Radiant Comics

It’s the end of another summer. Do you know what the first sign of that was for me? I went out for my morning bike ride as usual and I was cold. It wasn’t freezing or anything but I was in my usual shorts and T-Shirt for my ride and it was only about 60ºF out there. That’s not shorts weather when you are on a bicycle. There is always wind chill on a bike so things get chilly and fast. After that day I knew that I couldn’t take the weather for granted any more. I’d have to check the thermometer and dress appropriately before heading out. That and I would also have to buy a new pair of sweat pants to go cycing in.

I don’t have any fancy cycling pants to wear when I ride. I’ve never wanted to blow eighty bucks on pants just for cycling. I’d rather buy art supplies. I sure could use the tight cuffs like on a pair of cycling pants though. I’ve always ridden in sweat pants when it’s cold out. The problem with them is that the right cuff can get chewed up. There is no chain guard on my bike so that the loose fabric at the ankle of my sweat pants can get caught up in the chain. It was no big deal for years but somehow my new bike (from 2008) chewed my pant legs worse than my old bike.

I think it was last year that I noticed a rip in my sweat pants. It was just a small one near my ankle. Of course this made the pants stick out a little more so they got caught a little more. The rip got bigger and bigger as time and bike rides passed by. The weird thing was that the sweat pants also started absorbing grease. After a month or two the bottom part of the sweat pants was beginning to resemble a greasy rag. My solution was to cut the pants off mid-calf. No more fabric down there to get caught. I just rode with one pant leg shorter than the other. This was last Spring so I could get away with that as it was getting warmer each week. Now it’ll be getting colder so something had to be done.

Out with the old and in with the new. I bought a new pair of cheap sweat pants. I think the last pair was twenty years old. It’s amazing how some things just hang around in your life almost unthought about for years and years. Some small thing, like sweat pants, that get used every now and then but you don’t really care about. Pick them up and they’re there then put them down and they’ll never cross your mind until they’re needed again. The sweats had even reached the stage where the elastic waistband was no longer elastic. Only the drawstring held them up. That’s when you know your sweats are old.

The new ones that I bought are okay but its the first time I’ve bought ones without the elastic at the bottom of the ankle. I didn’t even know that they sold them that way since I never paid attention to new sweat pants but I figured I’d give that style a try. I’m not sure how I feel about them yet but I got them that way because I wanted to try something new with how I wore them.

In order to keep my pant cuff out of the chain I’m going to tie it down. I wasn’t sure how I was going to tie it down when I ordered the new sweats but I wound up using a sock. I cut the bottom off of an old sock and am using the elastic top part to tuck the pant leg into. I put on the sweats and then pull up the sock top over them on the bottom part of my calf. It was a little tight at first since there is a lot of material to tuck but it loosened up and I got used to it. It’s kinda goofy looking but so is the rest of my cycling outfit. I don’t have the matching cyclist’s gear that so many others wear. The sock I used is green and the sweats are black so that even adds a little bit more to the goofiness. It’s a good thing that I like goofy.

The other sign for me that summer is coming to an end is the start of football season. It’s the one sport that I follow so it’s an event when it starts up again for the year. It always makes Sundays a little more interesting and exciting for me. I’m a Giants’ fan and it’s a little annoying that they have played two of their first three games at night. Sure it’s good that they won the Super Bowl last year and have a good team but that also means more primetime night games. I hate night games. They end too late and I lose sleep when I watch them. It’s even more annoying because their first game was on a Wednesday night and their third game was on a Thursday night. That’s no time to be watching football.

I like my games on Sunday. When the Giants played on Wednesday night it seemed like forever ago once Sunday rolled around. I was all ready for a Giants game that Sunday but it never happened. They had already played for the week. Thursday night game used to start around Thanksgiving but this year they are playing them all year long. I know the NFL likes them because that means they make more money for them but I have a hard time caring about football on Thursday night. Football is an event sport and Thursday night football makes it less of an event. It’s annoying for us fantasy football players too because it forces us to make decision way too early in the week. But such are the signs of Autumn. Here we go with the falling leaves.

The summer TV season is over so I thought I write a wrap up of some TV shows that I watched these last few months. It’s mostly new new stuff but a few old things are thrown in too. Some I’ve watched before and some that are new to me. Here we go.

“Perception” – This one still has an episode left to air as I write this. It’s another quirky detective/cop show. I generally like that genre. It’s usually light entertainment with a killer to hunt down. This show follows that pattern except the quirky detective has a more serious problem than most. He’s a genius professor who is also a paranoid schizophrenic. He helps an FBI agent but also has problems telling his hallucinations from reality. I really feel sorry for the guy sometimes. It’s an okay show but not spectacular.

“Episodes” – I had seen the first season of this Showtime and liked it but forgot it ever existed. I was surprised to see a second season pop up because I hadn’t heard a thing about it since the first season ended. The show is a half hour comedy about a husband and wife team of TV writers who move from England to Hollywood to recreate their British show for an American TV network and an American audience. Of course nothing goes as planned. Matt LeBlanc of “Friends” fame plays himself. He is the star of the fictional show and plays himself as a bit of a self centered jerk. I like this one quite a bit. It’s funny stuff and worth checking out if you’re into sophisticated and crude humor.

“Web Therapy” – This one is also on Showtime and stars another “Friends” cast member, Lisa Kudrow. I never heard of this one before and so watched its first season plus the new second season. It’s also a half hour comedy about a woman (Lisa Kudrow) who invents a new kind of therapy, “Modality”, which is practiced in three minute sessions over a web cam. It cuts out all the wasted time of a fifty minute therapy session. Lisa Kudrow is very funny as the self centered therapist who doesn’t always have a lot of self awareness but can be mean and manipulative when angered. And she’s often angered. She’s usually on screen with another cast member also on screen as if they were talking over a web cam. It’s dialogue based so you have to pay close attention sometimes but it’s very funny. Lots of crazy characters. Each of these Showtime shows only have about six to nine episodes a season so it doesn’t take much time to watch through.

“Bunheads” – From the creator of “Gilmore Girls” this one has the same sort of “My Gal Friday” quick witted banter as G.G. but it never quite comes together like “Gilmore Girls” did. It’s about a thirty something ballerina/modern dancer turned Vegas showgirl who quits Vegas on a whim to marry a man and move to a small town. The man then dies in the first episode and the the woman stays to help run the small dance studio that her husbands mother has. It’s okay. It has its moments if you like banter but is not a total success.

“Burn Notice” – An old favorite back for the summer. I lost track of what season it is but they do a good job of keeping this series fun and fresh. The lead character, Michael Weston, is always in trouble with evil unseen forces who try to manipulate him to use his spy skills to do their bidding while he also helps out some poor slob who has run afoul of criminals. A little bit of “The Fugitive” and a little bit of “The Equalizer”. A good show.

“The Finder” – This one has been cancelled already and one of its stars, Michael Clarke Duncan, just died. Yet another quirky detective story. No cops this time (occasionally a US Marshal) but the quirky detective is a guy who is ex-military with brain damage. Now he sees things a little differently than everyone else and once he sets out to find something he can’t stop. It becomes a compulsion. Once again, light hearted fun. I enjoyed this show. Too bad it was cancelled.

“Eagleheart” – Funny, funny, funny. A ten minute long show that’s the latest Chris Elliot vehicle and runs on Adult Swim or some such. I just discovered it this summer but it’s in its second season. Some people like Chris Elliot and some don’t. I do. It’s stupid fun. Chris Elliot is a US Marshal who kicks ass and takes names. Plus he kills an awful lot of bad guys. The “Sky Crime” episode was just brilliant. If you like your comedy cleverly stupid then this one is for you.

“Copper” I’m not positive how I feel about this one yet. I’ve only seen three episodes and I sort of like it. It’s a BBC America show and it takes place in New York City back when the US Civil war was still going on but winding down. Our main character is a NYC Policeman/detective. The city was a lot different then. Lot’s of dirty streets and racial hatred. The main character tries to use what modern methods he can to solve crimes but faces evil and corruption at almost every turn. It’s a bit bleak. I’ll give it a little more time though.

“Life” – A show from 2007-2008 that I watched when it first ran and I decided to watch it again this summer. I liked it then and I like it now. Once again a quirky detective/cop show. But this one is a little better done than most. The lead character is a cop who spent 12 years in jail for a murder he didn’t commit. He was recently exonerated and the city had to give him fifty million dollars and his job back. He’s solving crimes with his partner and hunting down who set him up. It lasted through a ten episode first season and a twenty two episode second season. I liked it all the way through and it has one of my favorite final episodes. Oh, and his quirky gimmick was that he learned zen techniques to make it through twelve years of prison.

“Firefly” – A series that is ten years old now. I watched it when it first came out and last watched it in 2005 when the movie “Serenity” that was based on it came out. There are only fourteen episodes of it but it is one of the best TV series of all time. A lot of people like this show and you can find tons written about it so I don’t have much more to add than that it lives up to the hype. It’s a good show. It’s a space western with interesting characters living life on the frontier. They band together as a surrogate family and try to get by. A favorite.

So that’s what I watched this summer. How about you?

Do you know what I’m especially good at? Coming up with projects that have absolutely no commercial potential whatsoever. That was my revelation for the week. Well, maybe I’ve known that for a while but it hit me again recently. I can find things that I like to do and can do well. I’m a good artist. But to come up with things that other people not only like but would be willing to pay for is a whole different ballgame. I’m not even talking about having the business skills to pull some kind of money making project off. That’s a different conversation. I’m talking about the basic vision to say to myself, “Yeah, this is something people might like. I think I’ll do it”.

It’s the “This is something people might like” part that I can’t wrap my head around. Not in the sense that I don’t think people can like my work but in the sense of putting other people’s likes about a piece before my own. I’m not motivated by what other people like. Some creative people can see what’s popular, put their own spin on it, and put out some nice work that the public embraces. Look at all the art and commerce involving Star Wars, Harry Potter, Batman, and every other pop culture character out there. Good, bad or indifferent there is lots of it. I’m not talking old museum art but new fangled populist art. Custom T-shirts, toys, prints, posters, and the like are what I’m talking about. My work is hardly elitist but nor does it embrace pop culture.

I bring this up because of some of the paintings I did over the Labor Day weekend. They have their origin in some paper I bought last year. I was ordering art supplies online and as I often do I threw in a few cheap extra items that I thought looked interesting. One of those items was a pack of about fifty sheets of five by seven inch watercolor paper. I often do small watercolor paintings that size so I decided to try some of that especially cheap paper sight unseen. What did I have to lose? It was about five bucks for fifty sheets.

When I got the paper along with the rest of my supplies I had no idea what to do with it. This paper had a surface that was rough. I mean really rough. I like cold press watercolor paper which has a rough surface but this stuff was way beyond that. I’d compare it to something but I’ve never seen paper this rough. The best I can do is to say it reminds me of crumpled up toilet paper. Much thicker than T.P. but the surface looked about the same as if you crumpled a piece of toilet paper and them smoothed it out with your hand.

I couldn’t draw on this paper with a pencil. I couldn’t even draw on this paper even with a thick tipped and juicy marker. The paper just had too many peaks and valleys to move a drawing implement across and have the line go anywhere near where I wanted it to. I tried various techniques over a few weeks and then gave up and put the paper on a shelf. There it sat for months and months until last weekend. That’s when I was at the end of my rope with projects that I had been working on. I had been working on some things for a while and couldn’t get any of them done. My focus and concentration were gone for whatever reason. I was stalled. So I pulled out that paper and just started using it.

Since I couldn’t draw on it with any kind of consistent line I embraced the inconsistency. I grabbed one of my brushes. Not even one of my good brushes but one that’s a bit worn out and no longer comes to a precise point. I dipped it in my black ink and started drawing. I often draw without a preconceived image in mind. I let the brush hit the paper, make some marks, and then see where that brings me. I started drawing character sketches of whatever face I saw on the paper. I let the line be rough and inconsistent. I went with the flow. It worked and was fun.

After I made a drawing in black ink I went and got my containers of watered down acrylic paint. I mixed them up this winter for a new painting technique that I was working on that never went anywhere. They’ve been sitting around waiting for me to do something with them. Red, orange, yellow, and blue were the only colors I had in that form so that’s what I used. A limited color palette can often be freeing. I painted the color on loose and rough just like the ink drawing. I liked the results. I liked them so much that I kept on painting more of them.

I ended up making twenty of those small rough paintings. I made twelve of them on Labor Day alone. I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I wanted to see what I could come up with next. It was fun. I posted a few of them on Instagram and a few people liked them. They were nice. But they had no commercial appeal. Sure it’s hard to sell paintings under any circumstances but odd little paintings are extra hard. And I’m good at odd little paintings. I’m good at finding the strange little things that come from the edges of my mind. There are people who like such things too but many many more people like a clever take on a drawing of Darth Vader.

This was all going through my head on the days that I was painting these. I like them. I think they are good and worth doing. Yet I had to console myself because hardly anybody else will ever care about them. But don’t worry, I came up with a whole scenario where I’m just not appreciated in my own time and future generations of people will, for sure, get me and wonder why no on in this time did. It’s a good thing I’m a legend in my own mind.

I bought a new type of magic marker this week. A type that has nothing to do with my what can only be called my marker collecting of the last few years. Yes, I still feel the pull of getting new brands and colors of markers that I may or may not actually use much but these new ones have to do with wardrobe rather than collecting. They’re Sharpie fabric markers. I don’t know what makes them different than regular Sharpies and I haven’t even looked at them closely yet but I bought them for totally different reasons than I usually buy markers for. I bought them to, maybe, draw on some T-shirts.

It’s been a long time since I’ve worn any kind of shirt with writing or an image on it. I have some long sleeved collared shirts I sometimes wear in the winter that have patterns on them but no shirts with images. All of the T-shirts I wear in T-shirt weather are blank. I have them in various colors but none of them have anything on them. It must be about fifteen years now that I’ve been wearing blank and unbranded clothing. I don’t remember exactly when I stopped wearing things with pictures on them as everybody else does but I do remember the reason why. The writing and pictures started distracting me. I’d see something on the my shirt out of the corner of my eye and I’d look down and it was the design on the shirt. And so designs on my shirts started to annoy me. Weird I know.

Designs on other people’s shirts never distracted me. I barely pay attention to them unless they interest me somehow. So why did they distract me on my own shirt? I have no idea. I do know that I’m bored with my blank shirts though. I’ve been bored with them for years. I haven’t done anything about it because bored and driven to distraction seem to be my only two choices. That and I strove to simplify my wardrobe. Of course, over the years, I may have simplified it out of existence.

I’ve toyed with the idea of making my own T-shirts for ages. After all I am an artist who makes a lot of images so it would be a natural that I stick some on shirts that I could wear. Except how do I do that? Silk screen is how a lot of professional T-shirts are made but that’s a fairly elaborate process that I have never had an interest in learning. That’s really something you do if you’re interested in selling T-shirts. I just want them for myself.

I tried out some inkjet iron on transfer paper may years ago. That’s the stuff that you print out on your home printer and then heat transfer onto a T-Shirt with an iron providing the heat. I think it was the late 90s when I tried some of that paper and things didn’t go very well. Iron-ons are notoriously twitchy and making my own didn’t make the process any easier. I tried it out on some shirts I didn’t want anymore and it’s a good thing I did because I had to toss them out afterwards. I’ve looked into some of the newer iron-on inkjet papers they have nowadays but I don’t think they’ve improved them much. At least I can’t find many good reviews.

I have painted many a coat for myself over the years. From dusters to trench coats I’ve put designs and images on them with brush and paint. I’ve thought about hand painting T-shirts but they seem too impermanent for that. A coat doesn’t last forever but can last at least a decade. Plus coats don’t have to be washed after every time you wear them. A T-shirt may only last a year or two and would it really be worth spending the better part of a day painting something on it? And how will it even hold up? Paint sits on top of the fibers of cloth as well as it is absorbed by the fibers. I imagine the washing machine could really destroy the top sitting paint. T-shirt fabric is also thin and doesn’t take paint well. There are lots of reasons I never bothered to paint a T-shirt.

In this modern day and age I could also go the internet way. There are a lot of websites that let you submit a T-shirt design and they put it up for sale. They main problem I have with that method is that it’s expensive. It usually costs anywhere between fifteen to twenty dollars a shirt. And I have no idea if it will come out well. Plus a lot of things can get lost in translation especially since I have no experience with printing art on T-Shirts.

So that’s what brought me to these magic markers. It was curiosity as much as anything else. Sharpies made for drawing on clothing? What an odd concept. And they weren’t that expensive at only twelve dollars for eight markers. I’m still not sure how I’ll use them though. They seem to have the same drawback as the iron-on transfer paper. I’m guessing that they’ll only work well on light colored T-shirts. A yellow marker is not going to show up on a blue or black T-shirt. There’s a good chance that none of the other colors will show up either. That limits me just a few color shirts. I wonder what I could do with them?

I’ll get started with those markers one of theses days. It’s not a high priority project. It’s just something to mess around with. As a side note today I did buy a T-shirt on the internet with an image on it. It wasn’t even a great image but was a Firefly related shirt and I wanted to get something to break out of this plain shirt boredom I’ve been in. Since it has yet to arrive I’ll have to see if it distracts me. I hope not. I don’t like it when boredom wins.

Writing and walking. That has been my innovation for this week. I’ve actually done it before but I tried it again for the first time in ages and it went pretty well. It helped that this time I had a point to my writing. When I did this before I was just thinking on paper. I wasn’t writing anything specific. This time I was writing some pithy sayings for the T-Shirts in my “Message-Tee” comic. Well, with some more work they might be pithy. Maybe even witty.

I’m in the habit of going for daily walks. I’m not sure how far I walk for but it takes around half an hour. It gets me out of the house for a while and I like being outside in the open air. I even go for walks in the winter. It gets dark out before six o’clock then but I just grab a flashlight and put on a warm coat, gloves, a scarf, and a hat. I like to dress warmly. The flashlight is more so the cars can always see me but it also helps when there is snow on the sidewalk. Footing can be the biggest problem when walking in the winter.

Though summertime footing is easy I hadn’t thought of doing any writing while I walked before now because of the heat. It’s been a hot summer and when it’s 85-95ºF and humid out there I have to bring a bottle full of water with me while I walk. Even for a short half an hour walk I want to stay hydrated. Heat stroke is something I’m not interested in. This week it’s been in the low 80s and comfortable so my water bottle has stayed home. That freed up my hands for a notebook and pen. My tools of choice for writing while walking.

Usually when I walk I have headphones on and am listening to some music or the Stern show. Which one depends on what I’m in the mood for and sometimes I listen to one and then switch over to the other. I’m flexible. I’ve walked a few times with no headphones on because I wasn’t in the mood for that kind of noise in my ears but even on those few occasions by the time I was halfway into my walk I wished I had brought my iPod with me. Music can make life more pleasant.

On my walk-and-writes I left both the water and the iPod at home. The actual sequence of events was to walk for a little bit while thinking up a line and then stop and write it down. It’s not easy to write in a little notebook while standing. It’s only a sentence or two at a time that I’m writing down but often it’s sloppy. I try to be neat but sometimes my brain is ahead of my hands which are bouncing up and down as I try to hold the notebook still. But in the end I can read it.

I find myself liking to write with a Papermate Flair pen these days. I’ve like them for years but like them even better since they’ve improved them. That’s because they changed the barrel of the pen. It used to have ridges on it which I always hated. It’s a marker type writing pen and I always liked the way the ink flowed onto the paper but hated those ridges. They gave me the heebie-jeebies. Sometimes I would use black electrical tape to cover over the ridges but that was never the greatest solution. Now the new Flair pens have a smooth barrel. Much better. I can dig ‘em.

The problem with having to come up with pithy sayings for my “Message-Tee” comic is that I have to come up with a lot of them. I just finished twenty five drawings and I need one for each of them. That means I need at least two if not three for each drawing. I’d say it takes about three pithy sayings to get one good pithy saying. It’s tough to do short, breezy, funny, effortless looking writing.

I can remember learning that lesson back in my art school days. I was in a drawing class that was pretty standard. We were all learning to draw from still lives and the human figure but we had a little more looseness with our homework assignments. One guy, for his homework assignment, decided to do a drawing made up of writing in a notebook. He wasn’t making a picture made out of writing but was doing pretend writing in a notebook. It looked like writing but was really gibberish. It was an odd choice but I kinda liked it.

The student went on to say that he liked the look of the random writing-like marks in the notebook. The whole “Not trying to make a specific image” aspect of it also appealed to him. Being that this was a modern art school and not some old time art academy this idea didn’t throw our teacher at all. She wasn’t against the idea and she explained to him that making drawings from randomness wasn’t new but the key to it was making a lot of drawings. Artists who explore randomness will make a hundred drawings to start and and whittle it down to the best three to make finished works from. The student only had a couple of notebook page drawings so there wasn’t much else to say about it. I think he dropped out of the class a little later and I never saw him again. But I did learn his lesson.

The pithy sayings I’m writing are nowhere near random so I don’t need to make a hundred of them to get three good ones but I still need to do a few of them to get one good one. That’s the nature of comedy and is especially the nature of the rather odd comedy that I do. I can do weird and absurd rather easily but weird, absurd, and funny is a whole different ballgame. Weird can be disconnected but with funny you have to connect with the world. Getting the two to work together takes some doing.

I was able to come up with some stuff on my walk. I haven’t gone over it all yet but I think I was able to come up with about ten to twelve sayings on each of my two writing walks so far. That puts me nearly a third of the way there and I like that. I would have taken any progress since I hadn’t written any of these in half a year and that much time away from any creative endeavor always makes me wonder if I can get it started up again. It’s good to know I can.