Radiant Comics

I don’t have a set schedule for writing these pieces for my blog but for the last month or two I’ve been writing them on Sundays. I don’t know why. It just ended up being that way. But this one I’m writing on a Monday because this was the weekend of my annual backyard barbecue. It was the 30th one. Last year was supposed to be the 30th one but it got skipped because of Covid. That was disappointing.

On the first Saturday in August I invite my friends over and we have a barbecue in my back yard. It’s always fun and we have a good time. It takes some work and I can get a little wound up in the days before hand but things always go well. It’s the couple of days afterwards that a crash comes.

Since the party is on a Saturday that means Sunday is the next day and that’s when I have to take it easy. I try to clean up as I go along on Saturday and I clean up almost everything after people leave but there are still a few things left to do on Sunday. I’ve learned to keep those things to a minimum. I gotta rest on Sunday.

I’m one of those people who likes to keep busy. I like to be creative and make art whenever I can. So if I have a choice between sitting around and doing nothing or standing at my drawing table and making a drawing I choose to draw. That’s my habit. On the Sunday after my party it’s a lot better for me if I choose to do nothing. It took me a lot of years to learn that lesson. Maybe 20.

There is a feeling I describe as a party emotional hangover. It usually hits on Monday mornings when I go back to work and am faced with the stark reality that life is not a party. The Saturday party is always a lot more fun than the Monday earning a living. I’m not the only one who gets the post party blues but I’ve found that when I’m the one throwing the party I’d better get a day of rest after.

It’s a bit of work to throw a party. It’s not especially hard or unpleasant work but there are things to be done if you want the party to go smoothly. And when you’re the host of the party there are things that have to get done during the party. I’m lucky in that I’ve got good friends who have been coming to this barbecue for a lot of years so everyone helps out and things run like clockwork. But it can wear me out.

When I was a younger person I could get up on Sunday morning, clean up what was left to clean, and then get back to drawing or being creative. I could jump right in. As the years passed recovery time for everything got longer. Where I could once stay up until 2AM and be okay the next day now if I stay up that late (which I never do anymore) I’m exhausted for the next two days. It got to be that way with the Sunday after the party too.

In the transition period between resting on Sundays and not I spent a lot of time pushing myself to do stuff on that Sunday. Where I used to jump right in and get creative I had to start psyching myself up to do stuff. And it would lead to me being even more exhausted on Monday. That was the real problem in this transition period. Mondays.

Mondays can be hard enough during a normal week. Who wants to go back to work after all? They are made harder on the weekend after a party, harder than that after a weekend that I throw a party, and then they got even harder after my weekend party where I exhausted myself on Sunday too.

It must be over ten years ago that I started watching movies on the Sunday after my barbecue. In those days some people used to stay over on Saturday night and then we’d go out to the diner on Sunday. Things wouldn’t end until Sunday afternoon and then I’d go home, lay on the couch, and turn on a movie. Pretty simple stuff. Lot’s of people do it every Sunday.

I’m a morning person. That means that I’m up at the same time everyday no matter how tired I am. So I get out of bed at 6AM. When people where staying over I’d quietly get up and quietly finish cleaning stuff up until everyone else was awake at 10AM or so. With no one else here but me this past Sunday I cleaned everything up by about 9AM and then had to figure out what to do with my day. There was no brunch to go to.

Most people can sit in front of the TV all day and make a good time of it. I keep wanting to get up and do something. I actually had to stop myself on about three occasions from getting to work on a project. I’d put on a movie, watch it (I can’t even remember what I watched and it’s the next day as I write this), and then get up and want to do something. It was habit that got me up so I had to consciously stop myself. It’s weird to stop myself from drawing.

I’m glad I took it easy. I was really tired. I think I may have nodded off a couple of times during the day as I sat in my easy chair. I don’t think I fell asleep for more than a few minutes but that’s how tired I was. Back in my twenties it was okay to push myself to get things done when I was tired. It helped me develop good habits so I could get my own artwork done. But now that I’m older it’s counter productive. Pushing myself means more recovery time and that’s not worth it. Being well rested also means those Monday morning “Life is not a party” blues are less blue. I’ll take that any day of the week.

I jus bought five new 24×36 inch canvases. I wanted to buy ten but I can always buy five more later. Why did I want to buy ten? Only because they’e a buck a piece cheaper to buy them that way. That and I thought ten was a nice round number. It took me about two weeks to finally order them online from Dick Blick.

I had just finished completing my first large acrylic painting in quite a while and I was on a roll. At least in my mind. I had visions of buying ten new canvases and making ten new paintings over the summer. That seemed doable to me at that moment. Except ten of these canvases cost about $140. That’s not pocket change. Plus ten canvases over the summer (really a vague time period in my mind) was a lot of painting. So I ended up spending $75 on five canvases.

When the canvases arrived I didn’t have any paintings in mind that were ready to go. The last painting I did, “The Juggler,” was one that had been sitting around for 20 years. There was no prep work to be done on it. I had the image and color sketches all done from way back when so I started right away. There was none of that for my five new canvases. Just vague ideas.

I’ve made a lot of drawings over the decades. Some are turned into finished works and some not. Often when I’m stuck for idea I can look through all those drawings and find something I want to work on. It can be something that was never finished or it can be a finished image that I want to repurpose for something else. I occasionally like to rework stuff.

The first thing I did was go to my pile of 6×9 inch ink drawings. I’ve done a hundred of these over the last year so there are a lot of images to chose from. After looking through them I found three of them that I liked and thought would make good paintings. Then I did nothing with them. As soon as I picked them I lost interest. That’s never a good sign.

After that I dug out one of my old “Covers to Comic Books That Don’t Exist” series and decided to rework it for a painting. It was already a finished and inked drawing but it had a “Red Mary” logo on it. Plus it had been drawn to a be a finished 11×17 inch piece and it was now going to be 24×36 inches. Things don’t always scale up perfectly so I decided to redraw it with the new size in mind.

It was an easy redraw since it was already a finished drawing but there were certain things I had to pay attention too. First off I need the face to be more symmetrical than it was. It’s okay for a 2-3 inch tall face to be “Off” a little bit but when a face is 6-8 inches tall it better be as symmetrical as possible. One eye can’t be a half an inch higher than the other.

The second thing I had to do was add a little bit more form to her arms and hands. They are very cartoony in the 11×17 drawing and I didn’t think that would translate well to the larger version. I still kept the arms simple but I also added some flame sleeves on her arms. This adds a little more detail and gives me a place to add more color.

An odd thing I did to the drawing was to flip the bottom half of it. Her left hip is now her right hip. It adds some contraposto to the drawing that I think it needs. I don’t think that’s something I’ve done to a finished drawing before. It struck me that it would look better that way and it does.

The last thing I had to do was simplify the background. There were shapes with lots of lines in them and I had to ditch the lines. The shapes were fine but since this was going to be a painting it wouldn’t lend itself to such a black and white line based solution. All those shape will be filled with paint and the texture of the paint.

After the drawing was done I scanned it in and made a color sketch. And that was the extent of it. I didn’t start a painting. I don’t know why but after all that work I wasn’t as interested in it anymore. Art is like that sometimes so I put it aside.

Once again I don’t know why but I had no motivation to start a painting or think about starting another painting. I was in a floundering mood. That’s when I pulled out some of my “Dreams of Things” covers. I’ve done over a hundred of them over the years and I keep a handful of them in states finish so they’re ready to be either inked or colored with marker. So that’s what I did. First I inked a cover and then I colored another. That took up a couple of days of art time. When I was done with them I figured to start a painting. Except I didn’t. I still had no motivation.

Instead of painting I decided to make an ink drawing. I had a complex drawing already made for my next ink drawing but even that seemed to ambitious for the moment. Instead I went back into my stash of 6×9 inch ink drawing and found one that was a lot simpler to work on.

Though it was a simpler drawing it took me three days to finish. Paying work and other stuff had to be done before this drawing. But that was okay. I needed to take my time anyway. So what’s the conclusion of this? There is no conclusion just yet. I want to start a new painting but I still haven’t. I’m not sure if I’m going to start with the “Red Mary” one but I still might. I’m usually good at getting stuff done so I’m guessing I’ll eventually get some painting done.

John Romita Testing Paper

Recently I was asked by artist Rick Parker if I wanted to contribute a page to a comic he wanted to make about working at Marvel Comics. The idea is to get a whole bunch of cartoonists to contribute a singe page story about our days working in the Marvel offices. I know Rick from my days in the 1990s working in the Marvel Bullpen. Rick had worked in the marvel Bullpen before me but when I knew him he was a freelance letterer for Marvel and the artist on Bevis and Butthead comic book that Marvel published in the 1990s. I said I would do a page.

The first thing I had to do was to figure out which Marvel story I wanted to tell. A few of them came to mind but the main one I wanted to tell was the story of my geekiest moment at Marvel. I wrote about this moment here on this blog about a years ago. Marvel- Memories Summer 1992 I had a few other ideas but that seemed like the most interesting one. It has to do with me getting a piece of art from John Romita that he threw in the trash can.

Even though I wanted to do the John Romita story I thought about other stories I could do for a few weeks. I think I was trying to avoid the John Romita one. The main problem I had with that story was that I would have to draw 1992 John Romita. We’re the only two characters in the story.

Some artists are better than others at drawing what is called a “likeness” of someone. A likeness is just a drawing of a person that a viewer can immediately tell is that person. A drawing of Elvis that people can’t tell is Elvis can be a problem. Any artist worth his or her salt can get a likeness but it takes time and reference photos. If you want to draw Elvis it’s good to have photos of Elvis to look at.

I’m not particularly strong at likenesses. I knew it would take me a lot of time to get my drawings of John Romita right. I also knew that if I didn’t get them right it would turn people off. No one would care if I didn’t get a drawing of me wrong but everyone would care if I failed at drawing John Romita properly.

The first thing I did was to use the internet to find some photos of John. Most of the photos of him that I found were from a period later than 1992. He was clean shaven in 1992 but bearded after he retired in 1996. Most of the photos I found were with the beard. After some looking I found a couple of them that reminded me of my memory of how he looked in 1992.

After finding reference photos I started doing sketches to see if I could get a good likeness. It took a while and with my simplified drawing style it took quite a bit of work but eventually I got comfortable with it. That gave me the confidence to move onto doing some layouts for the story. Since it was only one page I needed to put a lot of panels on that one page. Twelve panels.

Next I drew the small layouts I blew them up and printed out the page on a 9×12 inch sheet of paper. Usually a comic book page is drawn on a 11×17 inch piece of paper but sometimes I like to start small. Not this time though. As I was drawing the first panel I got frustrated at the small size and abandoned it.

I decided to draw each panel individually on a 6×9 inch pieces of paper. First I was going to tackle the John Romita likenesses. That took me forever. There were four main panels he was in and it took me a few days, on and off, to draw those panels. I drew them a few times each. I would draw one, scan it in, and then draw it again. I didn’t have nearly as much trouble drawing myself.

I was also trying to decide if I was going to assemble all the pencil drawings into a page and ink the page as a whole or ink the panels on the individual 6×9 inch pieces of paper. At first I wanted to ink them as a single page but then since I was struggling so much I decided on the individual panels.

Once again I started with the John Romita faces. It took me a long time to ink them and get them right. As I finished the inking I scanned them in and set them up digitally as a single page.

I this point in time none of the pages had backgrounds in them. The background to the story was John Romita’s office in 1992 which I had no reference for so I knew I was going to have to make that up. The problem is that offices are boring so the Will Elder idea of “Chicken Fat” kept entering my mind. That is what Elder called it when he was drawing early issues of Mad Magazine in the 1950s and he’d add visual gags into the background. But what type of visual gags?

I’m not a gag writer nor a gag artist. That’s a whole specialized world of cartooning. But the concept kept entering my head and I couldn’t escape it. I though about what type of drawings John might have around his office and what type of gags I could make out of them but I kept coming up with nothing. It was take days of research fo me to pull something like that off. I wasn’t interested in doing that and knew my failure rate would be high with it so I got a little frozen with the page. And I hated the pages with no backgrounds on them. They just weren’t rich enough.

I wasn’t until I came to the conclusion that I should make the “Chicken Fat” my own that I got to work again. It would be impossible for me to make interesting John Romita drawing but I could make interesting Jared Osborn drawings. So I went about filling the backgrounds of John’s office with tiny little drawings of my own. Spontaneous things that could give the panels some visual interest. It took a couple of days to do since I made a lot of drawings but I finally was enjoying making the backgrounds.

After finishing the background inks I scanned them all in and arranged them onto a page. I still have one small panel of a hand holding a piece of paper that I have to draw but the rest of it is done. I have to script it now and color the page. There is still a lot of work to be done but none of it is going to take me nearly as long as the pencils and inks. That’s a good thing.

I’m at a loss right now. I’m not sure what art project I should start. What I should make or do. Life is like that sometimes. These are the times I rely on my good habits to get stuff done. A lot of artists have a hard time getting anything done. That’s because when an artist can’t figure out exactly what they want to do they often do nothing. I can understand why but I find doing nothing to be counterproductive in the long run. I try and get a little something done.

My artistic skill set and interests are broad. That helps. I have a long list of different types of art I like to make and I can switch between them as the mood suits me. There is even some stuff that I can do that takes less energy and concentration than usual. I often will grab one of those projects on days where I am at a loss.

Last week I finished a big acrylic on canvas painting and it took a lot out of me. It took more energy than I thought it would. In the days after I finished it my concentration was not at its height. So I worked on some of my faux comic book covers. I have a bunch of them worked up to various stages so I took one that was at the marker coloring stage and worked on it. That one had some complicated color to be done and it took about five hours to do.

After that one was concentration was still not up to snuff so the next time I started something it was some inking. I had another cover pencilled and ready to be inked so I grabbed that one. With just black ink to worry about rather than color I was able to get this one done faster but I still took my time. I didn’t want to rush through. It took four or five hours to ink.

As I was doing this inking and coloring I was also thinking about doing some more paintings over the summer. I got it in my head that I should buy some stretched canvases. In my younger days I used to stretch all my own canvases. I would buy lumber, cut it to length, add molding, put the four pieces of wood together into a rectangle, stretch and staple raw canvas over the wood stretchers, and then prime the canvas with gesso. That’s a lot of work. I used to enjoy it though. Nowadays I buy pre-stretched canvas. It’s more expensive but also more convenient.

The painting I just finished was 26×40 inches. I decided to get some canvases that were 24×36 inches. That’s a standard size. Since the painting I just finished was one I started 20 years ago it was an odd size that I stretched myself. I looked around for the best price I could find which was about $16 a canvas. For some reason I wanted to get ten of them but $160 wasn’t quite in the budget for the month. Plus ten paintings would be a lot to get done over just the summer.

As I was inking, coloring, and contemplating painting I also started contemplating photography. One of the things I like to do is occasionally look at Ebay to try and find old nude negatives to buy. After I buy a negative I scan it in and digitally manipulate it into a new composition that’s my own. Sometimes I draw colorful masks on the models in the photos.

I found and ordered a couple of new negatives but also realized I had bought one a couple of months ago yet had done nothing with it. So I took a day and did something with it. Once again it took me a longer time to make something than I thought it would. I started working on the photo early Saturday morning. I drew a mask on paper, and then scanned it in to put on the face in the photo. After that I made a 10×15 inch photo that took all of Saturday to make. I probably spent twice as much time on it as I thought it would take.

In recent years when I make one of these photos I actually make two of them. I make a 10×15 inch version and an 8×10 inch version. The smaller version has a little of the top and bottom trimmed off so both compositions have to work. I think I developed this method of working because I thought the smaller version would be easier to sell online. Turns out no one buys either version but I still decided to work that way.

I mention the two versions because that brings me to the next thing I got done. As part of getting the photo done I print out test prints on 8.5×11 inch paper until I get it right. After about half a dozen test prints I usually get it correct and then print out an 11×17 inch one. I checked my boxes of inkjet photo paper to print on and didn’t find any. I then looked online to buy some new photo paper but could have sworn I already had the paper I was shopping for. I got offline and searched my studio for half an hour to find the paper I was looking for. There it was, in a cabinet, not with all my other inkjet paper.

One of the things about printing out 11×17 inch photos or prints is that you need a place to put them. Some place convenient. I’ve put them in boxes, mylar sleeves, or sleeves in portfolio books. But I ran out of all of those things. A while ago.

After printing out the new masked photo at 11×17 inches and not having a convenient place to put it I noticed I hadn’t printed out a dozen other masked photos I finished over the years. I printed them at 8.5×11 but I guess with no place to put the 11×17 inch ones I never printed them. So I took a day and printed a dozen of them. It takes a while to make that many prints.

After printing I still had no good place to the photos so I decided to look for some portfolio books. I found some Dick Blick house brand ones that looked good and were only $10. That was a lot cheaper than the name brand $16 ones. That was also where I ws buying the canvases from so I cut the number of canvases down to five and put in the order.

I was going to order some new tubes of paint with the canvas but I didn’t have the money in the budget. That and I have to inventory my acrylic paint. I still have a lot of tubes of paint to use but I not sure what I have and what I need. No sense in ordering more just yet. I’ll save that task to do another day.