Radiant Comics

What is a comic book inking brush? That is a question that I answered in a video for my art blog but I thought I’d write about it too. In general the brush used to ink comic book drawings is watercolor brush. A sable hair watercolor brush that comes to a point. It’s really important that it comes to a sharp point otherwise you could use any old blunt brush. The most used one by comic book inkers is a Winsor Newton Series 7 watercolor brush. I like a size three but some people prefer the slightly smaller size two. A size three being slightly bigger means I can make bigger lines with it and that it hold more ink in its bristles. That means longer lines with less dipping of the brush in ink. I’ll take that.

The main problem with inking with a sable hair watercolor brush is that India ink isn’t good for them. India ink will slowly break down the hairs of the brush and make them fall out. A watercolor brush that only touches watercolor will last a lifetime but not one dipped in ink. All throughout my twenties I tried my best to keep my ink brushes as clean as possible. I even tried to keep the ink out of the base of the brush hairs and washed it with soap and water after every time I used it. I was vigilant. I really wanted all that cleaning to matter but in the end I don’t think it made the brush any better and sometimes it even seemed to make my brush wear out faster. I finally decided I was better off leaving it alone.

I wish I could find where I read it but once or twice I ran across a story about cartoonists Will Eisner and Joe Kubert discussing how to clean an inking brush. Will Eisner was all for cleaning one but Joe Kubert’s take was the only way to clean a brush was with a pair of scissors. Cut off the bristles. He meant there was no way to clean an ink brush. I’ve come around to that side of the argument. I never clean my ink brushes anymore. I rinse them off in my jar of water when I’m done using them, otherwise they’d harden up and become unusable, but I never take soap and water to a brush anymore. That seems pointless to me now. And my brushes may have lasted longer but I’m not sure of that. It’s hard to tell.

A Winsor Newton Series 7 watercolor brush comes to a nice point. That is what you want in an ink brush. It allows you to make a very sharp and precise ink line. You’ll know the brush is done for when it no longer comes to a point. Instead it will split and you’ll have two points. That is no good for precision. I don’t throw away my wrecked brushes though. Instead I keep them and use them for oil or acrylic paints. Paint is much thicker than ink so I don’t need the brush to come to such a fine point. Plus the really wrecked brushed are good for various dry brush techniques. I make my monster face drawing with a brush so wrecked that it usually has half a dozen points. It makes weird monster lines then.

Since I also use watercolor brushes for watercolor I have to keep track of which brushes are for ink and which are not. I figured out an easy method years ago. I carve a narrow ring around the brush just below the ferrule (the metal part of the brush that holds the wooden handle to the brush hairs). I take my X-Acto knife and run the edge around the brush handle with just enough force to scrape away the paint in a narrow ring around the brush. One ring means it’s a good ink brush. Once the tip starts to split and the brush is no good anymore I carve a second ring around it. That makes for easy identification. One ring, two rings, or no rings.

For the last couple of years Series 7 brushes have been hard to get. For some convoluted bureaucratic reason the sables that are uses to make sable hair brushes found their way onto some sort of endangered species list in the USA and therefor their importation was banned. Except it’s a different sable that’s endangered. It’s all so confusing that I’m still not sure if there is a ban on the brushes or not. But art stores ran out of Series 7 brushes a while a go and just got some new ones in recently. The price has gone up on them too. I used to get a number three brush for around twenty dollars but now they are ten dollars more than that.

I’ve tried a few different brands of sable brushes over the years. The second best is Raphael brand brushes. I’d say they were slightly below the Winsor Newton ones but if I could get them for a good price I always did. I never had any complaints about the Raphael brushes. They’re also the same size as the Winsor Newton ones. That’s one of the problems I’ve had with ordering brushes from a catalog. Sometimes one company’s size three isn’t the same as another company’s size three.

I recently bought a size three from a company called DaVinci and it was more like a size two. That means the brush will hold less ink and make a slightly narrower line. Plus I found the DaVinci brushes has less spring-back than I was used to. That means as I put pressure on a brush against the paper as I release the pressure the brush should resume its original shape. Instead it just stayed bent over a little as if I was still pressing on it. That’s not the end of the world since it still holds its point but I have to be careful which way I touch the brush to paper the second time. Things can go sideways.

I love a good brush. When it comes to comics some people like to ink with pens but not me. I’m a brush person. Hopefully they’ll keep making them.

If this isn’t your first time reading my blog then you’ve probably seen my Saturday posts about what comics I bought in any given week. Those and the videos that go along with it. For years I just wrote what comics I bought but then in 2014 I discovered YouTube comic book haul videos and decided to make my own. Those are videos where people show off each comic that they get that week. So now I have a written list that I can easily reference and a video where I get to talk and interact with other YouTubers. It’s fun stuff. I also show off some of my artwork after I show the comics.

That lead me to start a new channel this week. An “Art by Osborn” channel. On that one I plan to post some art “How To” videos, show off some my art, and maybe figure out some creative ways to present art in general. It’s all just beginning so I’m not sure how it’ll go.

In making the initial videos I’ve already been discovering how difficult it is to make “How To” videos. First off the technical aspects are tough. I had to buy a horizontal tripod extender to get things started. That’s basically a monopod that attaches horizontally onto a tripod so you can aim the camera straight down. I already had a monopod and tried to figure out a way to modify it for horizontal use but that prover to be futile. I ended up spending nearly a hundred dollars on a horizontal extender. I’m kinda broke but I needed the piece of equipment. It’s been on my wish list for a year now and I finally bought it. I must say it works well so far.

The first video I made for the channel was fairly easy to do. It wasn’t so far removed from my usual videos. It was an art supply tip showing how a person can refill a thin black marker. All I had to do was point the camera at my desk and show my hands holding my markers and refilling them as I said the instructions. Piece of cake. If I do more video like that one they’ll be the easy ones.

The really tough task is shooting myself as I draw. Even with the extender it’s a little cramped but without it it’s nearly impossible. Plus I have to make sure the paper is always in frame. Being that I move the paper around as I draw I was having a hard time with that. The first video I made I had only half the paper in frame for the first few minutes. I caught on after a while and began to learn to check the camera’s viewfinder often.

The first video I made with the extender was about ten minutes long. My ASMR drawing videos are about fifteen minutes long but they are easier to make because I’m not talking. With this how-to video I’m talking as I’m drawing and that turned out not to be so easy. Plus I think it was a little boring. I just don’t think I had enough interesting things to say.

In that first drawing video I took out a five by seven inch piece of paper and drew a head and face on it. I used two different pencils. A Generals Sketch pencil and a basic 4B pencil. I think I did okay with the drawing but the whole thing seemed a little uninspired. I don’t know what it was. When I looked back at the video it was okay but a little off. I decided to go at it again.

For the second drawing I decided to strip things down. I wanted to make a video all about just the very basic proportions of the face. In the first video I made an actual face but in this one I was just going to have basic markers of a face. I went smaller with the drawing too. I used one of my baseball card size pieces of paper and only my 4B pencil. This second time through was a lot smoother and snappier. It wasn’t anything new or revelatory. It was the most basic information on the general proportions if the face that you can find in any drawing book. But it’s where I wanted to start. And I kept it to a tight five minutes.

After making the videos I messed around a little with them in iMovie. Not too much. I added a photo of my artwork at the beginning to use as a title card and one at the end for the same purpose. I didn’t add any music though. I’m not sure if I ever will. I’ve seen a lot of videos with cheesy background music and those aren’t the type of videos I want to emulate. I stayed away from music and sound effects in my title cards too because that’s another thing that often annoys me. People put a little intro before their video but the sound isn’t leveled out. The intro is blaring and the video is quiet. I’m trying to avoid that.

I written a lot about my artwork over the last three years in this blog. From my beginnings in school to my various paintings, drawings, comics, photos, and other projects over the years. I’m now going to try and transfer some of that into the realm of video. I’m not sure how that’s going to work but I’ll give it a try. Video is still a fairly new medium for me. I’ve been shooting it for years now but that’s different than making a finished project out of it. It’s the difference between sketching and making a finished painting. It’s a long way to go from one to the other.

Here I go again. I can’t quite believe it but I’m writing about my third Bryant Park street photo trip of the summer. I don’t think I’ve ever written about my street photo taking this much. Unlike the first two that I wrote as I was out for the day this one I’m writing a few days later in the comfort of home. A look back approach.

I came in through Grand Central Station again which meant a trip across the Tappan Zee Bridge to Tarrytown. That was easy enough in the morning but on the way home the bridge was backed up and took twenty minutes or so to cross. The same thing happened last time so I assume, with all the bridge construction, that’s just the norm these days for a Saturday evening at 5 PM or so. Or maybe it’s the norm for always because it looked backed up in that direction in the morning as I was going the other way.

Every year for the first three Saturdays in August the city closes Park Avenue South, from 7AM to 1PM, to car traffic all the way up to Grand Central Station so people can bicycle, rollerblade, jog, skateboard, or just walk up the middle of the street. It gets really busy with people and that’s why I went down that third Saturday of August to get some photos. But first I detoured to Bryant Park.

Like other summer Saturdays they had dancing in the park from 9AM to 11AM. By dancing I mean that a modern dance group leads whoever wants to participate in some dancing across the lawn. They have a drummer to keep the beat and what looked like two women to lead the dances. They have lots of jumping up and down, sweeping gestures, and running across the grass. The people doing it look like they’re having fun. I got there just after ten thirty and for twenty minutes or so took photos of all the people dancing back and forth. It’s not an easy setting in which to take picture but I always get one or two good ones that I can use.

At about 11AM the dancers called it quits and I walked the couple of avenues over from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue South. That is where all the bicyclists were. It was only last year that I discovered I should photograph the cyclists by using my camera’s “Sports” mode. All my life I’ve been shooting in “Aperture Priority” mode as to let as much light into the camera as possible. That still works okay with cyclists but in sports mode it keeps the autofocus moving and refocuses between split second shots. I found I got a lot more in-focus shots of moving people that way. If the people were still I switched back to “Aperture Priority” mode because then I didn’t want the focus to change all the time.

I walked from 40th Street down to 23rd Street shooting pictures as I went. It was a 94ºF day so I stuck to the shady side of the street. It took me until about 12:30 PM to make it to 23rd Street and I was a bit tired when I got there. Lately when I’ve been shooting in Bryant Park I make sure to sit down rest every so often but on Park Avenue South there aren’t any chairs. I took it easy in the shade around 23rd Street and got a few minutes rest before heading back up to the park. Luckily I wasn’t walking the whole time as I often stood on a street corner for fifteen minutes or so at a time as I took photos. I walked up the sunny side of the street on the way back but still tried to find some shade. Downtown walk was an hour and a half and the uptown one was half an hour. I grabbed a seat when I got to the park and took a break. I made sure to drink plenty of water that day too. Maybe twice what I normally drink.

It was a weird day shooting in the park since it was so hot out. Bryant Park has a big open lawn in the middle, maybe two football fields big, with trees and paths surrounding it. Around the park itself are some really tall buildings and the library at the east end. There were a couple of dozen sun worshipers out catching some rays and getting tan but almost everyone else was huddled in a small area in the south east portion of the grass. That’s where the shade was. Usually I do laps around the park taking pictures from all angles but that day I stayed mostly to the area of shade with everybody else.

I took pictures of the sun worshipers further off in the grass as I often do but I also took photos of people as I sat amongst them. Usually everyone is so spread out that there is no “Amongst” but this day there was. About three different times I sat down in a chair and took photos of those around me. It was much cozier than I’m used to.

I’m normally far away when I take my street photos and people rarely notice me. But every now and then I think someone does but I can’t always tell. Last time I was in the park I think a woman got annoyed with me but this time it was the opposite. A woman noticed I was taking photos and seemed to be happy I was photographing her. She was in the cozy shaded section with her little dog and would glance over and smile as I was shooting every now and then. She even nodded to me as she left. But I always think no one notices me so I don’t know if anyone really does or not.

The heat was really bad around the corner on the library steps. I usually spend a lot of time photographing there but it was so hot and there is no shade on the steps. The tons of people that are normally there were down to dribs and drabs. I did end up finding a shady spot off to the side of the library where I could shoot people on the street corner. This is usually a secondary spot for me but with the blazing heat it became a primary spot that day. The street corner had a little bit of shade too that people could cling to.

All in all it was a pretty good day for photography. The only problem I noticed is that photos of people riding bikes can really be way too similar to one and other. Oh well, I’ll work with what I got.

It’s a Tuesday night and I’m finally almost over being tired. At least I think I am. How is that for a definitive statement? It comes from the fact that I’m not very good at staying up late anymore. Maybe I never was but at least when I was younger I recovered more quickly. I generally sleep from about eleven thirty at night to about six thirty in the morning. Plus I’m a morning person. That means I’m up at the same time (sometimes a little earlier much to my annoyance) even if I go to bed late. This past Saturday I didn’t fall asleep until after two in the morning which means I only got four and a half hours of sleep.

It doesn’t usually hit me hard the next day though. On Sunday I got some things done even though I had to take a nap in the afternoon. It was Monday that I couldn’t concentrate. I find that very frustrating. I like to get things done. I usually have very good powers of concentration. I can move in and out of focus on stuff with relative ease which allows me to keep a few balls in the air. Not getting enough sleep makes all these balls come crashing down. I pace, I sit down, I pace some more, and then I sit some more. I get nothing done and it drives me crazy. That’s why I usually like to get to bed at the same time every night.

So where was I? I was out having fun. I drove into Brooklyn for a friend’s birthday. We hung out on his rooftop that has a spectacular view of NYC, ate some food, and had a good time in the company of good friends. It’s how every day should be.

Driving in New York City can be quite the chore. There is a lot of traffic. My trip down to Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon traffic was, thankfully, uneventful but it did take me about an hour and forty-five minutes to make the forty five mile trip. That’s how much traffic there is in NYC. That and there were two bridges involved in getting to Brooklyn. They’re never as fast as highways.

Driving home was a bit more of an adventure. I dropped a friend off at his apartment in nearby Brooklyn and then had to turn around and try to find the Brooklyn Bridge. That was a lot trickier than I thought it would be. I had another friend with me in the car who was using her phone and its GPS and maps to navigate but the old saying “The map is not the territory” came into play. I think it was Flatbush Avenue that we were on and we were looking to make a left onto Atlantic Avenue but no such left was allowed. Neither were any other lefts for quite a while. And the roads were as full of traffic as you’d expect. Which is a lot of traffic. This part of downtown Brooklyn in mostly highway traffic with little pedestrian traffic. A ton of traffic lights too.

Eventually we made it onto the bridge but not before driving on a road that really made us nervous for a moment. I made a right turn onto the bridge entrance ramp and suddenly there were no cars around us. No street lights either. Just concrete barriers and barrel cones. It is really strange to go from driving in crowded traffic to no one. I was really questioning if we somehow made a wrong turn. But then were joined other cars on the bridge and all was okay.

After getting off the bridge we had to drive through lower Manhattan. That wasn’t too hard since it’s difficult to get lost in Manhattan. But we did end up somehow going north when we wanted west. A couple of times. It was easy enough to make a left though. Manhattan is much easier than Brooklyn.

As we drove through the sometimes large and sometimes remarkably small Manhattan streets I had the realization that driving through Manhattan was a completely different experience than walking through it. Usually I’m on foot when I’m in NYC. I take the train in when I go down there to take my street photos and I walk all around. When I’m on foot I’m part of the crowd. We all walk the streets together. Sure there are cars all around us but they are separate. They’re not part of the crowd. Besides knowing that I have to watch for traffic when I cross the street and don’t trust the cars to always do what they’re supposed to I mostly ignore them.

When I was in the car driving I couldn’t ignore anything. There were all sorts of things I had to look out for. Other cars, traffic lights, people on bicycles (despite it being midnight), and lots of pedestrians were all sharing the road with me. I felt like I was part of some giant machine. A vast machine with giant buildings, bright lights, and lots of moving parts. On foot I felt part of a crowd but in the car there was no crowd. There was the machine.

That is probably among the reasons that it took me an hour and a half or so to fall asleep that night. To play my part in the machine correctly I really had to pay attention. On foot I can wander, meander, and do as I pleased as long as I pay attention at the cross walks. I’d watch out for cars and bikes there. When driving I have to always pay attention. There is no other way. The running of the whole machine depends on it.

So I’m writing this late Tuesday night just before I go to bed. I almost never work this late but it took me until this afternoon to be able to concentrate on anything. I managed to get a street photo done despite crashing hard in the middle of it. I sat down for a minute before dinner and found myself drifting off to sleep. It wasn’t for long and wasn’t refreshing but I managed to get a second wind after dinner. Then ten thirty rolled around and I decided to write this. Now it’s time to see if I can get some sleep. G’night all.

I’m a tools guy. I like equipment. It doesn’t matter what for. It matters that I have the right tool for the right job. I’ll improvise if I have to. I’m no stranger to that. But there is nothing like the satisfaction of having just the right tool to help out in a situation. The exception to this is my specialized bike tools. They are annoying. Instead of being able to take my bike apart and put it back together with regular tools it seems I need a specialty tool for each part on my bike. I get no satisfaction from that.

I’m thinking of this because sometimes I’ve been known to come up with my own tool for a given situation. Just modifying something to make it more useful to me in a given situation. I’ve built a few things in my day. My easel comes to mind as it is sitting next to me but usually it’s smaller stuff. I’m not much of a craftsman though. I’m pretty good at figuring out how to build something but it doesn’t end up being very pretty. You’d think that would be the easy part for me since I’m an artist but I often have little patience for craft.

It’s funny what a person can have patience for and what not. I always think back to my youth and my complete impatience for model building. I have all the patience in the world for drawing and painting. I can spend hours getting those things done. Taking care of all the small steps and details is okay with me. But ask me to put together a model of a spaceship and I can’t do it. I don’t have the patience for that.

What I’ve been thinking about building lately is a tool for photography. Or maybe it’s videography. Either way it’s a better monopod. For those who don’t know a monopod is basically one leg of a tripod. A tripod is what you can put your camera on to keep it steady and in place instead of holding it. A tripod has three legs that spread out for stability and the camera screws into a small platform on top of and in the center of the three legs. A tripod has been a standard piece of photographers equipment for a hundred years.

Though I’ve had a tripod, the same one, since my college days back in the mid 1980s I only recently got a monopod. A monopod only has one leg with the platform on top that the camera screws onto. It’s there to help you steady the camera a little bit in situations where a tripod isn’t practical. I decided to get one a few years ago to help me with some low light street photos and to help with holding the camera steady while taking video. Especially if I was using the big zoom on my camera. The further out you are zoomed the more the camera shaking is noticeable. That’s the way of cameras.

The monopod I got is pretty cool. It goes from a foot and a half to nearly six feet tall. It has cool telescoping legs and a nice loop handle. As an object I really like it. As a tool not so much. The problem I have with it is that it seemed to make my problem of keeping the camera steady worse and not better.

I know how to hold a camera to keep it as steady as possible. I shoot from the waist looking down at the swivel LCD and hold the camera close to my body. Much like carrying a bowl of liquid your body will automatically try to hold the camera level and steady. And by using your whole body it will act as a bit of a shock absorber for the camera shake.

The problem I had with the monopod was that though it kept the camera from moving up and down it didn’t keep the camera from drifting left, right, backwards, and forwards. Unlike a tripod you have to hold a monopod with your hand and any small movement of your hand gets passed on to the camera. I couldn’t keep the camera as still on the monopod as off. That made it useless. I carried it on three or four street shooting occasions and it never proved useful once. So lately I’ve been thinking up some ways to make it useful.

First off it would be nice if it could stand on its own. I don’t want it to be a tripod but if I could put a small tripod or foot on the bottom of it that would be cool. I thought about a bunch of things to use as a foot but the best one to come to mind is the base of my bicycle pump. It’s made to stand on its own and even put your feet on as you pump. If I put something like that on the bottom of the monopod maybe it can stand on its own. Then I’d like it to rotate.

Turning the camera on the tripod is quite clumsy. That’s when it shakes left and right and turns too fast and not smoothly. That’s when it struck me that I might use a bike part to help out with that. I could use the axel from the front wheel of a bike. That turns smoothly with small ball bearings and can easily be turned vertical to match the monopod. Plus it’s solid with no top to bottom movement. That might work.

Of course this is all conjecture right now. It’s all in my head. I have no plans worked out nor have I gotten all the parts I need. Though I have an old bike tire I could use I don’t have an old bike pump to steal the foot from. Plus neither of those things may work so I’ll have to gather a bunch of parts.

But that’s what I’m thinking about. I want a new tool. And since it doesn’t exist I’ll have to come up with my own.