Radiant Comics

I’ve written about this subject in the past but I’m going to write about it again: sometimes it’s hard to work on the photos I’ve taken over the years. It’s like they’re a glimpse into a world that was once my everyday world but now it’s gone away. It’s gone to wherever time puts things when it’s done with them. It can be emotionally draining. Especially working on a lot of them at once.

First off I’ll give you the technical details. It has to do with my iPad and Apple’s need to change things around over the years. In the early 2000’s I scanned in all of the negatives of my photos so I could have them in a digital format. That took a lot of time but I got it done. At that time it was only a dream to have something like an iPad or iPhone to act as a portable digital photo album but I wanted to be able to carry all my photos with me. I knew it was on the horizon but it wasn’t there yet.

I didn’t get an iPhone when they first came out but when the iPod Touch came out in 2007 I got one right away. It was small but it could do the job that I wanted it to do. It could be a portable photo album.

When I scanned in all of my photo negatives I did it at a high resolution and saved then as tif files. That’s the file format I save all my work in. It keeps things high resolution with no lossy compression. If I were to save the files as jpegs it would make them much smaller but jpegs throw out information to compress the file. Jpegs are fine for making things smaller so they fit on an iPod Touch but you still want your master tif file too.

Since the iPod Touch had a small hard drive and a small screen I had to resave all of my scanned photos jpegs and also make the DPI smaller. I think I went from 600 to 150 DPI with them. I now had two sets of all my photos. Full size and iPod Touch size.

The first iPad come out in 2010 and the second came out in 2011. I let the first model pass me by and bought an iPad 2 in 2011 to use as my newer and bigger portable photo album. But the screen resolution wasn’t particularly good on the iPad 2. That meant that I could still use the 150 DPI versions of my photos and they’d look fine on screen. Everything was all right. I rolled with that iPad until 2018.

In 2018 I got a ten inch iPad Pro. That machine has a lot more power and screen resolution. I still use that one five years later. But the 150 DPI photos were too low resolution for this iPad. I had to figure out what to do. It ended up being fairly easy. The new iPad could convert my tif files itself to use the converted files on the iPad. I hooked the iPad up to my computer, pointed it to the folder I wanted it to sync with, and it converted all the photos and put them on the iPad. It took a long time and this is the only time this process went smoothly.

Anytime I wanted to add photos to the iPad I had to click on their new folders and sync the iPad. That worked for a couple of years until it didn’t.

With one OS update Apple added in some facial recognition into their photo app. You could put names to faces and the software would find all photos of that person. I spent some time putting names to faces. Then the next time I had to add new photos on I went to sync the new folders with the iPad and things went Kablooie! When I hit the sync button it took all the photos off my iPad and put them all back on again. Plus the new ones. This took forever and wiped out all the facial recognition names I already put in there. After that I didn’t bother with facial recognition and only added new photos to my album maybe once a year.

Just a couple of months ago I decided to add some new photos for the first time in ages. I did the same thing I did in the past except this time the iPad erased all the photos, supposedly put them and the new ones on the iPad, and then crashed. This process took about three hours, I tried it three times, (which took nine hours) and I ended up with no photos on my iPad. My iPad stood empty of photos for weeks and weeks.

Finally I decided to try something new. All of my photos from about 1990 until about 2010 were all tif files (I had 23,000 photos on the iPad) so I thought if I converted them to jpeg files at full resolution (unlike my 150 DPI versions) the iPad might have an easier time with them.

It took a week to do. I used a Photoshop action to covert the photos to jpegs and that went quickly but keeping everything in order is what made it take a long time. It also made me wonder where time goes.

I had to take frequent breaks as I was doing this and spread it out over time because it was like watching my life go by. It’s not even like I was checking each photo but I saw enough of them to get that “Time is passing” feeling. That’s not always easy to deal with.

In the end the conversion of the photos to jpegs did the trick. I set up the new folder full of photos in folders for the iPad to sync with and it did. All of them copied over and fairly quickly too. It took about 90 minutes instead of three hours. It somehow even had a the names I entered a while ago. I don’t know why it did this time.

On the day after I finished this task I got to see a bunch of my friend who were in a lot of these photos over the years. The strange thing was that as I was talking to them I would sometimes see a photo flash by in my minds eye. It was a little weird. For a brief moment I would see the past. What a strange thing.

I finally got a project going that I’ve been contemplating for over a year now. It’s actually a sub-project since it’s part of the illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby” that I’ve been working on for about a year and a half. But it’s big enough that it’s a project all on its own.

Chapter Six of “The Great Gatsby” starts with a bunch of names. Nick, the narrator, reads a list of names that he wrote down a couple of years before of the people who went to Gatsby’s parties. It’s a long list that’s supposed to give us an idea of the size and scope of the parties. There are about seventy names on the list but a lot of them are of couples and a few of them are of groups. I counted about a hundred and twenty people on the list.

Last year it came into my head that I wanted to draw a face for everybody on that list. I’m not sure if anyone has ever done that before but I thought it was a cool idea. The problem is that it’s a lot of work to draw a hundred and ten people. And how was I going to do it? I love to draw faces and have drawn a lot of them over the years so I know how much work it is and I didn’t necessarily want to do that much work. So I sat on the idea and thought about it.

The first part of my solution to this problem was to decide to leverage a whole bunch of faces that I have already drawn. My “Drifting and Dreaming” comic strip is made up of two unique faces per strip and I have done over seven hundred strips. That’s fourteen hundred faces at my disposal. The problem is that all of those faces are small, about two inches high, and are drawn in colored marker. I would have to somehow redraw them in ink and at a larger size.

The first idea to redraw the faces was to do them digitally. I picked out about six faces from the cards (I already have them all scanned in) and transferred them to my iPad. I figured I could work on them whenever I got the chance. Maybe on my commute when I was on the train. I only got a couple of them done and then never seemed to work on them. It turns out that I wasn’t that interested in drawing them digitally. There was always something I wanted to work on before them. So the project sat around for a year with no movement forward.

This week (the third week in May 2023) I decided to try and draw those faces on paper with pencil and ink. My first decision was what size to draw them at. I thought five by seven inches would be good but then I realized that I didn’t have a lot of paper that size. I probably have about fifty sheets of five by seven inch watercolor paper but since I wasn’t painting them that paper was better left alone. A six by nine inch size would be bigger but better. I often work that size because I buy a lot of nine by twelve inch pads of Bristol board and cut that paper in half.

Usually when I do something like this I would draw the face in pencil, scan it in, print out the pencil drawing in blue line, ink over that blue line, and then scan the ink drawing in. The blue line drops out if I scan the drawing in with the bitmap setting.

But these drawings on my art cards were already in color. With them I pencil, ink with a black marker, and then color them in with color markers. If I were to print the faces out I had to figure out a way to drop out the color and print the black ink line in blue. I’ve done stuff like this many times before so it wasn’t really hard but it took a little while to figure out the best way to do it. After I solved problem I made the solution into a Photoshop Action (a macro or a script) so I could use it with the press of a button on all the faces that I needed to draw.

Out of my vast archive of “Drifting and Dreaming” faces I picked ten, made them into blue lines, and printed them out to be redrawn. The redrawing process turned out to be fairly easy. I had all of the basic information there in the small drawing already. With the original faces I tried to be creative and vary the faces a lot. So I really only had to add more detail in the larger drawing. It was much less painful than when I tried to draw it digitally.

After I had pencilled a few of them I decided to figure out how I was going to ink them. I’m mostly a brush guy when it comes to ink drawings. It’s my favorite tool. But for these I decided that a brush might be too slow because I knew I would try to make them perfect. Since these were originally drawn in marker mimicking a marker line with a brush would be time consuming and silly. So I decided to use my “Three Marker Technique.”

As you might imagine my three marker technique uses three markers. A thick, thin, and medium point marker. I actually adapted it a little for these faces since I just bout a new type of medium marker. I ended up using that new medium marker to begin and then I went in with the thick one and my original medium marker which is slightly thicker than the new medium marker. I used the thin marker but just a little bit of it. I like the way the first few faces came out so I knew I had my method of doing all a hundred and twenty of them.

In general it went fairly quickly too. I figure I can comfortably get done six faces a day (in about four hours per group of six). That’s with doing some other things too since I can’t always dedicate all of my time to one project. But in ten days I’ll have sixty of them done and in twenty days I’ll have a hundred and twenty of them done. I think I can do that over the length of the summer while still getting other things done.

Of course when I get them all drawn, inked, and scanned in then I’ll have to decide how I’m going to color them. That’s a whole other kettle of fish. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Vector Digital Version

Two years ago, in the summer of 2021 I painted six 24×36 inch acrylic on canvas paintings. It was the first time I had painted such paintings in a good few years. I enjoyed the painting them but I remember them taking me much longer than I expected them to. I think it took from May until October to get all six done.

In the summer of 2022 I didn’t get any such paintings done. At the beginning of 2022 I got it in my head to make my own illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby” and that’s what I worked on most of that summer. I’m still working on that project this year too and I ended up coming up with an idea to merger the two things this summer.

Almost all of the work that I do that I would classify as illustration I do on paper or digitally. All of my paintings on canvas I’d classify as fine art. There is naturally some overlap between the two but that is the basic breakdown.

Also along the lines of that breakdown is that if one of my pieces is meant to be seen in reproduction, either on screen or printed, then it might lean towards illustration. If it’s something that is best seen in person, such as one of my 24×36 inch acrylic paintings, then I see it more as fine art. But, of course, there is that overlap.

A couple of months ago I got a second wind with my Gatsby project. I had a lot of it done but I still want to work on some more ideas. The problem was that I didn’t have any ideas for what to do. But I didn’t give up. I kept at it until I worked out a few things I wanted to do.

One of those things was a bunch of drawings that were mostly of drinking glasses and design elements. I did a series of drawings of them, liked the way the elements came together, and decided to use Adobe Illustrator to make the finished versions of them. They were fairly quick to do and were coming out well. Except that I didn’t love them. I liked them but there was something missing. That’s when I had the idea to paint them.

I’ve always liked using geometric shapes in art. I like, rectangles, circles, and triangles. I’ve been using shapes of color in my art since back in my school days. In art school my senior project, back in 1988, was paintings with lots of blocks of color in them. I’ve been continuing to make such art since then. So it seemed that making a painting out of these Gatsby drawings was a natural. I was excited about it.

24×36 Inch Acrylic on Canvas

I dropped $120 on a box of six 24×26 in canvases (up from $90 for six canvases in 2021) and I was ready to go. Last year in anticipation of making some paintings I stocked up on some acrylic paint but then never made any paintings. But as a result of that I didn’t have to buy new paints this year before I started.

Here is the kicker to getting started with these paintings. I had somehow forgotten how much physical work painting was. My style looks kind of effortless. The drawing is simple and I lay down the paint in flat colors. It doesn’t look physically demanding. It turns out that it is.

Brush strokes are very important to me and my painting. When I lay down the paint, even though it might look smooth in a photo, it’s important to me to have the brushstrokes create a texture. Most of the time that means that I lay all the brushstrokes down in a single direction. They can be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. That’s more physically taxing than I remembered.

Since each brush stroke has to be in the same direction I have to twist my arm and body around to reach that exact direction. Sometimes there is a lot of room to make the stroke and somethings there is not. It takes a lot of concentrations on exacting hand movements to get it right.

Sometimes if I want bigger texture I’ll go with a swirling brushstroke. You can see that in the yellow portions of “Gatsby Drink #1.” The swirling stroke makes the paint stand up and casts more shadows than my other brushstrokes. That really turns the paint into an object for me and gives it a physical presence that I like.

Original Pencil Drawing

As I was being struck by the idea to make these drawings into paintings I somehow thought it would take me two or three days to get the painting done. After all it was just a little bit of line work and then some shapes of paint. It took me five days to get the whole thing done. Day one was just transferring the drawing to the canvas and the other four were painting. The transferring part didn’t take a long time but after I had finished doing that I knew I wanted to wait until the next day to start fresh with the painting.

The next day, within an hour of starting the painting, I realized that it was going to take me a few more days to get it done. Laying down the paint on the canvas was going slower and taking more energy than I recalled. It was then I remembered that I’d have to pace myself. In my younger days I could paint all day like this. I could paint for eight or ten hours. These days it’s more like six. So I got to work but didn’t push it.

Three days of painting like that and I was ready for the last day. The last day of painting is when I put on all of the finishing colored brush strokes. That’s a lot less physically taxing but takes a lot more thinking. I put down some lines of red and then contemplate what comes next. I do this all day.

Most of the day is spent in a chair sketching over an iPad photo of the painting or looking at the painting and then getting up to put on a few colored strokes. It’s pretty boring to watch as I’m not moving fast but it’s the most fun part to do.

I finished the painting on a Sunday and by the end of the day I was tired of looking at it. Sometimes I put a painting aside for a few days and then look at it again and make a couple of last brush strokes. I did that with this one but didn’t put anything new on it. It’s finished. Now I just have to figure out how I want it to appear in the book. I’ve got a few ideas but I’ll have to see how they work out. I’ll let you know.

Art Supplies on Display

As of this writing I am waiting on a big order of new art supplies. The first week of May is ending and I am setting myself up for the summer. That’s how I do things. At least that how I sometimes do things.

Going into the summer of 2021 I decided that it was going to be a summer of painting for me. I bought half a dozen 24×36 inch canvases and painted on them. It was the first time I had painted in a couple of years and I had a good time painting them.

Last year I didn’t paint at all. At least not on those big canvases. At the beginning of 2022 I started my Great Gatsby project. I began doing a whole bunch of illustrations for the now public domain book. Despite having gotten a lot of work done on the Gatsby project I’m still working on it. I’m just not wholly satisfied with it yet.

Earlier in the year I started working on spot illustrations for the Gatsby book. Those are small illustrations usually of a single object or some such. I made some drawings of wine glasses and geometric shapes and then an idea popped into my head. I should do these as big paintings.

So far all of my Gatsby illustration have been digital or on paper. Making some on 24×36 inch canvases changes the game. I have to figure out how to present them. I could take digital photos and crop out everything around them but maybe I want people to see their size and context. Maybe they’d look better if you can see them on an easel. I’ll have to figure that all out.

Last year I even stocked up on some new paints. Since I has used a lot of my paint during the summer of 2021 I figured I’d better get some new paint. Then I never used any of it in 2022. At this moment I’m not even sure what paint I bought. I’m going to have to take stock before I start these new paintings.

My big order of art supplies doesn’t even include any new acrylic paint. Often when I’m thinking of ordering new supplies I add things to my online cart over time. It may take me a month to finally make the order. With this order I didn’t even add the canvases in until a couple of weeks after I started looking for things. That’s when the idea hit me.

A lot of the order in the beginning was a bunch of markers. I already have a ton of markers but these ones are a new brand and they were cheaper than my usual Copic markers. They are about half the price. Plus they had refills ink. I’ve complained about the bottles of Copic refill ink getting smaller so I’ve been looking for alternatives. This is one of the alternatives. But even at $3.19 a marker and $3.69 a bootle of ink the price still adds up quickly as I add more and more markers to my cart.

Another basic thing that isn’t in this order is paper. I normally use 9×12 inch and 11×17 inch Bristol board. I have plenty of 9×12 inch paper, about 8 pads of it, but I think I might only have a couple of pads of 11×17 inch Bristol. I know I bought a new brand of 11×17 inch Bristol last time but I thought I had more besides that. I still might if I dig through my pads but at a glance I didn’t see the extra paper.

I really should have checked my paper stock but I wasn’t in the mood to order more paper. Besides even with just what is left in those two pads plus a few other sheets that I know I have lying around I have enough paper for a couple of months. I can always get more another time.

One of the things that I like to do when making these big orders (this one was $350 by the way) is to look around the sale section to see if I can find any cheap and interesting items to add to my order. Usually I find some black markers, cheap watercolor paint sets, or sample paper to throw in. This time I even spent $12 on a tiny little desktop vacuum to clean up little eraser leavings. Talk about something I don’t really need. But it looked kind of neat. So I ordered it.

One thing that I had to order that I thought I had more of but didn’t were these little black “LePen” markers. I remember getting color LePen markers from the stationary store back in my High School days but only recently have I rediscovered their black art markers. I sampled one, really liked it, and thought I bought more of them. But it turns out that the “more” of them that I bought was only one pen. At least that’s all that I can find among my black drawing pen collection. Maybe I did buy more and they’re stashed away somewhere only to be found after the new ones arrive but I can’t count on that.

I have a new pan set of Lukas watercolor gouache coming. I ordered it because it looks just like the set of Pelican gouache that I have and I’m curious to see if it’s the same set under a different brand name. Plus it was cheap, only $12, and I’m always up for a new pan set of paints. I’ve been buying pan sets of watercolor this year and besides the Lukas one I think I have another small set coming too.

At this point in time I’m not even sure of everything that’s in this big order that I made. I could always look it up on the website but I don’t think I want to. I’m going to make an unboxing video when the art supplies finally arrive and I think I want to be surprised by a couple of things. That’s why I like to throw those little on sale extras in there. After I get everything I’ll post the unboxing video here.

Yesterday I spend a good portion of my Saturday afternoon arranging my pens, pencils, markers, and brushes. It all started because I bought some new pen holders. I bought a pack of four of them. I actually thought I was buying four marker holders, as I recently bought a similar marker holder, but it turned out that the pen holders I bought were too small to hold markers. At least too small to hold Copic markers and other art markers that size.

First of all I already have about ten different marker, pen, pencil, and brush holders that hold hundreds of my art supplies. They were actually a little bit crowded and it’s tough to get stuff out of them. I ignore the problem as often as not. So I decided that since I have these four new pen holders I may as well organize all my stuff. It should be easy. Famous last words.

Although the new penholders are too big for Copic markers they do fit Sharpie (and their type) markers. That was good. I have a set of about 36 regular Sharpies, 36 extra fine point Sharpie markers, 36 Bic Mark-It markers, 12 Metallic Bits, 24 Amazon markers and various other odds and ends markers. Each of the new pen holders holds 96 markers so I split up all the Sharpie-types into two of the new holders. That was the easy part. They were already organized.

Next I dove into my tangle of brushes and dip pens. I have two spinning circular pen holders plus a square brush holder that have been sitting on my side table since the 1990s. They have a lot of stuff in them. Too much stuff to easily grab something from that mess.

They key to organizing the pens and brushes turned out to be separating the long handled brushes from the sort handles brushes. I didn’t even realize there were so may short handled brushes in the holder. The long handled brushes were leaning over the short handled ones and covering them up. They were all supposed to be straight up and down but there were a lot of diagonal ones.

I used one of the new pen holders to put all of the short handled brushes in. It turns out that I had somewhere around fifty of them. I would have never guessed that. Especially since about half of them are busted up old watercolor brushes that got ruined, over the years, by the India ink that I use with them. I hated to throw them out and eventually developed my “Busted Brush” technique with them so it’s good that I still have them. The other half are random brushes that I bought over the years.

I have about forty long handled brushes that I use for oil and acrylic on canvas painting. They are mostly flats and duplicates in size that are in all different states of wear. Since I’m planning on making a few acrylic on canvas paintings this summer these ones will get some use.

The brush holder that these ninety or so brushes were in looks like it was meant to hold about fifty brushes. I had long and short handled brushes doubled up in some on the brush holes. No wonder it was such a mess.

The two spinning circular pen holders were the next ones to be organized. They have a lot of stuff stuck in them and they hold all the odd shaped things. The holes that the pens go in get larger as they go away from the center so there is room in them for big barelled things. Things like the four pallet knives and two architect’s scales that I have. They can’t go anywhere else.

Around the inside edge in the smaller circular holders I put all of my dip pens. There are the ones that I have to dip in ink to draw with. Being mostly a brush guy I’ve never used them a lot over the years but I also had a hard time getting to them. They were all lost as they were mixed in haphazardly with brushes and everything else. Now I can easily reach them. Maybe I’ll even use them!

As I dug through all my pens I even discovered a couple that I had forgotten. They are two “Drawing Pens” (from the 1990s) that are more like fountain pens. They both take ink cartridges of which I have none so I cleaned then up and ordered some fountain pen ink cartridges. I’m curious to see if they still work. All cleaned up they should. I remember the one pen always clogging on me. I have since learned that it was probably the drawing ink that I was using in it. Fountain pen ink is thinner and might work better in the pen.

I have a few empty marker holders now but I might still have to get a new marker holder. The empty marker holders are from the 1990s and they don’t quite fit Copic markers (I had some Sharpies in them). They’re made for 1980s to 1990s Ad Markers which were round rather than oval or square like the Copic markers. The oval Copics sort of fit in them but not really.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I have been reviving some old and dried out Copic markers and using Teflon Tape to fix the seal on their caps so Now I have extra markers that I have to put somewhere. I have all of my “Active” and most used markers on a shelf I built on the left side of my drawing table but I think I have to improve that shelf. It was built in two or three stages (and widths) over the years so I think I have to rebuild it in one stage with one width. That way I can fit more markers on it. Maybe this summer. After all I am just about to add more markers to the collection.

It was accidentally buying pen holders instead of marker holders that got me started on this organization journey. I didn’t even realize that I needed to get my pens, brushes, and markers in order but now that they are I think that I was ignoring them for years. Now I look over on that table with satisfaction. I can look at the tools and get ideas of what I want to make with them. That’s a good feeling.