Radiant Comics

As I sit down to write this I have two of my new purchases by my side. Poker chips. I mention this only because they are new to me. I’m the type of person who likes to keep his hands busy. I fidget with things. I was looking for something new to fidget with and I decided to look for some sort of coin to flip as I sat around doing nothing. I looked into challenge coins and the like but they are fairly expensive. That’s when I stumbled onto poker chips.

It’s not like I haven’t had any poker chips before but I don’t think I’ve had any in a while. I’m not a poker player but in my youth I had a box of cheap plastic chips like the ones a lot of us had. Nothing special but the times I did play poker lots of players would fidget with the chips as they played. Occasionally I would play a game with friends who were much more into it and had better set-ups than most. This is when I discovered that expensive poker chips feel better than the cheaper ones.

When I write “Expensive Poker Chips” they’re not really that expensive. A challenge coin, which is just a coin they put a design on, can cost between $10 and $20 a coin. It goes up form there too. I searched online for some poker chips and they ranged from dirt cheap to fairly expensive. And the expensive ones were only expensive because you need five hundred chips to play a game of poker.

I wanted some of the higher end chips because I knew those ones felt the best. The good ones are also made of clay and are heavy. So I found some that were a clay composite and 14 grams. They cost $12 for fifty chips. If I was playing a game of poker and needed 500 chips that would be expensive at $120 but I was only looking for one or two chips to fidget with. So I picked out a nice green color and ordered them.

I got my chips a few days later and they feel good. 14 grams is a nice weight to either flip of twirl in my fingers. They make a nice clinking sound when two of them bump into each other so sometimes I twirl two of them in my hand so I can make that satisfying noise. I’m very satisfied with them as fidget toys.

I’m also thinking I can use them as art supplies. After all I have fifty of them and only need a few to fidget with so why not do something with the rest? The chips are about an inch and a half wide with a playing card design around the edge and a blank circle, about an inch across, in the middle. I think I can make a small drawing inside that circle. I’m not sure if I should use paint or a marker but I think I can draw a small face in that center circle. It might be fun.

The chips also have a metal core. This surprised me. I only found out about it because of my laptop (on which I’m writing this very blog). My 2013 MacBook Pro have two magnets in the lid that keep it closed. My laptop sits on the endtable next to my easy chair and that very chair is where I sit and watch TV. Of course watching TV is an excellent time to play with the poker chips. Sometimes I found myself setting a chip or two on top of my laptop where, much to my surprise, they stuck to the magnets. I guess that’s what the “Composite” part of “Composite Clay” is.

Also by my easy chair is one of the things I’ve accumulated over the years. Dice. I started out buying various colors of six sided dice back in the early 1990s and have bought lots of them in fits and starts over the decades since. Next to my chair I have a 13x9x3 inch bin of about 400 dice in many different colors. I often pick them up and make “Color Compositions” out of them. I line up eight dice in every changing color combinations usually between my fingers on the back of my hand. For the past six months or so I’ve been posting photos of my dice color compositions on Instagram (my handle is artbyosborn).

I really like the hunter green color of the poker chips I bought. I thought it looked the best of the five colors available in this set. But, of course, after I opened them and handled them for a while I was disappointed that I only had one color. After all I had fifty different colors of dice so how could I only have one color of poker chip? The problem was that I didn’t really need two colors of chips. I was just using one chip at first and hadn’t even tried the two chip flip. Yes, it was after playing for a while with two chips in my hand that I decided to get a second set of chips.

I also had the problem of where to keep the chips. They came in two columns, shrink-wrapped in plastic, in a Ziplock bag. That was okay for only having fifty chips of one color but now I would have a hundred chips and two colors. As I was looking for what second color to buy I discovered I could also buy chip trays to keep them in. They’re clear plastic, have a lid, fit 100 chips, and costs $7. With that my cheap $12 fidget toy is now costing me $31. That happened fast.

In the end I ordered some purple poker chips in the same style of the ones I already have. The ones I have are green with black accents and the new ones are purple with yellow accents. I almost bought some black ones with purple accents but then I noticed those ones had an extra $10 shipping on them. No thanks. I’m trying to keep my fight toys cheap!

Greetings Earthling

I’ve been writing about how tough it’s been for me to get things done in recent weeks but and that sometimes makes me forget that I have gotten things done. I got the first of my five 24×36 inch acrylic on canvas paintings done. It took nine days between June 21-29 to get I done. That’s a lot of time and one of the reasons I feel like I’m having a hard time getting things done. In that time I can get a dozen “One day or less” things done. Getting only one thing done seems like nothing. It’s weird.

The title of the painting is “Greetings Earthling.” That’s what I imagine the woman in the painting is saying to us in her mind. It’s not that she’s an alien from space but she’s an outsider. She sometimes feels like an alien and sees herself as apart from the world at times. This is one of those times since we interrupted her thoughts.

I notice now that one of the original and obvious things about the drawing that the painting was made from is absurd now. There is an asterisk above her head that was the only thing there for most of the process as I didn’t add in all those colored brush strokes until the end. In comics an asterisk above someone’s head in a word balloon often means that their thoughts are being interrupted by something. In this case it means that we are interrupting her thoughts.

I remember using an asterisk in a painting only once before back in my student days. It was for a painting where I took a panel from one of my comic strips, blew it up, and painted it. The panel was one where a couple of cat and dog characters were being interrupted by the reader. They had turned to face out towards the reader and had an asterisk above their heads. I don’t know why I remember this since I made that painting back in 1987 and haven’t seen it since but that asterisk moment has stuck with me.

In making this painting I made the drawing first. Everything you see here painted with that dark purple line is in the original drawing. For many years I used black paint to make my line but sometime in the early 2000s when I switched from oil paint to acrylic paint I started using a purple line. Visually it still functions the same. The purple line is the darkest dark of the painting so it looks like a black line but it seems livelier to me. That’s why I go with it.

After the drawing is done I scan it in and make a digital color sketch of the basic colors. None of the little brush strokes or tick marks of color are figured out at this stage. I do figure out the large blocks of color though. The orange behind her eyes, the two thin vertical boxes of yellow, the red horizontal box, the two green squares up top, and the blue boxes in the background are all figured out at this stage. The color boxes are as much part of the composition of the drawing as they are part of the color.

I think the two colors that I find most pleasing are the purple of her body and the orange behind her head. The orange has a lot of texture to it and catches the light in a way that’s hard to see in a photo or reproduction. The purple is just a rally nice color. It’s a straight out of the tube purple and it anchors the reality of the painting for me.

After I painted the purple lines in I put in the color. That usually means brushing the paint into the area between the lines that it’s supposed to go in and then pushing the paint towards the line. I then pull the brush back in the direction I want the brush stroke to go. The direction of the brush stroke affects how the light hits the paint. It’s a very particular way to paint that I’ve been doing for a long time.

It take a long time to put paint down that way and it takes a bit of discipline. I’m not done with the purple line though because painting in this fashion, pushing the paint up against the line, often ruins the quality of the line. The line becomes a negative brush stroke rather than a positive one. It loses the power of being seen as a single brush stroke. To counteract this I get my brush, fill it with purple paint, and repaint the purple line. It usually doesn’t take as long as the first pass but it takes a while. It’s especially important in places like the eyes that get obscured when the color paint is pushed up against them.

So it goes purple line, solid color, purple line. That’s the tough part of the painting. It takes focus, concentration, physical stamina, and can be meditative at times and tedious at other times. It’s all about following a plan. Next comes the unplanned part. All those brush strokes of color the finish off and pull the painting together.

As I’m working on the painting I often have some idea of where the first brush stokes of color are going to go. With this one it was the marks around the shoulders and the paint strokes along the color blocks. But after that there is a lot of looking, contemplating, and distracting myself for a moment so I can look again with fresh eyes. Often one mark suggest the next one. Such as the lines that radiate like horns off the top sides of her head. First I made a yellow one, then magenta, and then the rest followed. Not right away but after I made one stroke I looked at the painting to figure out if it needed another.

The part that took the most thought were the two spirals above her head. I looked at that area for a long time and knew something was needed there. I didn’t want it to be too dense and fight with the drawing. I thought about it a long time and even drew some things in with chalk (first time I ever thought to do that) before I settled on those spirals. They’re almost like another set of eyes up there.

The last thing that I painted and what pulled the whole thing together for me are the yellow stripes on her suspenders. Those catch me eye. As I said before one brush stroke often suggests the next but when I can see no more suggestions then the painting is finished. After I put those yellow strokes in I knew I was finished. Look at that. I got something done.

I haven’t written a Friends walkthrough in a while and I feel like doing one. Let’s see where I am with the series. I haven’t watched any in weeks. It’s Season 5 Episode 17 “The One With Rachel’s Inadvertent Kiss.” It first aired on March 18, 1999. I watched it as it was broadcast way back then. Let me check my calendar to see what else I did that day.

Looks like I was at home and I finished working on photo called “Picnic Photo.” I don’t remember exactly which one that was so I’m going to have to look it up. I think that was before I was doing my my photo collages digitally so I’m going to have to go back and look at the dates on them. I may have that photo scanned in. I think I scanned most of my paper one in. I did my taxes the day before. I bet that was fun.

Let’s get started with the show. Coffee shop scene. Rachel is going to have a job interview at Ralph Lauren. This is the beginning of her having a good job. It takes until season five but I don’t think she’s ever hurting for money or job fulfillment after this. Joey underwear joke. Phoebe penis joke. Good stuff. Good start.

Now we’re back at the girl’s apartment and Ross is doing his shark attack bit across the street in his new apartment. That leads to our second plot line as Joey sees a hot girl across the street and tries to no avail to find her apartment. He keeps counting the windows wrong. It’s a zany sitcom plot line but it works okay.

Third plot line is Phoebe and her new boyfriend who is a police officer (Michael Rapaport) and how their love is all new and fresh compared to Monica and Chandlers’ romance. Monica is all upset that Phoebe thinks her and Chandler aren’t hot and fiery anymore. So, of course, now Monica has to prove it. I’m less amused with this plot line. It’s okay but not especially funny.

Here comes Rachel. She thinks she blew the job interview. This is where we get the show’s title from. She blew it by accidentally giving the male interviewer a casual goodbye kiss. A pretty funny scene. Monica’s dancing is funny too. Rachel is showing off her toned arms in this scene too. Hot girl interrupts the scene by appearing at her window across the street and Joey is off again to find her. He counts the windows and floors wrong again. I can somehow relate to his frustration even though I’ve never done anything remotely like that.

Now it’s time for Rachel’s second interview that she got despite the kiss. It’s time for her to double down on the embarrassment as she has ink from her pen on her lip that the interviewer tries to point out. Rachel flips out as she thinks it’s a pass. She storms out back to her apartment where everyone point out the ink. It’s one of those sitcom just being a sitcom moments that amuse me.

We’re back at Central Perk with Phoebe and Gary being hot and Monica being competitive. Chandler has no idea what’s going on and as Monica explains it he is happy to get some action.

Ross runs into the hot girl at his apartment mailbox and gets a date with her. Goofy scene but I like goofy Ross.

Here is another short scene with post-coital Monica and Chandler congratulating each other on being so passionate. Joey walks in with a grin. He then continues his search for the hot girl but now we know that it will put him in conflict with Ross. The show is upping the stakes on that plot line.

Joey finally gets the correct apartment but the payoff is that Ross is already there picking the hot girl up for their date. Joey thinks he has the wrong apartment again. Thus Ross wins.

Rachel is back for a third interview and she apologizes to the man interviewing her. She makes a pretty good case for herself and somehow gets the job. She almost blows it on the way out the door. I like this scene. I think since Rachel isn’t my favorite character on this show, she tend to be spoiled and annoying, I like it when she’s humble and embarrasses herself.

Double date time as we finally get the payoff to the Monica being competitive story. She tries to have sex with Chandler in the restaurant’s men’s room and that is a bridge too far for Chandler. Monica wants it to be all new again but Chandler is okay with getting past the beginning stages of romance. Chandler is a little too happy about being right.

The final scene gives us closure on Ross’s new apartment across the street window bits. Now let’s see what was cut out of this episode for HD and syndication.

A few jokes in the beginning about Monica and Chandler’s hotness and Joey’s bad job interviews. They cut out Monica’s dance that I noted before. I wouldn’t be happy about that. They also cut a good joke with a woman outside of the job interview as Rachel stormed out. That was probably that actresses claim to fame and she ended up on the cutting room floor except for the extended DVD cut.
They also cut a joke from the bathroom. Overall not a lot was cut from this episode but there was still a couple of things I’m miss. Especially the dance.

Let me check my ratings for this episode. Back in 2013 I only gave this one 2 out of 5 stars. I think I enjoyed it a little more this time around. Maybe 3 out of 5 stars worth. The Hot Girl plot line was fun, the Rachel interview plot line had some good parts, and the competitive Monica one was uneven. That’s not too bad. Maybe 2.5 stars.

“Red Mary”

Last week I wrote about painting and how it fatigued me more than I expected and here I go this week writing about painting again. I’m writing this on the Fourth of July (I’ve been writing on Sundays lately) and what am I doing for my Fourth? Painting and fixing chairs! An odd combination for sure and they’re two separate things. I’m painting. And I’m fixing chairs. I’m not painting the chairs I fix.

After finishing the first painting that I wrote about last week I decided to jump into another one. At least I jumped in after three days of working on other stuff but that’s still pretty close together. Back in May I bought five new canvases with the idea that I would finish five paintings over the summer. It took me a month to get the first one done so I knew I had to start this second one right away. I’m only about a third of the way into it as I write this so there is a long way to go but at least it’s started. If I have any hope of getting five done I can’t procrastinate as much as I did with the first one.

And what about the chairs you ask? As a Christmas present my parents bought my sister and I two new Lay-Z-Boy recliners. They are now upstairs in the living room. Downstairs in my studio I have another recliner that my brother in law gave me years ago after he got a new one. That one has seen better days. So have the two old ones from upstairs. So I decided to see if I could fix all three of them. Let’s hear it for YouTube repair videos!

When I was at the Lay-Z-Boy store picking out a new chair the salesman told me if I ever had any problem with the chair Lay-Z-Boy would send me parts to fix it for free. So I called them up and ordered two seat springs for one chair, one seat spring for the second, and a rocker spring for the third. For $15 shipping they sent them to me. Except the rocker spring. For some reason that’s not here yet.

The parts to the chairs arrived just as I was starting the painting. It’s the “Red Mary” painting that I mentioned last week. It was supposed to be the first painting I was going to work on but I changed my mind and went with something else for #1. Now it was Red Mary’s turn. I gridded up my already made drawing onto the canvas.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to get around to trying to fix the chairs but it turned out to be right in the middle of making a painting. I would work on the painting for an hour and them go out to the garage and work on a chair for an hour. Or half an hour each. Whatever I felt like at the time.

Fixing seat springs on a recliner is a tough job. First I had to unscrew the recliner bottom from the seat springs, remove it, and then unscrew the seat itself from the frame. For this task I needed torx screwdrivers, which I had, but I also had to order torx drill bits and a socket set. They don’t put all those screws in convenient places and it turned out that my two handle lengths of torx screwdrivers weren’t enough.

Then there is replacing the seat springs themselves. That takes pulling a lot of staples out of the upholstery and then pulling the spring into place. The spring does not like to be pulled. It takes a remarkable amount of strength and perseverance.

There were a lot of setbacks and much frustration as I worked on fixing the chairs but whenever it got to be too much I went back and painted. After gridding up the drawing, which took awhile, I began to paint the line drawing part in purple.

I have my brushes divided into brushes for paint and brushes for ink. The ink one is an expensive sable brush that comes to a really sharp point. The paint ones are often cheap brushed that don’t come to sharp point because I don’t need them too. I usually use my paint brushes to lay down the purple line but this time, since I decided to use purple ink rather than watered down purple paint, I grabbed an ink brush. It worked really well for the task. Better than the similar paint brush I used last week. I think I keep using it.

I’m only on my third day of the painting but my fifth day of fixing chairs. I’m down to the last one. I thought I had it finished but as I was wrapping it up I noticed one other thing wrong with it. That’s been the story of these chairs. The youngest one is 21 years old so a lot of things can go wrong. One of them had a split piece of wood in it that I had to glue, fill with wood putty, drill out, and buy a new bolt for. That took a day. I’m actually sitting in that glued chair right now. It’s solid as a rock. It didn’t used to be.

I spent today filling in some of the solid color in the painting. I painted in red Mary’s red skin. I don’t think I’m going to get much more than that done today. I started on it late because I was busy with other things but as long as it’s under way I know I’ll get it finished eventually.

One thing that has slowed me down a little with this painting is my hands. Fixing recliners is tough on the hands. Not only does it take a lot of physical strength but working with wrenches and screw drivers in tight spaces leads to cuts and scrapes. I’ve go one quarter inch square scrape on my right pinky and lots of other tiny cuts and scrapes on both hands. At a couple of points in time it felt like my hands were burning. That makes it a little tougher to paint.

After I fix these chairs what am I going to do with them? I already have one of them in my studio but I’m going to get rid of the couch I have in here and put the two chairs in its place. I rarely sit on the couch so I’d rather have the two chairs in its place. I think I’ll sit on them more. They’ll give me a different perspective.

Greetings Earthling

Painting is a lot harder physically on me than I remember. I guess that’s me getting older. I also mean a specific type of painting. They way I paint acrylic or oil on big canvases. First of all I always work standing up. I have my computer at standing height, my drawing table at standing height, and my easel at standing height, So I’m used to standing all day. That is not a problem. I prefer it to sitting all day.

When I make my Big Ink Drawings I do them on the same easel at nearly the same size as my paintings. The drawings are on 22×30 inch pieces of paper and my current painting is on a 24×36 inch stretched canvas. So it’s not the size. I think the difference is in the motions I make.

When I’m drawing a big ink drawing I’m moving all over the place. Sometimes I’m using a brush, sometimes a pen, and sometimes a marker. Plus I have at least two brushes that I switch between and four pens. With all those different tools come changes in posture and the movements of my arm. Using a marker with a straight edge is a completely different motion than using a brush and ink freehand.

When I’m painting my large paintings I’m using two brushes for a lot of it. A half inch wide flat bristle brush and a pointed #3 watercolor brush. Those two brushes make up about 90% of the brush strokes on the painting and I’m using a similar motion with both of them. That seems to be the fatiguing part.

I stand in front of the canvas with my hand about a foot away from my body and make small brush strokes. Each stroke is a fraction of an inch up to about an inch long. I actually change the angle of my arm at the shoulder every so often as I move the paint in different directions.

Most of my paintings have a holding line in them much like a cartoon. So I start them the same. I transfer whatever drawing that I have prepared onto the canvas (I grid it up) and then paint the line of the drawing with a brush in either purple or black paint. This part is similar to one of my Big Ink Drawings. With this painting (“Greetings Earthling”) I even used acrylic ink instead of paint. That was first time I did that. I figured I usually use watered down acrylic paint so I may as well use one of these acrylic inks that I bought recently. It worked well.

The lines that make up the initial painted line drawing actually aren’t very important. There is a long way to go on the painting and I have to put a lot of paint on the canvas around the lines. I even go back into the painting near the end and strengthen the lines and add even more lines to the drawing. So I try not to get too caught up in if the initial line drawing looks good or bad. It just has to be functional in the beginning.

With this type of painting I lay down a lot of areas of flat color. The paint itself isn’t really flat as I like to use the brush strokes to create texture. I originally started this type of painting way back in 1986 when I was a painting student. One of my teachers, Nick Marsicano, told me that I should look at Mondrian paintings and see how he laid down areas of paint and line. He also told me specifically to look at how Mondrian would often push the paint up to the line to create an edge. This is what I do too.

When I lay down my large areas of color and make them meet the line I use the half inch flat bristle brush to put paint right next to the line but not up against it. I put a bead of paint about a quarter of an inch away from the edge of the line. Then I move the brush in my hand so it’s facing the line and push the paint up to the line and then draw the brush away from the line. So it’s push and then pull. This creates the edge I’m looking for and makes the line look as if it were cut out of the paint.

For smaller areas of paint I do nearly the same thing but with the smaller painted watercolor brush. It doesn’t leave behind the same nice texture as the bristle brush since its hairs are softer but for small areas that the bigger brush can’t tackle without messing things up the pointed brush is essential. Instead of pushing the bead of paint up to the line with the front of the brush I use the side. So I draw the brush down and push the paint up to the edge. Then I pull outward with the pointed brush or grab the flat one if there is room. Sometimes with the flat brush there is room enough to pull but not push the paint.

It was a Thursday that was a long day. I started at about 7:30 in the morning and didn’t finish painting until five at night. In my younger days this was normal for me. I would do it for days if not weeks on end. I paced myself though. I stopped for lunch and sit down breaks every now and then. As I approach 55 I found myself having to take even more frequent breaks.

As well as the physical aspect of painting it takes a sort of meditative attitude to do this kind of painting. Putting down the same color paint with specific brush strokes going in specific directions takes a lot of concentration and is dull both at the same time. At times I have to let my mind wander and at other times I have to focus on just the stroke as I clear my mind of all other thoughts.

With this painting I found both the mental and physical aspect of it tiring. I had to take more frequent brakes than I usually do because I could feel myself tiring out. I’d work for fifteen to twenty minutes and then take a break for ten. I used to go for an hour or two without a break. Life changes.

Though I haven’t finished with this painting yet I’m happy with it. I’ve got the bulk of the work done. All the flat color is in and now I have to rework the line and add even more lines, brush strokes, and color to the painting. This is the most fun part and though it takes a lot of concentration the physical aspect of it is easier. I’m looking forward to easier.