Radiant Comics

I’ve never been a fan of the “To Do” list. Some people love to make lists and check things off after they’re done but I’ve never been that person. Even as a kid in school I usually didn’t write down homework assignments. Unless there was something really specific I had to remember. Otherwise I just kept what homework I had to do in my head. Oddly I found that if I wrote my assignments down I would not only forget them but also forget that I wrote them down. It was easier for me to just remember.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people who like “To Do” lists are also procrastinators. They use the list to motivate themselves to get things done. I am the opposite of a procrastinator. If I have stuff to do I want it done as quickly as possible and out of the way so I can be free to do what I want. The more time I wait before getting things done on a “To Do” list the more time I have to think about doing those things. Thinking about getting things done takes way more effort than actually doing them. At least to me.

One thing I don’t understand about procrastinators is what the heck they are doing with all that procrastination time? They usually claim to be wasting it (at least in internet status updates) but wasting it doing what? What people consider wasted time varies. I occasionally like to play video games in my leisure time but I don’t consider that wasted time. But maybe if I played video games in the time that was alloted for work it would be. I’m not sure. I like to get things done so I can spend as much of my time my way as possible. If I’m spending time doing what i want it’s never wasted. Wasted time is spent doing what I don’t want to do.

Though I’m not a fan of the “To Do” list I have recently gotten back to my “What I did today” lists. Half of my work is freelance stuff that I do for the dough and half is my own art that I do for myself. I have no career in the usual sense of the word so I don’t have the satisfaction of moving up the ladder at work which usually give people there sense of accomplishment. I have to find my accomplishments where I can.

In that spirit I used to write down in a calender what I did that day. I’ve always been fairly prolific when it comes to making my own art but most of it ends up being filed away. It’s not all where I can see it so it won’t necessarily leave me with a sense of accomplishment. That’s why I started writing what I did for the day down. At least I could flip through the pages of my calender and, at a glance, see that I did things. I had some small number of accomplishments.

I fell out of this habit a couple of years ago. I’m not sure why. I think I just got tired of calenders. I had a bunch of them stacked up on a shelf and they looked too much like years going by. That made me a little wistful.

Recently I started using the iCal calender on my computer. I had to keep track of a few things in it so I decided to start writing down what I did for the day in there. It’s not perfect program and kind of clunky for this sort of thing but I can sync it with my iPod. My sense of accomplishment has gone portable. It’s kind of fun again.

I started naming some of the drawings that I’ve been working on just so I can keep track of them in iCal. I found in did me no good, I got no sense of accomplishment, from writing, “Worked on drawing today”. “Worked on drawing named ‘Sense My Tension’ today” gave me more of a glimpse of what I did that day. And I like coming up with names for things.

So there you have it. No “To Do” lists but plenty of “What I did today” entries. That’s how things are over here. I think I’ll go enter that I wrote this blog today.

“I come to bury the comic book cover, not to praise it”.

I’ve written before on what makes a good comic book cover (good design, good art, and the fact that it tells a story) and how there are not as many good comic book covers as there use to be. But this week I came to the realization that the art of the comic book cover is dead. Covers don’t matter at all anymore. They’ve lost their cachet in society and have almost no cachet in the comic book shop.

What made me realize this? The cover to Ex Machina number 39. Ex Machina is a comic I buy regularly. I bought it last week but it sat around for a few days before I picked it up. As I picked it up I realized I had never even looked at the cover. So I did. That is when I came to the conclusion that comic book covers matter in no way shape or form anymore.

I hate to pick on Ex Machina and Tony Harris’ artwork because I like the book and the art. But the cover was pointless. Like almost every cover. It was nicely drawn with a nice design. A little symmetrical for my taste but that’s not really bad. It was that the cover told no story and was just a guy standing there that made it so pointless. It looks more like an exercise than a cover created to get a customer to pick up a comic and buy it.

That’s the problem. When comics were sold on newsstands to the public a cover was the thing that screamed out to people. Now that comics are sold almost exclusively at comic book shops people don’t even look at covers much. They buy their regulars. I’m picking up Ex Machina no mater what is on the cover. And I’m not picking up the X-Men no matter what is on the cover. Well maybe I would if they came up with am X-Men cover to intrigue me but I doubt that will happen.

Comics are much more expensive now than the newsstand days too. The days of browsing covers and picking up something that looks interesting are over. Not at three to four bucks a pop and not with all the dull covers.

Plus most regulars to the comic shop know what’s coming out that week and what they are going to buy beforehand. It’s the age of the internet and instant information. There is no need to look at covers in deciding what to buy. At most it will jog a customer’s memory that so and so number eleven was coming out this week and there it is.

Covers have become place holders filled with clip art. A cover has to be there so one needs to be drawn but it will in no way sell the book. Excepting Alex Ross covers. He is the only one left who can give a cover any type of cachet. Every other cover is art meant to be clipped for other uses. Ads, previews, t-shirts, posters, and whatever else anyone can think of to sell. Ninety nine percent of covers are never put to these uses but they can be if needed and that is what is important to comic companies.

What I wonder is did the comic book cover die because it was made into clip art or was is made into clip art because it was dead? I’m not sure but I think it’s decline started because of neglect.

I know that for a decade plus no one was in charge of covers at Marvel comics. Editors commissioned them to be made but there was no art director in charge of making sure they were good. Editors who even had a small clue about making a cover look good had bigger fish to fry. Covers all got done in a perfunctory manner. Basically whatever the artist turner in is what got published.

Then the editors started asking the artists for clip art covers so they could use the art elsewhere. “Iconic” covers they were called. This was in the mid Nineties when comics were in a major decline. Could some good covers have garnered interest and slowed the decline? Or were comics going to decline no matter what and the covers already didn’t matter?

I have no answers to these questions. People still love the art of comic book covers as they are the most expensive piece of art in the whole comic book. An interior page can run a couple of hundred dollars while the cover will run a couple of thousand. At least for old comic book art.

I love the art of comic book covers and was sad to come to the realization that covers just don’t matter anymore. They exist for no reason these days. They tell no story and sell no comics. As long as we have monthly comic books we will still have comic book covers but with so few artists, editors, and companies interested in what makes a good comic book cover they will continue not to matter. Ouch.

I’ve been drawing a lot for the last week and I thought I write a little bit about my process. I’m working on a portrait right now which is something I don’t do a whole lot of. I am in no way, shape, or form a portrait artist but do enjoy the task every now and then. I love drawing faces but most of the faces I draw are made up. The features aren’t always in the right places either. But sometimes I want to work with a real face.

I started with a photograph. Though most times I’m not the kind of artist that uses photo reference sometimes I do. One of the things an artist has to know about using photo reference is how to take a good picture. I’ve seen plenty of photo referenced art be ruined because a bad photo was used. I could write lots about what things make a bad photo but I’ll just stick with if it’s a cheesy snap shot don’t try to use it as reference.

I tried out my new Wacom Cintiq (12 inch). It’s a computer tablet that is also an LCD screen. I can put it on top of my drawing table and use the special pen to draw right on the screen on top of the digital photo. It’s not quite like drawing on a piece of paper. It’s more like drawing on a piece of paper with an eighth of an inch of glass on top of it.

So after I drew my underdrawing on top of the digital photo I printed out my drawing in non photo blue (a less then 50% blue that won’t show up on a bitmapped scan or photocopy) on bristol board. I then drew on top of the blue line with my regular 4B pencil. This will be the finished pencil drawing. But not the finished drawing. I was going to ink this one.

Inking is a traditional comic book/strip way of working. Those mediums were printed on cheap newsprint and therefore a pencil line could not be reproduced consistently. To deal with this fact an artist will draw something in pencil and then grab a brush, pen, and ink and redraw, in ink, right over the top of the pencil line. The ink drawing is the final drawing that can be reproduced consistently. Things aren’t always done like that today but it is still a way of working that many employ.

I happen to like an ink line and decided that is the way I wanted to work on this portrait. So I scanned in my pencil drawing, blew it up digitally, and printed it out, once again, on bristol board in blue line. Then I grabbed my Windsor Newton Series 7 number three brush dipped it in ink and got to work.

After I was done with the inking stage I scanned the ink drawing. When using a computer I use both Photoshop and Illustrator to color things. For this one and a lot of my prints I chose Illustrator because I like vector graphics for creating shapes. I do a lot of drawing in shapes when I work in color on the computer. Photoshop is more about dark to light and modeling.

Since I’m using Illustrator which is a resolution independent I like to blow things up. But whatever I’m blowing up has to be made as a vector graphic in Illustrator. The stuff I scan in will blow up just a jagged as a bitmap graphic. Because the things I like to blow up in portraits are eyes and lips I will often draw them larger and separately from the rest of the face.

So that’s what I did. After laying down the basic color for the whole face in Illustrator I blew up the eyes and lips and printed them out in blue line. I penciled and inked them again at their new larger size then scanned them in. I then brought them into Illustrator, cleaned them up and colored them. They could now be reunited with the rest of the face plus be ready to use for another project where I use large eyes. Like my painted coat.

I had my basic colors in but I now had to add in darks and lights. This is where I like to draw in shapes. I layer and interlock different shapes of color. There is some dark to light modeling going on but realistic color is not my goal. I’m looking for a an interesting playfulness between the line, shape, and color. And it has to look like someone too. This stuff gets complicated.

My next step was to figure out the background. When working on something that is not a portrait I usually figure the background out as part of the whole scene. Since this one was eighty percent face I never did. I printed out the finished pencil sketch in blue and grabbed my pencil again. I knew I was going to execute the background on the computer but it’s still much easier to work out my ideas on paper and then scan them in. That’s what I did.

I’m actually taking a break from the background to write this up. I’ve been working on this one drawing/print for about twenty hours now and I really need to give it a break. Except I’ve been into it and it’s coming along well. Sometimes it’s tough to quit when things are going well. I think I’ll put it down until morning though.

When looking back at old photos, as has been happening a lot lately because of Facebook, I notice that one of the first things people comment on is hair styles. This isn’t a new observation as people have been laughing at old hairstyles for decades but it got me to thinking about people and their relationship to their hair.

The first relationship is nearly exclusively the domain of the male. There are always a couple of guys in the pack who have had the same exact hair style all their lives. It is a short and conservative haircut that rarely changes. Maybe the part changes from middle to side and maybe the length varies by an inch or two but nothing drastic. Ever. From age ten ’til age forty the hair is a constant. This is usually a sign of having pretty good hair that holds a men’s classic cut well.

Of course there are now those who opt out by shaving their heads. This is mostly a man’s domain and is really just an off shot of the people who always have the same cut. The cut is just been replaced by a shave. Once a person starts shaving their head they usually don’t stop. Except the few who are going through a period as our second group is.

And that second group is almost the same as the first. Except that in this group a man has a period of long hair. It’s usually when he is young. In college or just out and for what ever reason he grows his hair long. But not being a true “long hair guy” he cuts it at some point. Usually when the demands of a career force him to. From then on in it’s the same short hair cut for good or ill.

The next type is the person who changes their hair around a bit. Mostly women fall into this category but I was a man who also fit in here. And it’s almost always young people in this slot. I grew different parts of my hair long, shaved other parts, and had other lengths in between. Most young women go through all sorts of styles and lengths throughout their teens and twenties.

But then haircut fatigue sets in. It has a lot to do with peer pressure and the demands of a career but at some time in a person’s late twenties to early thirties they start getting the same haircut over and over again for the rest of their lives. Unchanging.

A person may have had ten different haircuts over ten years and then the same haircut for the next ten years. When we see picture of the old haircut it will look funny no matter what. We get used to the same boring old haircut. It becomes the way we look and any deviation from it becomes funny looking. We become locked in.

The last relationship with hair is when a woman gets older and then cuts her hair short. This is part of haircut fatigue. “It’s so easy to take care of”, is always the phrase that goes along with the woman’s short hair cut. I don’t think most men care for this stage but by that point they know better than to say anything negative about their woman’s hair. It’s easier to not care but pretend you do.

Not being born with hair that is suited to a classic men’s cut I have always a fan of the goofy haircut. I have had many of them in the past and I am not the least bit embarrassed seeing old pictures of myself. I too have had the same haircut (or lack thereof) for the last ten years and envy my younger self who had the energy and stamina for fun hair. It was a part of life that I enjoyed.

So embrace those old pictures and enjoy yourself when you used to have fun with your hair because it all inevitably comes to an end. And when people who have had boring haircuts all of their lives laugh at other’s old pictures it makes me feel sorry for them. They just don’t get it. Viva the funny haircut!

I’m in search of a font. I thought I had one I liked but I was wrong. It all has to do with the web comic I’ve been working on for ages. Besides the subject matter of said comic and it’s involvement with ideas from my prints, paintings, and photos one more thing I am concerned with is my choice of font to letter the comic in.

I don’t want to letter it by hand or go with a traditional all caps comic book font. I want an uppercase/lowercase font but there are not a lot of interesting comic book fonts of that nature. It’s a small niche. I moved on to some regular body copy fonts that I thought might work for me but they all seemed too mechanical for my liking. I don’t want a stark contrast between hand drawn art and a mechanical font.

My next step was to rough some fonts up. That’s when I convert them in Adobe Illustrator to “artwork” and skew and roughen them up a bit using some filters. I’m always coming up with filter “recipes” in Photoshop and Illustrator to apply to images so this is nothing new. It took me a while but I finally found a font and “recipe” that I liked. I though I was done.

Then everything lingered. The comic wasn’t turning out to my liking. I worked on a lot of strips but never finished anything. That probably had to do with the fact I had no idea what the finished format was going to be. I didn’t have the size totally knocked down.

As a matter of fact I was working at three sizes. Since this comic was supposed to unify my comic book, print, and web work I was trying to figure out the perfect physical size that would satisfy all three. I though I had it but I didn’t. Hence me never finishing anything. If you don’t know what size the finished building is going to be it’s never going to be finished. Or something like that.

Today I found my size and format and actually finished one of the strips. Except for the font that is. Y’see in this new format the font size went up a couple of points. Not much but it was enough to make me not like my old font and roughening recipe. After I printed out a copy of the strip the font didn’t look good. It looked shaky. Like it was a mistake. It looked like something went wrong in the process and it wasn’t really supposed to look that way. Not a good thing.

So I spent some more time looking through my fonts today. I’m sick of looking through fonts. Especially because I am looking for something specific that probably doesn’t exist. I want a body copy font for a comic strip that is a little bit funky but not too funky because it can’t fight with the drawing for attention. And it has to be easy to read. Most funky fonts are display fonts and are not easy to read as body copy. I hate to have to struggle to read a comic because of the font. I don’t want that for my strip. Call me picky.

I found a font I vaguely like called “Montara Gothic” which I am using straight up but it’s not really satisfying me. The font I was using before that which I now don’t like at all was a “Frutiger” all messed up and roughened.

Though I’ve always used and appreciated a wide variety of fonts I’ve never been a hard core type guy like some of the designers I’ve known. My knowledge of fonts is fair to middling but clearly not deep enough to satisfy my very particular need in this case. I will have to keep my eyes open.