Radiant Comics

I’m going back into the past this week to look at a piece of art that I made back in August of 2000. That puts it at eighteen years old as of the date I am writing this. It’s a digital print named “Astonishing Wonder Thrills of the New World” and it’s print number six of about a hundred prints I’ve made over the years.

Let me take you back for a moment to the time I made this print. I bought my first computer at the and of 1995 and had been doing graphics on a computer since about the beginning of 1994. So by the year 2000 I was well versed in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator but it was still not that long since I started working in them. This was around the time I started thinking I could make big full color prints in them.

A few years before, in about 1997, I made my first digital art prints but they were fairly small, maybe around 8×10 inches, and my inkjet printer really wasn’t good enough to make art prints. In those days you could tell with the naked eye what was an inkjet print. The color just wasn’t smooth enough. But by the year 2000 inkjet printers were a lot better so I decided to make some new art prints.

The first thing I notice about “Astonishing” is how busy it is. Normally I’m a simplicity guy but with these prints I indulged my complex side. I call them digital prints but my process for these wasn’t all digital. I made the drawings by hand with a brush and ink and then scanned them into the computer and colored them digitally. With this one, unlike most later ones, I also composed digitally.

This print was made before I was in the habit of drawing in my sketchbooks in ink (my ink books). So I didn’t have my now vast reservoir of thumbnail drawings to choose from and instead had a bunch on drawings on random sheets of paper lying around. In looking at this print I can see five different source drawings for the overall image. The largest drawing of the man with the firsts and bubble head was a finished ink drawing that came out of my “Surrealist Automatic Drawing” method, the four colorful figures are some of my “Mod Men” drawings, the yellow faced guy on the left was a tiny ink drawing, and the stripped arm and pink faced guy were pulled from pages of ink doodles that I made.

It was not easy working that way. Having to pull drawings from a variety of sources and put them all together into one drawing can be a tough go. The main problem I had was that I’d find an image or three I wanted to work with, fit them together, and that would suggest that I needed another image to complete the composition. But what image? It was back to looking through my drawings and hoping to find something. I think it was this process that lead me to drawing in my ink books and keeping my spontaneous ink drawings all in one place but at the time all I had was various piles of drawings.

It may have been a pain to work in that piecemeal method but that was the point of these early prints. I was trying to find a way to make something finished out of all these various small drawings that I made. For example I drew a bunch of those Mod Men over time but what were they for? They weren’t characters in a story. They were mostly decorative figures so I had to make something they could decorate. These prints were it.

Besides the variety of images in this print it also has an overload of patterns and outlines. It’s a little crazy busy. This also might be the only print that I used four different fonts for the headline. That’s really something you should not do. It’s also a bit of an amateur move to make each word or line its own font. Newbies do it because they’re so enamored with having so many fonts at their disposal that they want to use tons of them but the more experienced designer knows to stay away from that. But sometimes it does work and I think it does in this print. With all the busyness you barely notice the many fonts.

Outlines are also another tool that I don’t use often but used a lot in these early prints. I think it was because outlines helped integrate all the drawings. Normally an outline would be used to separate parts of a drawing, and it does that a bit here, but since almost everything has an outline in this drawing it becomes a unifying theme. I was tough using digital outlines though. Any little imperfection in the edges of my drawing were amplified by a digital outline. I had to do a lot of smoothing.

The background is filled with patterns. Stripes, squares, rectangles, stars, and bubbles fill the print. I even used more type and numbers on some of the background stripes. The bubble headed man’s shirt has a digital pattern and his pants have a digital texture. So does the rock behind him. The stars in the background even have a digital opacity fade to them. There is so much going on that it’s tough to note it all.

It’s a saying of mine that complexity is simplicity multiplied. That’s how I approached these prints. I added one element at a time. It was impossible to plan out in advance so I planned one step and after that was done I planned another. Or maybe I planned two or three steps in advance but not the whole thing. I’d drop a block of color here and there and then maybe a stripe before figuring out I needed another drawing in some spot. One decision lead to the next.

I look back on these early prints with a bit of nostalgia these days. It was before digital was as integrated into my workflow as it is today and I can see myself learning and exploring. As is my nature I eventually stripped down the complexity of my prints but it took a long time. Or maybe the complexity changed a bit since my “Painted Lady” prints are still pretty complex. But it’s a different kind of complexity. Either way I did dozens of prints in this style and it’s cool to pull them out every now and again and give them a look.

It turns out that size does matter and I can creep myself out. I found that out after making a large ink drawing this week. I’ve written about two big ink drawings I’ve done recently, the scary clown face “Face Seven,” and the monster face “Big Monster One”, and this one “Glory Days” was the third big ink drawing in a row that had a horror theme to it. Big and horrific. That’s what got to me.

“Glory Days” started it’s life as a small 6×9 inch drawing that I made back in 2012. After that made an 11×17 ink drawing of it but neither of those satisfied me. The were both swings and misses. I liked parts of them both but neither of them as a whole. Still I liked something about the drawings so I decided to give it another go but this time as a large ink drawing.

As I drew a new 6×9 inch drawing of the monster I noticed that the part I didn’t like was the teeth on the monster’s dress. I did a double face thing where not only did the monster have a face but there was a weird abstract face in her dress too. In the original drawing I made the teeth and mouth too abstract.

In general I have two ways that I make teeth in my monster faces. The first way is to make the teeth into sharp triangles that I then make a little more irregular and the second way is to use the many lines my busted brush technique generates to gesture in teeth without strongly defining the edges. In the original ink drawing I used the triangle teeth but instead of keeping them white I blackened them in and put a white outline around them. This messed up the positive and negative space of the mouth and obscured it in a way that didn’t work for me. So in the new drawing I worked out the teeth so they would be white.

The second thing that I changed was that I gave her big monster ears. In the original drawing she didn’t have any ears at all. I’m not sure why that is but I found that not very scary at all. It was even a little bit elegant looking. I guess I was going for a more skull-like look but I don’t think it worked. The big ears say “Monster” much more clearly.

After I worked out the new drawing at 6×9 inches I blew it up and transferred it to a 22×30 inch piece of paper. That was easy enough but as I started drawing it in ink I ran into a problem. How I originally made the drawing wasn’t working at the larger size and it was confusing me on how I should proceed. The original 11×17 inch ink drawing had hard edges. It was all about the shapes and how the positive and negative spaces played off each other. But I had to redraw and simplify a lot of those shapes to get the dress-mouth correct plus the hard edges at the large size didn’t look very scary. So I abandoned my regular brush and grabbed my multi-pointed busted brush.

I was planning on using my busted brush with this drawing but it turned out that I really hadn’t thought out how I was going to use it. Usually it’s easy to use. I use it to define the forms of a drawing. The roundness of an eye or the shape of a nose. But with this drawing I had mostly graphic shapes that didn’t define forms but defined positive and negative shapes. It was different so I had to take some time and think about it. I started with the face but only got so far before I switched to the other parts of the body.

I ended up not defining the forms but obscuring them. This drawing is almost all black with only a little bit of white showing through. This white defines the forms but in a subtle way. Little hints of edges stand out to us and give the body its shape. I actually had the hardest time with the wings because they basically have no form. They were such a graphic element that it was impossible to bring any sense of form to them. I tried to define them using various direction brush techniques but in the end found that obscuring them was the way to go. I kept making them darker and darker until they sat back in space the way I wanted them to. That sounds easy to do but takes a remarkably long time to figure out and execute. In the end this large 20×28 inch drawing took me about ten hours to finish. That’s not too bad for one of these large drawings but it’s not a short period of time.

The different thing about this one was that by the time I was done it was creeping me out. I’ve done a lot of monster drawings over the last half a decade or so but they were all 5×7 inches or 11×17 inches. Sure they were some creepy ones but I guess them being smaller made them less creepy. I even like to take a few dozen of these small ones and line them up to take photos or look at them. They’re cool when they’re all in a group.

After I finished “Glory Days” I didn’t want to look at it. Normally after I finish one of these big drawings I leave it on the easel for a couple of days to think about it. This one I left up for a shorter time. It creeped me out. It didn’t help that the two before it were also creepy drawings but this one seems especially bizarre. It’s odd that I can make a drawing that can creep me out. After all I’m the one who made it and know how it’s done.

After making this one I had to clear my brain by making a larger drawing that was pleasant and fun. I went back to my clean edged style and made a drawing where the main figure was a smiling woman. Much less creepy.

I tackled another big 20×28 inch ink drawing today. I’m on a roll with them. This one was giant monster face. Unlike my other big ink drawings the monster face didn’t involve any markers, French curves, or straight edges. This one is all brush and ink. And it was a broken down and busted up brush instead of my usual good one.

My busted brush technique developed over the years due to happenstance. I use sable hair watercolor brushes with my ink and they serve me well except for the fact that India ink eats away at the brush and degrades it over time. Usually a brush is good anywhere from months to a year. Not a terribly long time. And those watercolor brushes are expensive; $20 to $30 a pop. I hate to throw them out. So I have a lot of old brushes lying around.

When a sable round brush goes bad what happens to it is that it no longer comes to a point. It splits into two points which is pretty useless if you’re looking to make one line. But eventually I found a reason to want to make two lines. Around five years ago I bought some 5×7 inch watercolor paper. The problem was that it was the roughest watercolor paper I had even seen and I found it impossible to draw on. So that paper sat around for months. Then I got the idea to try drawing on it with one of my busted brushes. Two out of control tools might add up to something that neither one of them could do alone. It ended up being a success and my “On the Rough” and “Monster a Day” series of drawings were born. I’ve been doing busted brush drawings ever since.

I’ve probably drawn monsters of some kind all my life but it really didn’t become a theme until I came up with this technique. I can trace my monster drawings back to two sources. One is obvious. Comic books. There have been lots of monsters in comic books and I have been reading comics all my life. The second source is more obscure. I was in college in 1988 and we went to a show at the Brooklyn Museum called “The Art of New Ireland”. New Ireland is an island in the Pacific near Papua New Guinea. The show had in it a small sculpture of a monster. It was about a foot high and scary looking. We were told that the people of New Ireland would make such sculpture in order to remind them to be morally straight. Otherwise monsters were waiting for them. That idea and that monster stuck with me.

Most of my busted brush drawings are small. Somewhere around 5×7 to 6×9 inches. I’ve made some 11×17 inch busted bush drawings but in general I think they work better at a smaller size. After all the brush isn’t very big. So when the idea popped into my head to make a large scale busted brush drawing I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. That’s a lot of paper to cover with one small brush but I’d have at it.

I don’t do much preliminary drawing when it comes to these monster faces. Since so much of the drawing is done with the brush there isn’t a lot of use for an extensive under drawing. Instead I will either make a quick small drawing to work out some details or I will pull out a bunch of my old monster drawings and look at them to get some new ideas. Then I sketch in the broad strokes of the face in pencil. Since there ends up being so much ink on the paper there isn’t a whole lot of room for details anyway. I’d say the pencil stage only takes about half an hour. This is considerably short compared to the pencil stage of most of my work.

One of the little drawing tricks I did with this monster face was to duplicate one eye twice. Often with a big face drawing that’s symmetrical I find myself spending too much time making sure the eyes match each other. If I’m no paying close enough attention one can be slightly higher, lower, smaller, or bigger than the other. The easiest way to avoid this is to draw one eye, get a piece of tracing paper, trace that eye, flip the tracing paper over, use the graphite of the drawing to transfer the flipped eye into place as the second eye. This is an easy way to insure that second eye is right. I did that here and it saved me a lot of time especially since the eyes were drawn in a sketchy manner. It’s actually tougher to match loose sketched eyes than fully drawn ones.

After I finished the pencil sketch I just went at it. Brush and ink. This is what takes all the time. It’s tough to describe what it takes to make one of these drawings since it takes so much building up of brush strokes. It’s all about trying to figure out and build the forms of the face but doing in such a way that they’re defined by darkness as much as or even more than light. I’m always making the drawing darker and darker.

I try to work all over the drawing all at once. I can’t finish one area and then move onto the next. I have to draw all over until it reaches a level of darkness and then start again working on the next stage of darkness. I have to do this four or five times until the overall drawing is finished enough to start working on individual areas like the eyes, nose, or mouth. It’s a method that takes a lot of patience and I have to psych myself up to not get discouraged. I have to trust that it will all come together in the end.

The end was about six hours later. That’s a long time to be putting ink down on a single piece of paper. There is so much ink on the paper that there is actually a bit of surface to it. I can feel the ink when I touch the paper. That’s unusual. But it did come together in the end and that makes me happy.

Tape around the front fork of my bicycle.

Y’know what’s on my mind tonight? Tape. That sticky stuff that’s really useful for holding other stuff down temporarily. Yeah, I know a lot of people think duct (or duck as the case may be) tape is a permanent solution but it’s only permanent for a short period of time. A little too short a period in the case of the roll of duct tape that I have now. I bought it at the hardware store last year. I think the brand is Blue Dolphin and it’s the worst duct tape I’ve ever bought. It just doesn’t stick well enough. It comes off whatever I stick it onto in a relatively short period of time. I’ve still been using it though because I’m too cheap to buy another roll of another brand. I just expect it to fail and have to be replaced fairly quickly. It’s also a reminder that duct tape is in no way a permanent solution.

The tape that I use the most is white paper tape. It’s an inch wide and the paper core is about three inches across. About the size of a slip-on bracelet. I use it for taping paper to my drawing table if I need the paper to stay in place as I draw on it. White paper tape is sort of like masking tape but with less glue on it. Masking tape could rip the surface of the paper as you attempt to remove it but white paper tape won’t. They make a tape called drafting tape that has even less stickiness to it and is specifically made to be easily removable but I haven’t used any of that since the 1990s. I find the white paper tape a little bit more versatile.

I also use the white paper tape to keep my large sheets of paper in place on my drawing board when it’s on my easel. It’s the same task as the tape on my drawing table except the paper is upright rather than laying flat. I only mention this because the white paper tape almost always fails at this task as time goes by. I tape a large 22×30 inch piece of paper on the board, draw on it over a period of time, and then watch as the tape slowly comes off the drawing board. It takes a day or two but it always happens. It’s not the end of the world so I just put up with it.

Another strange thing about the white paper tape is that it sticks to itself too much in the middle of the roll. Since I only go through a role every few years it may have to do with age but I’m not sure. As I get to the middle of the role the tape gets harder to peel, rips, and leaves residue on itself. Then it clears up. I’ve noticed this pattern with other rolls over the years. I have no idea why it does it but I work through it.

I used to have a tape dispenser that hooked onto the side of my drawing table that could hold four or five rolls of tape. I had that thing racked with tape, white paper tape, drafting tape, Scotch tape, removable tape, and acid free framer’s tape. There was a serrated metal strip on the front of the dispenser that cut the tape. The problem was that I cut my hand on strip too many times. I’d bump into it. Couple that with the fact that I really didn’t need such a large variety of tape at my fingertips I eventually retired that dispenser.

Cut to the present day and I was actually wondering recently if I kept that dispenser. I still have a one inch roll of Scotch Magic Tape left from the late 1990s. It’s amazing that the tape is still good. That’s the Scotch tape in the green package and it’s made to last a long time. I bought some mid-1960s comics books at a garage sale in the early 1980s and in which someone had reinforced the spines with that magic tape. All these years later that tape is still good. Most other tape would have turned brittle and yellow by now.

I couldn’t find my old tape dispenser but a week later a friend mentioned to me that he was getting rid of one and asked if I wanted it. I said sure. Turned out it was a smaller dispenser than my old one (one or two rolls rather than four or five) but that didn’t matter. I only wanted it for the one roll of tape so I was good to go. It’s amazing how much more I use that tape now that it’s on a dispenser. The white paper tape is easy enough to use by hand but not so much the Scotch tape. Finding the end of the tape and then peeling it off itself is a pain with the Scotch tape. On the dispenser it’s just pull and cut on the serrated edge.

Another type of tape that I use a lot of is plastic electrical tape. I use that for repairing stuff. Years ago I bought some small rolls of half inch electrical tape in a variety of colors. Red, green, blue, yellow, and white. I originally used it to make rings of decorative color on my bike. I don’t know why I did that but it came to me one day to do it so I did. Ever since then I’ve found other uses for the tape and even bought more of it. I use it mostly for repairing small things like the handles on a laundry basket that broke. I taped them back on.

I used to use removable tape all the time when making my photo collages. Digital photography changed that. Removable tape is a low-tack clear tape that can hold a piece of paper in place for a brief time and then be removed easily and leave no residue behind. When I used to compose my photo collages by hand I’d move the pieces of photos around, tape them down, and then move them again. It was a process that took a while since I was cutting up and using real photos to compose in real time. There was a lot of movement to it so the tape was needed to keep things in place. Then in the early 2000s I went digital with my photography and could compose the photos on screen in Photoshop. No need for removable tape in Photoshop. So my need for it went away.

Well there you go. That’s the mundane world of my relationship to tape. How the heck did this idea pop into my head?