Radiant Comics

I can’t seem to escape this idea that I want to make a web comic. I’ve already worked on and given up on many ideas for a web comic. Mainly because they are too much work for too little reward. Make that no reward. But making comics is just in my bones. I can’t quite stop thinking up stuff.

Since the web comics I’ve made so far are akin to color Sunday strips I thought I would try for a something more along the lines of a the more simple black and white daily strip. The problem with that is that I don’t have much to say in that form. Most daily comic strips, wether on the web or in print, are gag a day strips. I hate gag a day strips. I generally find them dull and relentlessly similar to one and other.

I actually should be more kind to gag a day strips. There have been great ones; Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and Doonesbury are my favorite three. It’s just that gag a day has been the dominant comic strip form for decades now and there are so many bad ones. And believe me if I were to do a gag a day strip it would just add to the dreck. I can’t write gags any better than all the other guys out there doing it badly. And at least they like to write gags. I’d probably do it worse than the dreck that’s out there.

So that leaves me with the other dominant form of the comic strip. The adventure story. There aren’t many of these left and I can’t think of a good one currently running. Maybe there is one but I don’t know of it. The heyday of the adventure strip happened before I was born. It doesn’t matter anyway because an adventure strip is way too much work for me. An adventure strip takes at least three times as long to draw as a gag a day strip.

With neither predominant form of comic strips looking like they will have anything to do with me I languished. I put aside any notion of web comics until this week. I decided to give it a go based on some dialogues I’ve been writing. No gag and no plot just two people talking. For some reason I like writing two people talking. I try to make it interesting and humorous but there is no gag or joke. I don’t know what to call them.

This week I decided to write a dialogue as a comic strip. It consisted of making four panels and then writing what the two people were saying to each other in word balloons. The writing went well. I made a few strips but then, of course, the problem comes with drawing them.

There is a reason most web comics are so badly drawn. It’s a lot of time consuming work to draw them well. And very few are getting paid for that time. So I tried to come up with a style I could draw quickly in. My strip is about dialogue so it’s really all talking heads but I can’t just draw it that way. I’ve got to vary things up. That takes even more time.

I ended up drawing two strips and though I did them quickly it was not quickly enough for me. And I found drawing it so literally boring and I didn’t even like the drawings in the end. The kiss of death again. Ouch. So now I’m going to try something new.

I’m going to draw a few more strips to see what they look like. Then I’m going to try and suss out where I am going with it visually and work up a book of poses for the characters. A lot of web comics guys cut and paste poses or panels over and over but that is not quite what I have in mind. I’m looking for a bit more variety and a lot less obviousness.

There is no getting around that I am doing a strip based on dialogues so there is no need for exotic locales or action sequences. There is a limited number of ways that I can draw two people talking to each other. I’m going to try and find a number of talking poses and use them as a starting point for my drawing. I’ll draw some varied heads and faces and see if I can tie it all together into a finished strip.

Y’know it could be that I have a hard time working in a linear fashion these days. Pencil, ink, and color. Pencil, ink, and color. Pencil, ink, and color. A lot of times I want to do things out of order. I’ll have to build up something of a backlog. That way I can work on whatever part I feel like at the time.

I think I’ll even try out a couple of 3D programs I have that are designed to help artists draw stuff. You can quickly work up 3D reference figures in them and use the figures in the same way you would use reference photos. Since the strip I’m working on is not photo realistic I’m not sure how much it would help me but I want to try it out.

Once again I have no idea if this will ever amount to anything. But I am enjoying writing the dialogues. And that is something.

I just opened up the lid of my year old air freshener that is only supposed to last three months. It’s of those cheapo things that has a big wick sticking into some sort of smelly oil. It doesn’t really freshen the air in any way but it makes the room smell sweet for a little while.

The reason this air freshener is only supposed to last a few months is that is says, in the instructions, to throw the lid away. Yes, it actually says to unscrew the cap and toss it in the trash. Why anyone would do this is beyond me. I kept my cap so I could turn the air freshener off.

The problem with scented air fresheners, beside the fact that sometimes I don’t want to smell them, is that eventually your nose gets use to them and you can’t smell them. They may as well not be there. Where is the point in that? So I like to cap mine after a while and save it for later. Since the cap isn’t off twenty four seven it lasts a lot longer than three months. I think I’ll cap it now though. It’s giving me a headache.

Last night I had a hamburger for diner. I had it a different way than usual since I’m big on new ways to eat the same old stuff. I had it on a toasted and buttered roll with hot sauce. It was good.

I was in Wisconsin once and butter on top of a hamburger was one of the ways they served them there. It was at a famous hamburger joint the name of which escapes me now. They had a lot of different ways that I had never heard of to serve a hamburger. Even the famous hamburger joints in Manhattan I’ve been to didn’t have all these different kinds of Wisconsin burgers. And the Manhattan joints have a wide variety of burgers.

My variation on the butter burger was good. The difference was that I buttered the roll and not the burger. And of course I added hot sauce. Now I’m not going to tell you it was better than the Wisconsin burger joint’s one, because it wasn’t, but at least it hit the spot for me. I was looking for something different and I got it.

I tried a new genre of video game on my Nintendo DS this week. It was a “Seek and Find” type mystery game. There really is no point to the mystery except to use it as a framing sequence for the seek and find stuff. What you have to do is find a picture of some small object amongst a whole lot of small objects on a bigger picture.

It wasn’t the most challenging game in the world but after “Advance Wars: Days of Ruin” it was refreshing to have something not so challenging. The game keeps your eyes nimble as you are constantly moving them around while scanning the picture for the objects on the list. It reminded me of doing the find the hidden pictures puzzles in “Highlights” magazine when I was a kid. Who didn’t love those?

My computer went a little crazy on me this week. On Sunday night I noticed that the sound coming from my Harmon Kardon Soundstick speakers was muffled. On Monday morning it was still happening so I ran through all of my trouble shooting procedures. From a Safe Boot to running Disk Utility to booting from an install disc nothing that I did would fix it. So I gave up and went for a ride on my stationary bike. When my exercise was done I came back, restarted my machine, and everything was fine. I have no idea why. The mystery of computers.

One more food related thing from this week. It has to do with potato knishes. I haven’t had a knish in a little while but had one this week. I always have my knishes with mustard and usually a little cheese too. Cheddar or Pepper Jack are my usuals but this week I had one with Mozzarella. I think I have a new favorite now. I slice open the knish and put mustard on one side and the cheese on the other. Then it goes in the microwave for a minute before the two haves are reunited. The creamy texture and taste of the Mozzarella just went so well with the potato knish. Good stuff.

This week I added drawers. What a fun thing. To modify things. To make them better. Or at least to make them suit my needs better. Where I’ve added drawers is underneath the surface of my drawing table.

I’ve modified my drawing table quite a bit over the years. I originally bought it way back in about 1991. It wasn’t the best table I have ever seen. It’s basic structure seems a little needlessly complicated and it has always annoyed me that I have to undo two wing nuts to change the angle of the table. A classic drawing table has one big wheel on the left side that you loosen to change the table’s angle. That is a little easier than the two wing nut method.

For some reason the store I bought this at (Pearl Paint in NJ) didn’t have any tables in the classic big wheel style. I got this one because it was the best one they had. It has served me well over the years but it is not an example of outstanding craftsmanship. It’s solid and stays together but is hardly inspiring as a piece of furniture.

The first modification I made was to add a side tray to the table. That is a typical drawing table accouterment and nearly everyone I know gets one when they buy a table. The side tray screws on to one side of the table and has lots of little sections and wells to stick pens, pencils, erasers, and everything else in. It’s essential. Without it there’s no place to pile up your crap except the table top.

The second immediate modification I mad to my drawing table was to jack it up. I work standing up and tables are built for sitting down. It wasn’t tall enough. So I built a platform out of two by fours for the table to sit on. Then it was tall enough.

I also made the platform serve another purpose. It holds the barbell I used to use for curls. The barbell sits at nearly ground level across the bottom front of my table. It keeps the weights out of the way and anchors my drawing table very nicely. I don’t exercise with that barbell any more since I switched over to all dumbbells but it’s tucked away and not bothering anyone. And bump into the table all you want. It has seventy five pounds keeping it in place.

They other modifications I made to my drawing table mainly have to do with expanding the side tray. I’ve used wire, screws, and even tape to attach extra penholders and things onto the side of my side tray. Who can have enough penholders? My side tray is about twice as big as when I bought it. I have about fifty different pens, pencils, and markers sticking up out of it.

I also built a small platform for the left side of my drawing table. This holds my jars of water that I clean my brushes in as I work. It’s much smaller than the side tray since it’s main purpose is specific rather than the general “Holds everything” nature of the side tray.

I even built a little extension off of the top edge of my drawing table that holds a small plant.

My latest modification is one that’s been rolling around my brain for years. Since there is space immediately underneath the surface of the drawing table and since I stand at it and don’t sit then there is room for drawers. I always looked at the space and thought I could use it constructively.

What finally motivated me was the ever shrinking size of the work space I had on top of my drawing table. It was constantly being cluttered up with drawings and papers in general. Every so often I’d clean it off but I usually had no place for the stuff to go.

Sometimes I have ten or twenty drawings piled up that I had worked on in the last couple of weeks. Some would get past the drawing stage and be made into something but plenty wouldn’t. Either way I needed them handy to look at. Tucking them away wasn’t the answer even though that did clear off my drawing surface. Easy access drawers close by were the answer.

I searched out how to stick some drawers up under my drawing table. Turns out it was easy. I found a place on the internet that made “Add a Drawer” kits. They are made to go underneath any old work table. First you assemble the drawer and then you screw the top of it into the table’s underside. It was easy. It all took only a couple of hours to install.

The drawers were also a nice size for what I needed. They are twelve by eighteen inches plus about four inches tall. Since I work on a lot of eleven by seventeen inch paper (or smaller) they fit in the drawers neatly. I have two drawers side by side underneath my table.

So now I’ve reclaimed my drawing table’s surface space while still having a lot of drawings at my finger tips. Another modification that makes life a little easier. That’s what it’s about. If only the rest of life were as simple.

Album art. That’s one of the things I was doing this week. That is, I was making my own album art. It was the final step in getting my iPod Touch to look exactly as I wanted it to.

I’ve written before on making playlists (à la mix tapes) in iTunes (or whatever program you prefer). It’s how I like to listen to music these days. I even copied the MP3s of my music in my playlists so that I could enter new information into the songs’ metadata and give them my playlist name as the album they belong to. That keeps things from getting messed up.

The one thing I overlooked after I set up my thirty-some playlists was album art. Since all of the songs on my playlists now stated that the album they belonged to was the name of my playlist rather than an actual album the original album art that was attached to each song disappeared. Poof! Into the ether.

There was still album art associated with each song but is was a nearly random default piece that attached itself to my playlist named albums. Each of my playlists had a piece of art attached to it from some actual album art in my collection. My playlist “Rolled and Landed (don’t ask me what it means even I don’t know) had a James McMurtry album cover attached to it. It was confusing.

Since it took so much work for me to get my playlists up to snuff I was tired of dealing with them. Random art from other albums was okay with me. Also making an album cover takes a while. More time than I wanted to spend. But then, unbeknownst to me, my brain was working on the problem. And interesting way to make a quick album cover hit me. Google images.

In case you’ve never used Google images before it’s just like a regular web search at Google (or whatever your favorite search site is) except you hit the “Images” link and it just shows you pictures instead of web sites. Lots and lots of pictures.

So I would put the name of my playlist into Google images and see what sort of images it found. Sometimes the results would be literal, such as for my “One Wolf” playlist, and sometimes anything could happen, such as for my “Phineas Flatters Us” playlist.

Lots and lots of choices. And since the images were only going to be seen on screen low resolution images were fine. I’d pick an image, open up Photoshop, and add the name of the playlist in type. No fancy type work. Just basic. I kept things simple and got things done.

As I said before it takes a lot of work to make a real album cover. Or at least it should. I have seen plenty that were badly cranked out. But thanks to random images on the internet I was able to make a low res album cover that was interesting enough for me (and I’m fairly picky) in about five to maybe ten minutes (for the couple of stubborn ones).

I’m generally pretty fast with graphics on the computer (it is my profession) but it was the vast number of images out in cyberspace that made this little project of mine go so fast. There were so many interesting choices that I was bound to find something. And quickly. Image, type, choose font, and it’s done.

This isn’t a method that would work for commercial purposes. The images are property of whoever their copyright holders are and someone would need permission to, say, put them on the cover of “Time” magazine but for a guy making album covers that almost no one will ever see but himself it’s a great method. I knocked out thirty something album covers in an evening.

So now my iPod Touch is looking real cool. It’s loaded with all of my playlists and when I flip it into “Cover Flow” view I no longer get a useless collection of album covers that don’t even relate to my playlists. I get a series of album covers with interesting images on them that also state the name of my playlist. They’re useful now.

The images can surprise me too. I made them so fast and furiously that I don’t even remember what some of them look like. So as I flip through my playlists in Cover Flow view I say, “Oh look at that cool album art” as if some one else put it there. Gotta love album art.

I ordered some new shoes this week. I have short, wide, and tall feet that are hard to fit. I used to dread going shoe shopping because out of every ten pairs that were supposed to be my size maybe one pair would fit me. Then, years ago, I found these Northfield Oxford shoes. They fit great and I have been buying them ever since. They are about a hundred dollars a pair plus I have to get insoles for then since they don’t have enough padding for me. So cheap they’re not.

But this little piece of writing isn’t about my shoes. My shoes just got me thinking about shoes in general. One observation, that has been made numerous times, is that women like shoes a lot more than men do. Cue all the shoe shopping references from “Sex and the City”.

A second observation is that a bunch of guy I used to work with were concerned with how a woman’s feet (and shoes) looked. They were by no means foot fetishists but a woman had to have pretty feet for these guys to be interested in her. This was foreign to me.

I’d also like to point out that these guys were ten to fifteen years younger than me. I mention this because none of my friends, who are my age (40-ish), have ever mentioned anything about a woman’s feet in any of our “guys sitting around talking about chicks” discussions. I mean never. And women are a common topic among men.

This brings me too the thought I had about a woman’s footwear and its relationship to the world. I think women’s feet and shoes have become a form of sexual expression. They always were to some extent but now it’s mainstream. It’s linked to women in the workplace.

With men and women working together all the time the subject of what is appropriate and what is not always comes up. In our society men are usually the aggressors and women usually are the ones who dress sexy to get a man’s attention. But that dynamic doesn’t always work in the office. A man can get into trouble for being too forward with a woman and a woman can get in trouble for dressing too sexy. These are the pitfalls of the modern office.

I think that the interest in the sexiness of women’s feet and shoes has grown up to compensate for this. If a bunch of guys are overheard talking about a woman’s tit’s or ass at work then there is a chance that they could get into some real trouble. If they talk about a women’s sexy shoes there is almost no chance of a reprimand. It’s not a hot button.

Women also have almost no chance of getting in trouble from their shoes. A woman could wear a top that is too low cut or a skirt that is too tight and be told to dress more appropriately but no one will ever mention her shoes. She could come to work in five inch spiked stripper heels and as long as she is wearing a conservative grey suit she won’t get into trouble.

So there is my though about shoes for the week. Not that women haven’t always used shoes to express their sexuality but because of the rules of the work place shoes and feet have taken on a new life as a safe and mainstream expression of sexuality.

I just never know where my thoughts are going to take me.