on a drawing for an oil painting and working on an 8×10 inch photo collage of a couple of friends. It looks like I spent that whole week working on paintings and photos. That Saturday I went to an engagement party in NYC. I remember that being fun. Let’s start the show.

The first pre-theme song scene starts out with the cute Pizza Woman delivering pies to Chandler. Ross is upset that Chandler, who is dating Ross’s sister Monica, flirts with the Pizza Woman. Chandler does a good job flirting. Good scene from top to bottom. Chandler’s attempt at showing Ross what flirting really is tops it off. Here comes the theme song. Talk about nostalgia!

Now we get the ladies in the apartment setting up the second plot line. Joey is going to be on Law and Order. Here come the boys and Ross is still upset at Chandler. Turns out Ross likes the Pizza Woman. He thinks she’s attractive (she is). But she forgot Phoebe’s veggie pizza so here is Ross’s chance to turn on the charm. Spoiler. Ross isn’t especially good at charm.

Joey arrives with his non-English speaking grandmother to further the second plot line. She’s there to watch his appearance on Law and Order. At some time they’ll revel that Joey was cut out of the episode and try to trick Grandma into thinking he was really in the show. This is one of the clunkier plot lines in the show.

Monica finally appears and sets up the third plot line as Chandler wants her to wear some earrings that he bought her. After a game of telephone it turns out Monica leant them to Phoebe who lent them to Rachel who lost one of them. Guess what? Monica doesn’t lend stuff to Rachel because she losses said stuff all the time. Hence our comedy out of conflict. Not my favorite plot line but they pull it off well.

They’re all watching Law and Order waiting for Joey’s scene as Rachel is looking for the lost earring. There is a knock at the door and here comes Pizza Woman. All three plot lines run close together in this thirty second scene. Ross tries to flirt and it’s a funny disaster. Chandler saves him and Ross resents it. This is my favorite of the three plots.

Rachel points out that Ross can’t flirt so Ross decides to order another pizza so can show off his flirting prowess. Now here is the reveal that they cut Joey’s Law and Order scene. They all have to smile and talk so as to not alert Joey’s grandmother. Monica needs her earrings but Phoebe can’t produce them. Ross tries out his flirting on Phoebe but she doesn’t get it. Meanwhile Chandler is upset when he finds out the Monica flirts. This is a subplot of the Ross flirting plot. They don’t always have those. Usually three main plots is enough.

A new scene starts in the girls’ apartment. All the scenes except the very first one have been in this apartment. I’d call it a bottle episode except they never went on location regularly anyway. Still no earrings for Monica so Phoebe decides to come clean. She blames the loss of the earring on herself and Monica forgives her. Rachel, jealous of the forgiveness, comes clean and tells Monica it was her all along. Monica is in no mood to forgive Rachel. After all she has a no lending stuff to Rachel policy. It pays off pretty well.

The doorbell rings and here comes Ross’s flirting. It’s another funny disaster. I love this scene. It makes me laugh every time. Ross even realizes it was a disaster. Rachel runs after the Pizza Woman to try and help Ross. She wants to know why Rachel isn’t with him in a bit of turnaround comedy. Pizza Woman gives Rachel her number for Ross.

The solution the Joey’s grandma problem is solved by Joey shooting a scene in his apartment and surreptitiously sneaking it into the VCR. This plot line was silly but the scene Joey made was funny. Especially as it was punctuated with Chandler singing “Major Tom” into the camera. He didn’t expect that to be shown. And here come the credits.

The post credit scene was Monica trying to fool Chandler into thinking she is wearing the earrings Chandler bought her. He thinks they are and the stinger is that it was actually Ross that picked out the earrings.

Now I’m going to go to https://uncutfriendsepisodes.tripod.com/season5/519uncut.htm and see what was cut out of the episode for syndication and HD. We lost a solid Ross hair joke. We also lost a couple of jokes that set up how upset Joey’s grandma would be if he wasn’t in Law and Order. No great loss there. Wow, we lost the whole scene where the pizza woman asks Rachel why she isn’t going out with Ross. And that’s it. Not a ton cut out of this one and nothing great.

Now I’m going to check what rating I gave this one about a decade back when I rated all the episodes on iTunes from one to five stars. I’m guessing I gave this one two or three stars. It’s not the best episode. I love the Ross flirting stuff but the rest was okay at best. I’d rate it three stars right now but maybe that’s because I’m felling extra nostalgic. Let’s see. I gave it four stars?!? The Ross flirting part must have really affected my grading back then. That and it was preceded by a half dozen two and even a one star episodes. If I watched a lot of them in a row I must have been happy to see this average one.

What crazy and completely pointless bit of art have I been doing lately you ask? That would be gluing comic book panels to Magic the Gathering cards!

Back in the early 1990s in my Marvel Bullpen days a bunch of us used to play MTG at lunchtime. It’s a fun collectable card game and I enjoyed playing it but I haven’t played it in decades. Sometimes I’ve played it on the iPad but it’s not the same. Those games I used to have with my friends and co-workers were a lot more fun.

One thing I have done in the last five years is to make “Altered Art” MTG cards. That’s where I strip the art off a card with acetone, prep the card for printing, and then print a new picture on it with my inkjet printer. I’d sell them for a few bucks on eBay. It’s fun to do but it takes a lot of meticulous work to get it right. I stopped making those in the summer of 2021. It stopped being worth the time and effort.

Back when I started making those I still had most of my original MTC collection but I wanted to order some other MTG cards to experiment on. You can get about a thousand random MTG cards on eBay for about $25. I ordered a batch. It was fun getting all those new cards, playing around with them, and putting them in order. Even though I have 950 of them left I occasionally still want to order more. But I haven’t. Until now.

The other thing I have in great supply around here is comic books. I’m an active collector of those so I go to my local comic shop every week and get new ones. One week, a couple of years ago, my LCS owner gave me a stack of about 20 comics that were so battered and worthless that he was just going to toss them out. I sometimes draw on such comics so I gladly took them for the paper. Each has around 32 pages and I don’t do that many drawings on comic books so they’ve sat around for years.

Besides the tedious method of stripping the ink off a MTG card and then printing on it another method I’ve used is to print an image on sticker paper and stick it over the art. This isn’t as pretty or desirable a method but it works in a kludged together way. I printed some images from old Steve Ditko horror comics on some cards. It came out okay. But I didn’t do many of them.

I think it was the memory of those Ditko cards that made me put two and two together. That’s when I had the idea to take the old battered comics and cut out panels from them to glue on some MTG cards.

When I write “Glue” that’s a colloquialism. I really use something called “Positionable Mounting Adhesive” (we used to call it 3M paper). That’s a paper that comes with sticky stuff on one side. You apply that sticky stuff to the paper (or photo) you want to mount and transfer it to the paper by applying pressure to the back of the PMA. It can be tricky to work with but it’s much cleaner and more precise than glue.

After making a couple of test cards I decided to buy a batch of new random cards. I spent $25 on a new bunch of 1000 cards and waited for them to arrive. Why did I need more cards? I don’t know but I’ve enjoyed looking through them and putting them in order. Sometimes arranging things is soothing.

The first comic I chose to cut up is a battered copy of Conan #40 from the 1970s. It took me some trial and error to figure out a technique to get the size of the cut out correct. I eventually settled on using and actual MTC card as a cutting guide. I used an X-Acto knife and straight edge to precisely cut out the art on a card. The I placed that card on the comic page and chose the art to cut out. Using the edges of the hole in the card as a guide I carefully cut the paper with the X-Acto.

Working with newsprint from the 1970s takes a delicate touch. That stuff is thin and fragile. One wrong move and it tears. Especially once the sticky stuff is on the back of it. It takes a steady hand to line up the cut out panel right over the art on the card that it’s going to cover up. I ruined a few of them but the newsprint sticking when I didn’t want it to and then tearing it as I tried to correct the placement.

It turns out that there are a lot of good images in that single comic to work with. I’ve made about 15 cards so far and have only used four pages of the comic. Sometimes it’s just a piece of a drawing but at other times I can get a cool word balloon in there too. I like the way they are coming out.

Magic the Gathering card art is generally pretty good to begin with. They have some talented artists working for them. But pasting the comic art on them makes each card an individual piece. That changes things. Putting the printed comic book art on a card also re-contextualizes the art. That means if you use art for a different purpose other than it’s original one it looks different. Or, at least, it makes us look at it differently.

I notice that I find myself looking at these cards with new eyes now. Each piece of art that I cut from the comic has a new composition. It’s removed from its original place on the page and is now a single piece of art. This makes me look at it as such. I find myself looking at the comic book art on the card and taking in the details of it in a new way. What was once one tenth of a page is now its own thing. It says something new. I find that interesting.

I have no idea what I’m going to do with these cards or how many I’ll even make but for now I’m finding it a fun way to make something interesting.

I’m not a big cell phone person. I’m tethered to a computer most of the day and I have an iPad that use all the time so I mostly use those two things to communicate with people. I still have my first pay-as-you-go Nokia phone from 2008 and that was my only cell phone for many years. It wasn’t until 2014 that I got a smart phone and even then I didn’t set it up as a phone for years.

That 2014 phone was an Amazon Fire phone. For a brief year or two Amazon got into the phone business with their own Android based operating system. I bought my Fire phone in December of 2014 and I only bought it because it went on sale and I wanted to use it as a music player and camera. I was already a user of Amazon Prime and when I bought the phone for $250 it also added on a year of Prime which cost about $100. For me that was like getting a $150 camera and music player.

After Amazon left the phone business in 2015 I couldn’t find any new apps for my phone. That was okay though as I continues to take photos with it and use it as my primary portable music player. Though it still had no SIM card in it and wasn’t a phone. There were a couple of occasions when I tried to get one of those newer pay-as-you-go services that would sell me a SIM card and service but none of them were compatible.

It wasn’t until 2019 when I found a company called Ting that worked with my phone. It was a little annoying in that I had to pay for calls and texts but since I didn’t make many my bill was usually around $15 a month. It would get up to $25 a month on occasion. It was really an in case of emergency phone.

Cut to the beginning of September of 2021 and I get an e-mail from Ting that tells me my phone will no longer be able to get on the network. It won’t work come October of 2021. I had to get a new phone. Having just spent around $1800 on a new computer just the week before this news could have come at a better time.

The first thing I did was look at the phones Ting had for sale on their website. Since my computer and tablet are both made by Apple I wanted some sort of iPhone but I certainly didn’t have $1000 to drop on one. No thank you. But it turns out Apple has a budget phone. It’s the iPhoneSE. It’s not the latest and greatest but I don’t need that anyway. Instead of being $1000 it’s $400.

I was also a little tired of my monthly bill varying every month. Recently I have been getting a lot of spam texts. Someone else obviously used my phone number when she signed up for something so that she wouldn’t get the spam. The idea that I had to pay money for those was bothering me.

My father and sister both use TracPhone and said their iPhoneSEs were cheaper than $400 so I decided to check them out. Turns out they were selling the phone for $200 as long as you got a plan with them. I picked the $200 12 month plan of 12gigs of data a month plus unlimited calls and texts. Spam wouldn’t bother me then. That break down to $16.66 a month with no $25 month surprises. I don’t plan to use much data.

I ordered the phone and it got here in a couple of days. My main concern was transferring my old number to my new phone. I went to the activate tab on TracPhone’s website as they said and started the transfer process. I ran into a wall right away as I had to pick my carrier and they didn’t have Ting on their list. I had to call their number and get a human.

I got woman and she asked me if I set up my phone already. Since transferring the number was step one on the website I didn’t. I took a few minutes and set it up as I was on the land line with the women. Then she asked if I had the Ting account number and I was able to find that on an e-mail. Next she asked me for the pin number. I had no idea I even had a pin number for that phone. I looked in my book where I write down such things and I could find one.

That made woman number one have to pass me onto woman number two. When she got on the line she said that we were going to have to call Ting to verify that I was me. So she got woman number three, from Ting, on the phone. Eventually woman number three sent me an e-mail with a number that I could verify.

The woman form Ting also asked me why I was leaving. I said, “My phone will no longer work on your network and they have cheaper phones and plans.” She said, “Oh” in response. Clearly that was a fine reason. Woman number two told me that the switchover should happen by 5:33 and they’ll give me a confirmation call at 6:00. But I could try the phone before then because the switch could happen early. It didn’t.

When woman number four called at 6:00 my phone still couldn’t make or receive calls. After about ten minutes of her doing stuff on her end and me testing things out on mine everything worked. I could make and receive calls and texts and log onto the internet. Everything was good to go.

Overall the process was fairly painless. I had to spend an hour or so on the phone that I didn’t really want to but all four women were nice and helpful. I’ve got a new phone now and even though I don’t think it’ll make a huge impact on my life I don’t feel like I’m frozen in time anymore. Having a smart phone for over five years that I couldn’t add any new apps to is a weird experience in this day and age. A day and age that I’ve just joined.