Radiant Comics

In deciding what to write about this week I dug through a box of old drawings. I’ve got lots of boxes of old drawings. Some of the boxes are store bought and some of them are homemade. My fanciest store bought box is an 11x17x4 inch aluminum box. I don’t remember how much that one cost me but it must have been somewhere near fifty bucks. I can’t fathom now why I even wanted to spend that much money on a box to hold some of my art but I did. I must have made some extra money that month.

The aluminum one is a great box. It’s easily the best box I have to hold my drawings and it’s tough to describe how cool it looks and feels. The top totally separates from the bottom and it’s a matter of holding the top as the weight of the bottom slides away with tolerances so precise I cam feel a cushion of air between them. I wish all my art boxes were aluminum. That would be really cool.

The one problem I had with the metal box was that it was nearly an exact 11 inches wide. I had some of my favorite drawings and prints in mylar sleeves that made them slightly larger than 11×17 inches. So I couldn’t keep them in the sleeves if I wanted to put them in that box. A minor annoyance but an annoyance none the less.

The next type of store bought box that I have is the type that’s made out of archival cardboard. It’s closer to a matte board or a illustration board than the cardboard of a cardboard box. These are usually sold to store photographs and can get pricey but nowhere near aluminum box pricey. I only have a couple of these and I think I have photos in both of them. I remember liking them but thinking they weren’t quite sturdy enough for the price. Not that I was building pyramids out of them but when I spend money on a box I don’t want it to feel flimsy. On a flimsy to sturdy scale of one to ten I’d give these a seven. That means they were sturdy enough but not sturdy enough for the price.

The third type of store bought box that I have is one made out of a corrugated plastic. These ones are tough but ugly. Both the cardboard and the plastic ones are a clamshell design. One side of the box is hinged and the top and bottom pieces can’t be separated. The hinge is just the plastic or cardboard material compressed so it’s not the fanciest of designs. The tolerances on the plastic one are especially clunky.

In order to make the hinge work the bottom of the box has no wall on the hinge side. After closing the top it makes the missing wall for the bottom box. This design works fine for the stiff cardboard boxes but the plastic ones have too much give. Every time I try to close a plastic one the top and bottom hit each other and it doesn’t close smoothly. That makes the drawings slide around and block that open side from closing too. It’s not the end of the world and really only means that the box takes an extra four seconds to close but it annoys me every time. That’s the price I pay for the cheap boxes.

The next type of box that I have is the homemade ones. I’ve always liked making boxes but I usually make small boxes for art projects and such. I’ve made boxes that fit sets of my art cards, I’ve made boxes that fit small paintings, and I’ve made boxes to carry dice in. Whenever I needed a small box I’d make one.

When I used to play Magic the Gathering in the 1990s I made special boxes that were narrow so I could carry a deck of cards in my art portfolio. A normal box for MTG cards is about two inches thick (or more depending) and my portfolio was thinner than that. So I made boxes at a quarter that thickness but four times the width and height (2.5×3.5 inches). That made them much easier of me to carry. I even decorated those boxes with classical paintings pulled out of old wrecked art textbooks (which I think were from my college days working at a book warehouse). Those were cool little boxes.

I used to have all my drawings stacked in cabinets on shelves. That worked for a lot of years but eventually the stacks got too high. It was then that I decided to put all my drawings into boxes and it was then (over a period of time) that I bought all my store bought boxes. I eventually decided that none of them were perfect and I would make some boxes of my own.

I needed three size boxes that corresponded to the size paper that I used. 11×17, 9×12, and 5×11 inches. I’d want them a little bigger than that. I learned my lesson with the aluminum box. I decided I wanted a plan so I measured everything out and built a diagram with measurements on it in Adobe Illustrator. That way there would be no mistakes. I decided to make the boxes out of foam core board because it was sturdy. I could have chosen the cheaper route of matte board but it was too flimsy. I didn’t want to put in all the work for flimsy.

I measured out and drew one of the designs on a piece of foam core board. Then I cut it out with a straight edge and an X-Acto knife, folded it in the proper places, and taped all the edges. Foam core board is a quarter inch thick so the edges are broad and vulnerable to breaking. Tape helps out with that. I repeated this process about ten times until I had all the boxes I needed. It took a while.

In the end I think my box design depended too much on tape. I used a white paper tape that lasts a long time and the boxes are solid but they look a little sloppy. They’re not out in the open so no one ever sees them but every time I take them out I notice. I’m still glad I got them made because it makes storage a lot easier. Too bad they couldn’t all be really cool aluminum.

This week I went through a drawing burst. I made nine new working drawings on six by nine inch sheets of paper. They’re all about the same size but don’t all have the same proportions. I was at a creative standstill and couldn’t get anything done. I had some things already started that I could work on if I had wanted to but none of them interested me. So I decided to start over. I grabbed one of my ink books that has all of my marker drawings in them and found a few small drawings that interested me. I took these three small drawings, blew them up on the computer and printed them out on some six by nine inch Bristol board. I repeated this over three days.

The first drawing is named “Empty World.” It’s a figure drawing but the figure isn’t near the realm of realism. The woman has an impossibly long neck and some teacup hips. That’s what I call those super-curved hips that look like an upside down teacup. And what’s that on her head? It could be hair or it could be a hat. Either way it has lots of stripes for putting color in. This one is sufficiently dreamy enough to become one of my dream-like faux comic book covers.

The second drawing is named “Trivial Agency.” We have a lot of symmetry going on here. It’s almost perfectly symmetrical except for the eyebrows. I like symmetry but also like things to stop short of perfect symmetry. I can see this one being a large black and white marker drawing. It has good shapes that I can add black too. I think it’ll look best at a large size.

The third drawing is named “Brow Line.” This one has a lot of negative space in it. The whole thing revolves around the sky in the background. I’m not sure exactly what I want to do with it since so much of it would depend on color. I may even have to add some more elements to it in the color phase. This might be the most “Unfinished” of the drawings.

The fourth drawing is named “Deployed Bits.” This one is a face without a face. That’s unusual for me. It also has a lot of symmetry. I keep wanting to see a face where there is no face. It’s a bit confusing. I like the composition of this one but it really needs color to give it clarity. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it but it would look best as some sort of painting.

The fifth drawing is named “Act of Wraith.” Alright, what the hell is going on in this one? I’m not really sure. I remember thinking that about the thumbnail drawings of it too but I liked the shapes and general composition of it. The two one eyed creatures on the bottom are a mystery but the top is even more so. It looks like a head with some sad eyes but it could also be the sun. The repeated oval shape could be a halo for a person or a halo for the sun. I lean towards a person but the shapes are so simplified that I could be wrong. This one cries out for color too.

The sixth drawing is named “Fair Brains.” This one I can see as one of my large ink drawings. Twenty by thirty inches. We’ve got two faces and a body. One face is the body. I’m not sure exactly how I’d work out all the shapes as a large black and white drawing though. That would take some time. I’d need to find places to put patterns and such. I’m sure I could work it out but this one is far from finished.

The seventh drawing is named “Lost Banana.” Except for the background sky this one has everything there. Lots of shapes and pattern plus a big face. The neck area is odd. It might need rethinking. Or maybe not. It could be that it’s not a neck solution that I used to. The more I look at it the more it looks okay. The rest of it is settled.

The eight drawing is named “Stop Now.” I could go in a color or black and white direction with this one. I can see it as a faux cover or as a big black and white drawing. All the shapes and patterns are thoroughly worked out. I think it’s easier to work everything out if the drawing has a big head in it. No matter how weird I make the head it still acts as an anchor of the expected. We all know and expect to see faces. I can distort them a whole lot and they’ll still read a faces. That helps.

The ninth drawing is named “Soul Hero.” One more big face in this last one and it’s the most realistic face in this series of drawings. It even looks a bit odd. All this weird stuff around a semi-realistic face makes me wonder what is going on? Are all those shapes a look into her mind? A look into her dreams? Just the mention of the word “Dream” makes me think this will make a good “Dreams if Things” faux comic book cover.

Nine drawings. All in pencil on six by nine inch Bristol board one blue line. It took me a while to get them all done. They vary in the time it takes to draw them but if I had to pick an average I’d say they each took a couple of hours a piece. The symmetrical ones usually take the longest because they don’t always start out symmetrical. I usually decide part way through that I want them to be symmetrical and that means figuring out which half I like, or taking pieces for each half, and then duplicating the half on the other side. I use tracing paper and graphite to do that so it’s not hard but I have to pay attention. Nothing worse than asymmetrical symmetry when that’s not what I’m aiming for.

I am not a fan of wasting paper. Especially not drawing paper. There are a lot of different kinds of drawing paper from cheap to really expensive. Cheap is usually just any old kind of paper. I know artists who will draw on whatever is at hand. Some draw on a plain old piece of printer paper (it used to be typing paper but who has a typewriter anymore?). It’s cheap and it’s handy.

The next thing up from printer paper is the paper found in pads sold under the name “Drawing paper.” That’s the paper you can find in any basic arts and crafts store, general store, and even a well stocked pharmacy. There is nothing special about it that I can see and I generally stay away from the stuff. I stay away from all cheap paper most of the time. I don’t like the stuff. I find it too smooth, too hard to erase on, and I struggle with drawing on it in general. It also doesn’t take ink well. Don’t use tools you struggle with if you can help it. It’s better to make things easy on yourself.

The most expensive paper that I’ve used is a 300lb watercolor paper. That’s some thick paper. Paper is measured by weight and the higher the number of pounds the thicker the paper. 300lb is about as thick as it gets for me. One 22×30 inch sheet of 300lb watercolor paper is going to run about $15. It’s well worth it if you’re going to make some large watercolors (or even small ones) but that’s not the kind of paper I work on as my everyday paper. Mind you I’d hate to waste a sheet of that expensive paper but I’m not sure I ever have. I don’t use it often and when I do it’s usually at the end of a very long process where I have most things worked out so the chances of the drawing going wrong are slim.

Things going wrong is one way that paper can be wasted. That happened to me recently with some sketch covers. I had an idea come to me and I quickly implemented that idea. Too quickly. The drawings came out terribly and I ended up with a couple of wasted sheets of paper. Usually I’m patient so that type of wasting of paper doesn’t happen too often. That and I start my drawing out small. Wasting a five by seven inch piece of paper isn’t too bad. In the story I just told the pieces of paper were eleven by fourteen inches. That hurts a little more.

The more common way for me to waste paper is in my preparation process. That’s where I messed things up today. I had finished nine small six by nine inch pencil drawings and was setting a few of them up to be covers in my faux comic book cover series. I scanned the drawings in and then blew them up and placed them into one of my cover templates. The cover templates are designed and made up to look like comic book covers. They’ve got the logo and trade dress of a comic book. In the trade dress is an issue number and a month just like on an old comic book cover. And I keep track of them too. If issue one has January on it than issue two will have February as its month.

The series I was working on today was “Dreams of Things.” I’ve done about fifty drawings in that series and it turns out I messed up last time I printed some out to be inked. That’s another thing I do. I prep some covers for inking and coloring in bunches and then let them sit there until I get to them. The last two I let sit there I messed up on. First of all, I accidentally made two different issue number 50s and printed them out. That was annoying but not too big a deal since I had duplicated numbers in this series before. I did those on purpose though so doing it not on purpose was a disappointment.

As I was setting up issue number 52 I checked to make sure I had the correct month on it. It turned out to be August and everything was okay. Then I did a few more unrelated things and came back to set up issue 53. I checked the month and got all confused. I’m not even sure what caused the initial confusion but eventually figured out that both of my number 50s that I set up weeks ago had the wrong month on them. Crap, that’s annoying. At least I hadn’t inked them yet.

The paper that I usually work on is a two-ply Bristol board. At 96lbs it’s a pretty thick piece of paper. You can buy it with a smooth or rough surface in many different sizes. The size I was working at for those covers was a fourteen by seventeen inch piece of paper cut down to eleven by seventeen inches. The Bristol I buy costs about $15 for twenty sheets. That’s not too bad. There is more expensive Bristol out there but I only use that on occasion. I prefer to use a watercolor paper if I’m upgrading my paper.

So now I had the choice to live with the wrong months on the cover or print out two new versions with the correct months on them and throw $1.50 down the drain. As much as it pained me I went with the two new versions. It’s not a ton of money but I hate to waste stuff.

So now I’ll aim to not waste the two pieces of paper. The key is to use the back of paper to make a working drawing. Something that isn’t going to be a finished piece. Sometimes in this situation I’ll cut the paper into smaller pieces to draw on but in this case I think I’ll keep them at eleven by seventeen inches. I can make a full size working drawing on the backs of them. Let’s hope they come out okay.

I’m rebuilding some logos this week. What the heck is that you may ask? It’s something that I do when I make an old comic book cover recreation or when I make a blank sketch cover (which is a comic book with a white cover that a person can draw on. They make them for that purpose). I know what you’re going to ask, “Can’t you just buy a blank sketch cover?” The answer to that is yes. If I wanted a blank sketch cover to draw on I could find some random ones at my local comic shop. But they are at least four dollars per comic and that makes it an expensive piece of drawing paper. Plus I’ve got tons of comics about the place that are cheap and unsalable. So I’ve recently decided to make my own sketch covers. Some I’ll draw on myself and a few I even put up for sale on eBay. If someone wants a sketch cover on an old school comic they can get one from me there.

Anyone can make a blank sketch cover of their own if they want to put in the time. All it takes is a piece of drawing paper (I use two-ply Bristol) cut to the right size, some needle nose pliers to bend the staples straight, and a steady hand to put the staples back in their original holes with the drawing paper wrapped around the comic. Of course that will be a true blank cover. Most of the ones that the comic book companies make have the logo printed in place so it looks like a real comic book cover. I like to print the logos on my blanks but that means I have to remake them. I don’t have access to the companies’ logo files and some of the old comics I put blanks on are from before the age of digital so there might not even be digital versions of them. I build my own digital versions.

One way to go about getting a logo that you can use for a sketch cover is to scan in a printed cover and then clean the scan up in Photoshop. But that’s more work then it looks like. Unless you have a good clean scan of the logo with no art overlapping it the digital clean up part can take a while. I’ve seen people scan in logos from blank covers and they work best with this method but not every comic has a blank version. I prefer to rebuild the logo from the ground up.

Instead of pixel based Photoshop I like to rebuild the logos in vector based Illustrator. I scan in a comic book cover with the logo I want to rebuild on it, place that image onto a layer in Illustrator, and then remake the logo on another layer on top of the scan. The way a vector based program works is that you make a point, then make a second point, and a straight line is made between them. Drawing in Photoshop mimics drawing with a pencil or pen but Illustrator feels more like building something.

Of course you can make more than straight lines in a vector program. Every dot that makes up the lines comes with two “handles.” Pull those handles one way or another and the straight line curves. So I make a dot at the corner of a letter, make a second dot at the next corner, and pull on the handles to get the correct curve of the line I’m trying to recreate. It’s easy but tedious. I call it rebuilding a logo because it has more in common with building a bookcase than drawing. Each individual logo can have it’s own challenges too.

One of the logos I rebuilt recently is “The Official Handbook the the Marvel Universe.” That one was a four step process. First is the straight up type. That’s the “The Official Handbook of” part. I just have to find the right font and type the words out. On these old comics the plain, basic, type is almost always a Helvetica. I don’t even sweat it if I can’t find the exact version of the font. Close enough is good enough otherwise I can fall down the rabbit hole of searching endless variations of fonts for the perfect one. That can suck up more time than building the rest of the logo. Avoid that time-suck.

Step two was to build the main outline of the logo. I built each individual letter on its own and in place. That’s easy enough to do. The program keeps the line the same weight all around so all I have to do is build the logo point by point and curve the lines where they need to be curved. None of this is hard but once again it’s tedious. There is no creativity to be found in doing this. It’s a task. The next two steps are even more of a task.

Step three is making the black space background. It’s the black part that’s inside the letters. It’s made up of straight lines, curved corners, and little half circles cut out of the lines. It takes a while to rebuild all that. I had to pay attention to spacing and that’s not always easy. Having some good podcasts or some such helps because you won’t be using a lot of your brain doing this. Also part of this was making the white stars. They are just little ovals but it takes a while to make that many of them.

The final part is the corner box. This one didn’t have corner box art, which can be a problem, and was just type so it was easy to recreate. The only thing that could have been a problem was the little “CC” Curtis Code world logo but I had that done already. That’s another tip if you want to recreate logos for blank covers. Keep all the various pieces you’ll use again in one folder so that you can find them. As a matter of fact the main thing to keep in mind when rebuilding a logo is organization. It’s as much an exercise in organization as in art.

I’ve got an easel in my art studio here in the house. I’ve made many a painting and drawing on it over the years but recently I haven’t been doing many large works so I haven’t had to use it for that purpose though I still use it though to display and look at things on. When I’m finished with a drawing that I make on my drawing table I’ll step over the the easel and lean the drawing up against the large white drawing board that sits on my easel. That allows me to see the drawing, print, sketch cover, or whatever I’ve made in a different light. That light is both literal and figurative.

Things build up on the easel these days. There is never just one drawing on the easel. First off, I always have one of my large 22×36 inch drawings in the background of the others. Since the drawing board is so large and a stark white I like to keep a large drawing on it at all times. Otherwise I catch a distracting glare off the board. I have a bunch of those large black and white ink drawings to choose from so I switch them out every now and again. It keeps me from being blinded by the white and reminds me the large drawings exist. That’s a good habit to get into. Remind yourself that your past work exists. I find it too easy to get caught up in what I’m doing now. The now is all fine and dandy on most days but sometimes I have no sense of accomplishment if I’m focused on the now. Seeing older stuff reminds me that I’ve done things.

I’ve generally been working in three sizes these days. Eleven by seventeen inches, eight and a half by eleven inches, and comic book sketch cover size which is around six and a half by ten inches. The bottom bar on my easel (my homemade easel I might add) where the drawings sit is about an inch and a quarter wide. It fits two eleven by seventeen and three eight and a half by eleven inch drawings side by side. That means I can stack quite a few drawings together but only the front ones can be seen. I tend to keep my most recent drawings on the easel with the ones I most recently completed in the front. I also rotate the ones I get tired of to the back or find a place to put them away once they’ve hung around a while.

I also take photos of my work on the easel. For stuff I am posting on eBay I take three photos. One from the front, one from the left, and one from the right. I even like to leave other pieces around the one I’m photographing. Since all the works are on paper I make a nice, clean, isolated scan of them anyway so I like the photos to have more personality. I like to show the works in an environment and in the context of some of my other stuff. I find that makes the photos more alive. It’s always good not to kill the work in a photograph (which is easy to do).

Often I either have eleven by seventeen inch drawings or eight and a half by eleven inch drawing on the easel. I do things in bunches so my most recent drawings can sometimes be all the same size. At other times I put the bigger drawings on the left and the smaller ones on the right. Putting the bigger drawings behind the smaller drawing usually doesn’t serve a purpose because it just blocks the bigger drawings.

The one purpose stacking small in front of big does serve is a photographic purpose. Stacking art makes for good photographs. I first learned that seeing photos of paintings stacked in Picasso’s studio. It was just so cool to see works of art stacked together even if everything wasn’t clear. It gave a sense of casualness to the art yet tinged with importance because I wanted to see what was in the stacks beyond the glimpses shown.

There is also something called “Impressionist Stacking.” Since Impressionist paintings could be small the people putting Impressionist shows together would “Stack” them on the wall. They would hang them in grids. Maybe six across and three or four high. You could take in a whole bunch of paintings at a glance. This also helped them compete visually with the much larger academic paintings of the time. I’ve always been a fan of Impressionist Stacking.

That leads me to my “Accidental still life.” That’s a term I use when I photograph a still life that I didn’t even arrange consciously. Sometimes a bunch of interesting stuff ends up organized in such a way that it looks artistic. Pens on my drawing table, brushes in my brush rack, random bottles of paint, and even nested cardboard boxes can turn into a still life. So I take a photo when that happens. Sometimes I go looking for ASLs and sometimes I stumble upon them. This one I stumbled on.

It started out with me making a still life. Since I had a bunch of my drawings on the easel I wanted to stack them a little and take a photo as I’ve done before. Big ones in back and small ones in front. Two by three. It made for an decent photo. The big drawing I had in the way back worked well because it was one big head. One, two, three was the stack. Nice.

Then a funny thing happened. I started to work on some five by seven inch drawings. I don’t usually stack them since they are so small but since I already had the other drawings lined up in size order I put one or two in front. I barely noticed the stack at this point but after a few days I had five of the five by seven inch drawings done. Then I had my stack, my accidental still life, complete. I put them all in the front of the easel. Five, three, two, one. A nice pyramid stack. And the front ones even had word balloons on them so they were talking to the viewer. It’s clever enough that I wish I planned it. But I’ll take a happy accident.