I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics.
Check them all out here:
The past is a strange place. That’s my thought for today. It comes into my head because of what I’ve been working on lately. Y’see I love history. I’ve been a fan of history since my childhood when my mother used to bring my sisters and I to the library to pick out books to read. I’d pick out history books. I can’t recall the name but there was a line of books for children that were biographies of the heroes of the American Revolution. I remember reading about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones, John Adams, the Marquis de Lafayette, and probably many more that I can’t recall right now.
My love for history started early and because of that I like to keep track of things. Photographs specifically are what I’m talking about in this piece. My mother took family photographs my whole childhood. I didn’t start taking photographs for myself until my freshman year of college. That was in 1984 and I got my first camera then. I also took a photography class in college so I was able to get acquainted with my 35mm camera, develop my own black and white film, and make prints of my photos. I had fun doing it.
Even after my one and only photography class ended I kept on taking pictures. I usually took photos of friends, gatherings, and everyday events. After college I went to work at the offices of Marvel Comics in NYC and it wasn’t as easy to take pictures anymore. My 35mm camera wasn’t always around. This was long before the days when everyone carried a camera phone so if you wanted to take photos you usually had to have a good reason to carry your gear. I carried mine every now and then.
But then sometime in the early 1990s I got my first pocket camera. The Olympus Stylus. It was about the size of a large bar of soap so I could carry it in my pocket all the time. And I did. I became the guy who carried a camera around in case one was needed. I also took pictures whenever I could. I wish I had taken more. Back before the digital age you usually needed a reason take a photo. It took time, effort, and money to get photos printed so I didn’t just shoot willy nilly like I do today. But still I shot more photos than most.
Because of my love of history I got into the habit early of writing the names, dates, and places on the back of my photos. I may have only been 20 at the time I started but I knew there would eventually come a time when I might not remember the names of all the people who were in my photos. Some were good friends with names never to be forgotten but most were acquaintances who came and went. It’s a good thing I got into that habit because thirty years later a lot of names have slipped away.
Lately I’ve been scanning in a lot of old family photos. I’ve borrowed a few photo albums from family members and now the photos are digital. Photos from the 1920s up through the 1970s. Even with digital photos I have to write names, dates, and places on them. Usually I put the name of whoever is in the photo in the file name and I put them in a folder with the date and place on it. That way it’s easy to find and I don’t need any specific program to keep things straight.
Lately I’ve been doing something different. I’ve been loading all those old photos onto my iPad. I’ve always had my own photos on my iPad but they only run from about 1985 until present. With the old photos I know have photos spanning about 90 years on my iPad. That’s an amazing thing.
One of the annoying things about the iPad and Apple’s iOS in general it that it ignores files names and makes its own new file names. So all this names that make my photos easily identifiable on my desktop are useless when I transfer the photos onto my iPad. It’s really annoying.
What the iOS on the iPad does have is facial recognition software. It’s far from perfect. It doesn’t work anywhere near as well as on TV shows when the cops use it. But it does allow me to add names to faces. First the iPad has to scan the photos for faces. There is no start button for this. You plug the iPad in and lock the screen and then it’s supposed to automatically start scanning. This may be what’s happening but there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason for it. Sometimes it scans faces and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it scans all the faces in a photo, sometimes none, and sometimes just some of them. It’s weird how scattershot it is.
So as the iPad has been slowly scanning faces I’ve been naming them. It also tries to find other photos with those faces and automatically name them. That’s hit or miss too. So far I have about 400 named faces on my iPad. I don’t know if that’s a lot or a little but it seems like a lot.
So what about all of this makes the past so strange? It’s that having all those old photos means that I have a lot of photos of people who are passed on now. I have photos of them when they were young, middle aged, and old. I have photos of my living relatives at all three of those stages too. Plus I’ve been sitting with some of my older relatives and asking them the names of some of the extraneous people in the photos from their childhoods. I’m learning the names of young children who haven’t been young in 75 years but to me they’re five years old.
All in all it puts me in a strange head space. I’ve been looking at and naming so many photos that everyone is both old and young to me. The 1920s are still here and there are young people having fun on the shores of the Hudson River. So are the 1950s in a different part of town. Everyone likes to pose by their new car no matter what the year so what year is it exactly? I keep jumping from time to time as the iPad wants to know who’s face this one is. And the iPad doesn’t even care about time. As far as I know there is no place to date a photo as I name them. So in an odd way all time becomes one as I wander through the photos on the iPad. It’s a strange place to be.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics.
Check them all out here:
This week I thought I’d do that thing where I pull an old painting out of storage, take a look at it, and write a little something about it. This painting is one of my small 8×10 inch acrylic on canvas paintings. This one also wasn’t quite in storage in that in hangs on my wall above my front window. I have a row of of eleven 8×10 inch paintings up there, above my head, about seven feet in the air. Though I can see them from where I sit, like most things in everyday life, I take them for granted and don’t pay a lot of attention to them. Today I’ll pay attention to this one.
Since this painting is named and dated on the back I know it’s called “Rage Cage” and was painted on May 15, 2005. Wow, it’s fourteen years old. Time really does fly. Especially when looked at in hindsight. I think this might be one of my earliest 8×10 inch acrylic on canvas paintings. I originally started doing them because I wanted to work on more painted images. I could make four, six, or ten of these small paintings in the same time it would take me to make a larger 24×36 inch painting which I usually made. That allowed me to explore more imagery.
I bet there are also three other paintings that I finished on this same day. I used to do them in fours. That way I could switch between them as I was either waiting for the paint to dry or waiting to come up with an idea for what to do next on them. I’d decide what to do on one of them, lay down the paint, put that one aside, pick up the next one and keep the process going. It worked well for me. When working on just one of them at a time I found myself going too slowly. There was too much down time. With four of them at once there was always something to do next and I liked that.
“Rage Cage” is a stripped down painting of a face and a gloved hand. The face is especially stripped down in that the only feature it has is a single eye. There is no hint of a second eye, nose, or mouth. I’m betting that in the drawing stage they just got in the way. I don’t usually strip faces down this much so I’d guess that in the drawing stage I tried to put them in there but kept erasing them until I finally saw that they weren’t needed. The drawing stage is very helpful in figuring out what is needed and what is not.
The eye on the face is a few simple shapes and lines. I like the way it’s done. We have the upper eyelid in a slightly darker color than the rest of the face, the green of the eye, the black of the pupil, and a stroke of white for the white of the eye. The stroke of white doesn’t even have a black holding line around it. I like that part. It works for me. I bet a black holding line would have made the eye too heavy. As it is now it floats on the face in a striking way. I think the eye, looking back at us, is the key to the whole painting.
The second key to this painting is the color. It has two main colors. The portrait pink of the face and the light blue of the background. These two colors are both tints (color with white in them) and work together in harmony. Pink and light blue are also colors of childhood so there might be a bit of color nostalgia going on too. The dark blue of the glove is a good counterpoint to the tints. It’s solid pure color and acts as an anchor holding everything in place. Usually I’d use a dark color like that in the background but here in the foreground it acts like a paperweight keeping the other colors from blowing away in the wind.
I find the three yellow triangles interesting. They’re an accent color but they also define what appears to be a shirt collar and a sideburn. I usually don’t use the same color on two different objects so close to each other but since they’ve become so abstract they read as color more than as objects. My mind just sees yellow that looks like it belongs there and doesn’t even question what the yellow is.
The red in the bottom left corner is interesting. It reshapes the positive and negative space of the canvas when I look at it. At first glance the face is the positive space and the light blue is the negative space but when my eye eventually gets to the bottom red that becomes a new negative space and make the bottom light blue become a positive shape. It’s really weird. It’s like falling into a visual hole. It adds a little more complexity to the piece.
The red X’s on the glove were probably a finishing touch. They take the attention off the bottom corner red and leave you to discover that later. The X’s demand immediate attention and fight with the single eye for what is most important. Though they are marks rather than objects the X’s almost read as objects for some reason. It might be that they are where fingernails should be and so make me think of fingernails. As I do a piece like this I’m always trying to figure out how to fit all the pieces together and sometimes even after I fit them together I’m trying to figure out why they fit together well. That’s the process.
The small circles of color around the piece are usually the last things to be painted on. They’re the part of the process for getting the right color balance, balance of marks, brush strokes, and objects. The fine tuning of a painting. I needed a little more yellow on the top so some small circles of yellow went up there. I needed some violet so some circles went on the side of the face. Some green to work with the eye color went along the sides of the neck. This finishing touches don’t take long to do but often take a lot of looking and contemplation. Another reason to do four of them at once.
The last thing I’ll mention it the film like sprockets along the right side. A thin strip of black with pink/violet squares on it. They emphasize the asymmetry of the piece but also add some balance. A little more dark to balance the dark blue of the glove. When working with asymmetry balance becomes really important. That’s my advice for the week.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got six new comics.
Check them all out here:
This week I’ve been making some more art cards. Baseball card sized drawings. Ones of my cartoon art card variety. Those are a drawing of a person with a word balloon above them and an amusing saying lettered in the balloon ( at least I aim for amusing). Except instead of my usual drawings of made up faces I decided to draw some super heroes. Mostly Marvel super heroes but a few DC ones too.
I’ve found it takes me a remarkably long time to draw a super hero head. With my own cartoon art cards there are very few rules. I grab a pencil and draw whatever comes to mind. Sometimes I even skip the pencil and go right to ink. Since I’m filmed myself drawing some of those cards I know they take me about 15 minutes to draw, ink, letter, and color one of those. But super hero illustrations take much longer.
When I make a drawing of Captain America the number one thing I have to get right is that it looks like Captain America. His face has to be the right shape, his mask has to be the right mask, and all the other details have to be correct. People who look at it have to immediately recognize the drawing as Captain America or I’ve failed. Not to mention that a lot artists have made good drawings of Cap so I don’t want to make a bad one. People know what bad ones look like so I want to stay out of that lane.
So the first thing I do is grab a pencil and start to draw the face. An oval for a head, then I gesture in the placement of the eyes, nose, and mouth. After that I sketch in the details of the costume and then slowly bring the drawing along until I have a finished face. With my own random faces this pencilling proves takes about two minutes. When trying to draw a specific super hero this process is more like ten minutes. Or even a few more if I don’t get it right the first time.
I also have to find reference for all these superhero faces. That takes time. Not a lot but another few minutes a drawing at least. I have to decide on a character and then, either online or in one of my digital reference books, look for a drawing of that character’s head. There is not always a good one available so I have to dig a bit. So now just pencilling a head take just as long as making a finished cartoon art card of my own design. It can be a little frustration.
One thing I did do with the pencils is I scanned them in. In order to try and save some time I can now print out the pencils and ink over them if I want to make another card of the same character. I even erased the mouths on the pencil drawings so I could draw a new expression on the character’s face to keep it fresh and have the character match what he or she is saying in the word balloon. It would be nuts to draw a card of Batman over and over since they would all generally be similar anyway so this will say me some time.
The next step is inking the drawings. I found this step tricky. The drawings are really small. For most of my own cartoon art card drawings I inked them with a sign pen (a cheap marker) refilled with India ink. I did the same with some of the superhero cards but I found I didn’t like the results. It was a little too thick lined for this style. I tried using a brush and various art markers but didn’t like any of them. The brush was also a little too thick lined and sometimes the black ink of the markers smeared when I added the color markers on top off them. That’s a problem with markers.
I ended up using a technique I’ve seem other inkers use but I never have before. I started with a dip pen and India ink. Most inkers use a Hunt 102 to ink with. It’s a solid pen with a bit of flexibility to it so they can vary the weight of the ink line. Instead I used a Hunt 107 which has almost no flexibility to it. It puts down a solid single weight line. I inked the whole face with a single weight line figuring I’d add in some line weight after the color.
The good thing about using India ink is that it won’t smear into the color markers. So after I had my single line weight down I added color to the drawings with the markers. Once again I had to pay attention to my reference to make sure I got the color right. This takes more time. The one good thing about these drawings taking more time is that as I was working in the various stages ideas for the writing would pop into my head. So there wasn’t really a writing step as with my own cartoon art cards. That step would happen as I was in the middle of other steps.
After the color was in I went back to add to the black line. I used a brush and India ink to thicken up some lines and generally get the drawing to look like I wanted it to. I tried to not overdo things and leave some of the thin lines in there. I’m used to working in all brush so this took some trial and error to get the look I wanted. I instinctively wanted to overwhelm the thin ink line so I had to restrain myself.
After I finished pencilling, inking, coloring, and writing the cards the last step was lettering. It was usually after the pencil stage that I would pencil lettering guide lines into the word balloons. That way if an idea popped into my head I could write it in pencil directly in the balloon. When the lettering stage came around I would letter the words in ink.
I’ve been using a .5mm black art marker for my lettering in recent years but I’ve never been happy with it. So for some of the art cards I decided to go old school and use a filed Hunt 107 for my lettering. A filed Hunt 107 is different than a normal one in that the letterer (in this case me) uses a piece of wet/dry fine grit sandpaper to file the point of the pen into a angled line. That way using the side of the point you can get thicks and thins into the lettering. It’s much trickier than using a marker but I like the results.
In the end I liked the way the cards came out and put some of them up on Ebay. For $12 you can have one of your own.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics.
Check them all out here:
It’s time for the post-party blues again. Every year I throw a backyard barbecue for a bunch of friends. Usually somewhere from around 30 to 40 people show up and we all have a good time. I don’t have much to say about the party except that it’s fun.
The party doesn’t cause me much stress either. For anyone who has ever thrown a party that’s a big deal. If you’ve never thrown a party then let me tell you that they can be stressful. You worry about things going right and you worry about people who can’t make it. But I’ve been throwing this BBQ every year since 1991 so I’ve learned to let things go. If we run out of stuff someone will go to the store to get it. If someone can’t show up that’s okay. Enjoy the people who are at the party and don’t sweat those who couldn’t make it. Also let people help you. They want to.
The post-party blues happen after the party is over. Of course they do. That’s what “Post” means. Not right after the party though. Since the BBQ is on a Saturday that means that there is still probably a bit of cleanup the next day on Sunday. There are things to do. Often a few people stay overnight too. So the next morning there is breakfast and hanging out. That takes most of the morning so it’s not until the afternoon that everyone is gone.
This year I had something to do on Sunday afternoon. Usually I do nothing since I’m too tired and can’t concentrate. I sometimes spend that Sunday afternoon watching TV, a movie, or some such which is an unusual event for me since I don’t normally watch a movie in the afternoon. Not even a Sunday afternoon. I don’t know why but it’s just not my habit.
This Sunday afternoon I had some old photos to scan. Two of my party guests were old friends from my Marvel Comics days. Actually more than two were my old Marvel friends but these two brought old Marvel photographs. We all worked in the Marvel Bullpen in the 1990s. The photos were mostly of a couple of Holiday parties and a couple of Halloweens. I took a bunch of photos back in those days too but I’m always happy to add to the collection so my friends left the photos with me to scan in.
I have both a photo scanner and a negative scanner. Negatives give you a better quality but photos are easier to scan. I mention that because these were all photos and I want to set the stage. Scanning negatives can be real work but scanning photos can just be a task. A task is something I really don’t have to think about. It’s mindless repetition. It might not be totally mindless when it comes to scanning photos but it’s mindless adjacent.
So there I was on Sunday afternoon. I put three 4×6 inch photos at a time on the scanner, made sure they’re straight, closed the lid, previewed the photos in the scanner software, selected each photo individually, and then hit the scan button and waited five minutes. Repeat this about 40 times and you have 120 photos scanned. So that’s what I did all Sunday afternoon and into the evening. Sometimes getting lost in a task is like meditation. My mind is at peace as I run through the steps. It mostly kept the post party blues away.
That evening I decided to watch a movie. Avengers: Endgame. It was three hours long. It was a good movie and took me to bedtime when my tired self fell asleep. All in all the post-party blues didn’t affect me much on Sunday. Then Monday came.
We all get the Monday blues. It’s the back-to-the-grind day. I don’t have to explain that to anyone. I’ve been putting together my “Four Talking Boxes” comic strips on Monday mornings just so I can start my week out with something expected. After that I tried to get some art work done but nothing was happening. I was too distracted by the post-party blues creeping in. It also didn’t help that I was waiting on a phone call about some work and the phone call never came. That was an extra distraction from getting anything done.
I hadn’t finished scanning in all the photos yet but wasn’t planning on doing anymore that Monday. I really wanted to do something creative to shake of the doldrums but nothing creative was coming out of me. I had about 60 photos left to scan and so decided to tackle them. That took me a few hours but never in those few hours did I reach the peaceful meditative state of the day before. Instead I had to grind it out.
Grinding out scans is a lot different state of mind. Instead of the repetition soothing me I become aware of it. I have to make the conscious decision to keep going with every task. Instead of my hands doing the work without my mind being very involved I have to think about every step. It’s really annoying and slows things down.
As I’ve written about before scanning in old photos has it’s own type of ennui that can come along with it. Plus these were photos of parties. The post-party blues are how I describe the feeling of sadness after a party. That feeling hits me as I realize that every day isn’t a party. I had a lot of fun at the party so how come there isn’t another party the next day? Of course we all know we can’t have a party everyday but that logical answer doesn’t help when you’ve got the post party blues. Scanning in photos of parties past doesn’t seem to help much either.
So there I was with the post-party blues, scanning in photos from parties past, and waiting on a phone call that never came. That’s a recipe for sadness if I’ve ever heard one. Do you know what shook me out of my doldrums? I had small family party to go to that Monday night. A little hair of the dog.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics.
Check them all out here:
Here is a bike riding update for you. I’m still out there riding my usual route to get some exercise and fresh air but my bike could use a little repair these days. My bike is ten years old this year and that’s ten years of Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter riding. The nice sunny Summer days are easy on the bike but the cold and wet ones are tough on the bike. Winter road grime gets everywhere.
I repair my own bike and am good at keeping it in riding shape. Just recently I had some chain slippage and knew I had to check my gear cassette. Chain slippage happen when either the chain gets worn out and stretched or the gears get worn down to points instead of being flat on top. Chain slippage is really not fun. It happens when you’re pedaling, especially when pedaling hard, and the chain suddenly slips forward a few inches. The chain isn’t catching on the rear gear cassette properly.
I think this is the third gear cassette I’ve bought for this bike. The original one and then three others. It’s easy enough for me to put on. It takes a couple of special tools and some effort but it’s not hard to do. It’s the adjustments afterwards that get tricky. The rear derailleur is what needs to be adjusted. That’s the part of the bike that moves the chain from gear to gear when you shift the gearshift lever.
My rear derailleur has seen better days. Its gears are wearing down and so are its setting screws. Those are the two little screws on it that adjust how far up or down the derailleur can go. The road grime has gotten to them and they’re worn down and tough to turn. I wish I could just replace those little screws but I can’t find them. Oh, well.
After I adjusted my rear derailleur my bike was working fine except I was getting some chain rub on the front derailleur of all things. I didn’t even touch that one. Chain rub is when the chain is rubbing against the metal side piece of the derailleur. That shouldn’t happen and makes for a rougher ride. I set out to adjust it but couldn’t get it to stop. I went to look on the internet to see if it had any answers. It did.
It turns out that there is a tension knob on the derailleur cable that’s used to stop chain rub. Somehow in ten years I never knew this and never really paid attention to the knob. The way cables work on a bike is that they attach on one end to the gearshift lever/brakes on the handle bars, get run along the frame where they pass though mounted holes that keep them in place, and attach at the other end to a derailleur or brake as the case may be. One of these mounted holes on the frame has a small half inch plastic knob attached to it. This is the cable tension knob.
Ideally that knob moves the whole derailleur over fractions of an inch to get rid of chain rub. Turn the knob two turns to the left and the derailleur moves over an eighth of an inch and it doesn’t rub on the side of the derailleur guide piece. Unfortunately ten years of riding have frozen that knob in place.
The knob itself is plastic. It also has a spring in it so you have to pull up on the knob and then turn it. The bolt that’s in the threaded hole is metal. So I pulled on the plastic knob, tried to turn it, but it did nothing. The metal is rusted in place. I tried using WD40 to lubricate the metal but that didn’t help.
I could also feel the plastic knob start to crumble a bit under the pressure. I decided to get the pliers out and try to use them on the knob. I figured I might as well try that before the knob crumbled entirely. It didn’t work. The knob kept crumbling and nothing turned. So then I crumbled the knob off on purpose to try and turn the metal bolt part itself. Then the metal started to crumble too. I admitted defeat and walked away.
Now I have to track down a new cable tension knob and bolt. I found something similar on the internet but still haven’t ordered it yet. The bike is still working fine and is ridable with a little bit of chain rub so I fear I’ll mess it up more if I try to replace the bolt. That thing is rusted in and I’m not even sure if I could get it out. I may make things worse rather than make things better.
The rest of the bike is okay though. The chain slippage is gone and that’s the most important thing. A bike is unrideable if there is chain slippage. I also patched a bunch of tire tubes. I’m always getting flat tires so it’s no surprise that I have to patch tubes but I somehow let them build up. I got a flat one day and when I got home to patch the punctured tube I noticed I had two more punctured tubes that I never fixed.
One of the tubes had a new hole right next to a patch and the second tube already had four patches on it. I imagine that I was frustrated with the tubes when they went flat and didn’t want to bother to fix them since they had both been fixed before. But now, months later, I wasn’t frustrated with them any more so I figured I’d patch them. I was patching one anyway so why not three? It all went okay. I must have been worried about putting one patch so close to another on that one tube but it held up just fine. And that five patch one did too. Maybe that’s one too many patches but we’ll see. It’s all fine for now.