I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got three new comics (Plus a bunch of free ones).
Check them all out here:
I’ve got nothing. That’s my subject for today. Things unfinished. What do I have that’s unfinished? That’s tough to say because for one I finish a lot of things and for two if I don’t finish something I usually tuck it away and don’t look at it. But I know I have unfinished things.
For many years I had one particular unfinished painting on canvas sitting around the studio. It sat there for years and years. One day a friend asked what it was and I said it was an unfinished painting. Then I went on to tell him that in pictures and movies I had seen of famous artists they always had unfinished canvases around their studios so I decided to keep an unfinished one around mine. He pointed out that that probably meant my unfinished canvas was actually finished since I had no intention of working on it again. I think he was right about that. I can’t even tell you where that canvas is today. I didn’t get rid of it but I stopped paying attention to it.
I have an unfinished comic book from back in my self publishing days. My friends and I made and published six issues of a comic book back in the late 1990s. But it was a bad time for comics, especially small press comics, and we never made any money with them. So we stopped making them. I went on to start another story with my character who starred in my comic but with no place to publish it I stopped working on the story. I think it was ten pages that were pencilled and lettered but never inked. The pages sit in a flat file in my studio.
A couple of years ago I published a few art books on a print-on-demand publishing site. It was fun but nobody was really interested in my books. I sold a handful of them to friends and that was it. I had started and even finished another art book but when I came to the proofreading stage I couldn’t face it anymore. What was the point of finishing it? It was just going to sink into oblivion like the others I had just finished. So I abandoned it. I never bothered to set it up on the print on demand site. It sits on my hard drive. I’ll have to take a look at it someday.
I have ten unfinished cartoon art cards on my desk that have been there for a month. They’re written and lettered but I couldn’t bring myself to draw characters on them. I know I’ll finish these sometime soon but I made a lot of them over the summer. I even filmed them as I drew them for my YouTube channel. It’s intense filming myself as I draw. It takes a to of concentration. Much more than if I drew them without filming it. So that’s the part I haven’t been able to bring myself to do. I could draw them without recording it but that seems like a letdown if I do. I’ll get to them someday.
I have a drawer filled with unfinished drawings. But at least they serve a purpose. As a matter of habit I make a lot of small (around 5×7 inch) pencil drawings. I pick out a bunch of thumbnail ink drawings from my sketchbook and work them up into pencil drawings. I make about three or four of them at a time. Two or three of them might get turned into finished drawings right away but the leftovers go into my drawing drawer. Later when I’m looking for something to do I open the drawer and thumb through the drawings. I usually find something but some of those drawings have been in that drawer for years. I just quickly glanced in the drawer and saw a drawing dated from September of 2009. Things can sit around.
I have a pile of unfinished 5×7 inch gauche paintings. Since they’re unfinished they don’t have any dates on them but I think they’re about eight to ten years old. That’s about when I started doing marker drawings at that size. I enjoyed painting in gouache and still do at times but back then I was looking for a quicker and more immediate medium. Copic markers became my art tool of choice for that function and my gouache paintings fell by the wayside. I could still go back and make something of them but as of now I haven’t.
I even have a folder named “Never Finished Blogs.” I’ve been writing this blog every week since December of 2005 so I have to be good at finishing them but not everything gets finished. There are only thirteen unfinished essays in that folder so I guess that’s not too bad. That’s less than one unfinished blog per year. But why do I insist on keeping them? Because you never know.
I try my best never to delete anything. I’m one of those people who thinks something that may be useless now could be of use in the future. Especially in the digital world where it’s easy to store things. In the real world being a hoarder is a bad idea but in the virtual one it’s okay.
It started with me back in the early 1990s with my photographs. Only about half of the photos I shot were good enough to keep and display but the other half had some good parts in them. I starting keeping the bad ones in file boxes and eventually developed my photo collage style with them. That transferred over to digital when I abandoned film in the early 2000s. I never delete any digital photos. Even the bad ones. At different times I’ve been able to dig through the bad ones and find good stuff in them.
In one particular case I pulled up a nearly black digital photo, played with the levels, and found an image buried in there. It wasn’t a spectacular image but it was a record of the lobby of Marvel Comics when they were on 40th Street. It was the only photo I had taken of that particular location in the building. It made me a little nostalgic when I found it. In the world of unfinished stuff one can often find nostalgia wandering around.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got seven new comics.
Check them all out here:
Failure and success go hand in hand. Maybe not in life but for sure in art. That’s my lesson for today. What brought me to that conclusion? Working on a drawing of course. Or an inking as the case may be. One of the things I occasionally like to do is cover recreations. That’s when I pick a comic book cover from sometime in the past an draw my own version of it. Sometimes I try to recreate the cover as exactly as I can and sometimes I do a interpretation of it. Both ways are fun so it all depends on what I feel like doing at the time.
The first step I take is to recreate a comic book cover’s logo and trade dress digitally. That way I can print those out on my drawing paper and have them look good and be ready to go. The logos on all the original covers were done as mechanical copies (photostats) like this and not hand drawn for each comic so it’s authentic. Except the original Iron Man comic had the logo pasted on rather than printed on the drawing paper.
The second step is to redraw the cover. This is the part I’ve never had down to a specific technique. I’ve used at least three different methods none of which I’m fond of. The first method is to draw over a scan of the cover on my computer. I’ve never taken to drawing on the computer so this is the method I like the least. Sometimes I can do it quickly so I stick with it but other times it’s too slow. The second method is to print out the cover in blue line, redraw it on a piece of paper, and then scan it in. I like this way but it takes a lot of work and concentration. I have to draw it in a fine dark line and that’s not my usual habit. The third method is a new one. I redraw the cover digitally but on my iPad. I still haven’t taken to digitally drawing 100% but I like this way better than on the computer. I have an Apple Pencil and that helps.
I can’t remember which way I redrew this cover but I think it was on paper. I was happy with it too. I think I got it right. That was until I got to the inks. I print out the pencils on a separate piece of paper to ink and that’s what I did here. I’m usually a brush person when it comes to inking but this time I chose a pen. I wanted the lines to look hard and mechanical. At least that was my plan. Nothing I did worked. It all looked confused and terrible. I picked away at that cover for a few hours and hated it. I’m not usually an insecure artist that hates his on work so when I do I know it’s justified. I couldn’t look at the piece any more so I put it away.
A few months later I pulled it out to see if I could salvage it. I worked at it for about an hour and it didn’t help. It was still a confused mess. I put it away again. Another couple of months passed and I once again pulled it out one more time. This time I decided to take a radical approach with it and try my busted brush technique on it. The sloppiness of this approach was the exact opposite of my hard line start to the piece. And it worked about as well. I messed it up even more and then put it away again.
The Iron Man #100 cover that I was working on was originally drawn by Jim Starlin. It’s one of the first Iron Man comics that I ever bought and it remains a favorite cover. It’s a simple design of Iron Man standing and snapping a steel I-beam while in front of the number 100 that is rendered in stone. Simple and easy to mess up as I had done before.
A recent Monday morning rolled around and I was looking for something creative to do. I had some energy in me but maybe not enough to really dig down deep and get things going. I decided I wanted to do some inking. Inking is creative but there is also a lot of craft to it. A lot of applying technique to make a drawing look good. It’s a different type of creativity than drawing with a pencil. There is a lot of acting when drawing with a pencil and a lot of reacting when drawing in ink over a pencil drawing. Reacting I could do that morning.
I decided to take the same hardline approach with this second attempt at the cover. I started it over on a new sheet of paper and inked with a Hunt 107 pen that has no line weight. But I wasn’t going to keep it that way. That was just my starting point. I was also mixing some brush work in with the pen work. This gave me thick lines when I needed them but the thin hard line as a default. For some reason it was easier to figure out what I was doing that way.
I didn’t mess it up this time. I went slowly and worked things out. Instead of Starlin’s finely rendered muscles I went with some of my “Painted Lady” body design tattoos. They weren’t easy to work out because a lot of them blended with shadows. This was the part I whiffed on earlier but this time I was in the zone. Some days are like that. I took the time to figure out what Starlin had meant by his shadows and incorporated my designs into them. Somehow I couldn’t do that the first time around.
It took me a good part of the day but I finished it. It kind of amazed me that I did. It also amazed me that I finished it by going back to my first approach. I really thought that I would need a radical new approach. That’s why I tried my busted brush technique and I thought I would go back to that or something like it. But in the end it was my original idea that worked. I just had to not fail at it.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got six new comics.
Check them all out here:
Tonight I’m going to sit here and watch an episode of “Friends.” I need a little bit of a break and I’m feeling like some nostalgic TV so that means “Friends” for me. It’s my go-to nostalgia show. I’ve never tried writing about a TV show as I watch it before so this is something new. I guess it’s kind of like people who live Tweet shows but not with the “Live” part. This has been previously recorded.
I watch “Friends” in chronological order so I’m going to have to see what episode I’m up to. I finished watching season ten back in the late winter or early spring so I know I’m back on season one but I have to load up the show to see what episode. I still watch the shows in standard definition off of DVDs because those ones have the extra footage in a lot of the episodes. The streaming and broadcast ones in hi-def are the original broadcast episodes without the extras put back in them. I don’t think I’d like them with some jokes cut out. Of course I might not even miss the jokes but why takes the chance? I’m okay with SD. The blurriness adds to the nostalgia.
It looks like I’m on season one episode 18 “The One With All the Poker.” It was first broadcast on March 2, 1995. I watched it first run and at the time I was 29 years old. I’m checking my calendar for that day and it looks like the only info I have for that day was that I worked down in Manhattan at Marvel. It was my main freelance job all through the 1990s but I wasn’t there every day. Just a lot of them.
Looks like on the day before, according to my calendar notes, I bought some Magic the Gathering Cards at “The Compleat Strategist” in midtown. Boosters and a starter deck. I also got some photos developed at Kam Photo. Cross referencing with my dated photos I can see that sometime in the previous week or two the gang and I were hanging out at Ace Bar and Sophie’s Bar down in Alphabet City. Just setting the scene.
Staring up the episode. Ah, a little bit of a whistle as Rachel sends out her resumes. I think she worked at the coffee shop for about three seasons before she found her career as a fashion executive. And nothing says “Nostalgia” like that theme song. Love it. They always added scenes to the opening as the season went on. I thought that was cool.
Chandler and Ross are actually not on the couch in Central Perk. That’s unusual. Some resume jokes, and chit-chat. Ross is in love with Rachel. Unrequitedly. “What’s Happening” reference! For me season one is fairly basic. It’s good but they hit a lot of the easy and basic stuff. This one is the whole “Girls can’t play poker” thing. A little clichéd but they do some funny stuff with it.
The first poker scene ends with the girls losing all their money and being angry about it. Chandler is in full sarcastic mode during the game. I like him that way. Ross’s “I’m not a nice guy after the cards are dealt” is goofy. Good goofy. I’ve always found Ross’s goofiness endearing.
The next scene takes place in Ross’s first apartment which was very bland. And Marcel the monkey is there. They were really stretching my patience with that monkey. I never appreciated the monkey humor.
Now we go back to the girl’s apartment and Aunt Iris. A one shot character who is there to teach the girls some poker. She’s not much. Just a basic character there for the plot. We also get some jokes establishing Monica to be extra competitive. That was a personality trait that lasted the whole show. I generally found it funny.
Back to Ross’s bland apartment and more monkey humor. I was so glad when they sent Marcel packing. Ross having a pet monkey was way too “Sitcom-y” for me. I know it’s a sitcom but they don’t have to hit me over the head with it. And it’s time for the next poker game but first Chandler makes a “Four out of five dentists prefer Trident gum” joke. I like it but I wonder if anyone born after this episode airs will even get it. Monica is getting competitive! Rachel with the fake shuffle!
The second poker game ended like the first. The girls lost all their money and Ross continues to be a sore winner to Rachel who he has a crush on. Maybe not the best romantic strategy. Here comes Aunt Iris again. They really don’t give her a lot to do besides advance the plot.
Third poker game. Ross is smug. Let’s see if he gets his comeuppance. Ha! He gets called “Monkey boy” by Rachel. That’s how I feel about that monkey too. Interesting little “Waiting for a phone call” plot device that doesn’t exist anymore. Rachel is waiting for a phone call so Joey can’t use the phone to order pizza. It’s before the age of cell phones, of course, but it’s also before call waiting was common. So if the job calls and Joey is on the phone the job’s call just gets a busy signal. They may or may not call back. That’s how things worked in 1995. Nowadays with everyone having a cell phone, everyone having call waiting, and everyone having caller ID, that would never happen. A plot device destroyed by time and technology.
“Your fly is open Gellar” is still a funny line. Chandler’s stupid “Joe-incidence” joke still cracks me up. It’s so dumb but I love it. Rachel is learning to be a sore winner in a comedic way. I like the down shot of the table. There are almost no down shots in “Friends.” At least not that I can recall.
It’s time for the final showdown between Ross and Rachel. She’s gaining confidence but here comes the pivotal phone call. She doesn’t get the job and is crushed. Ross wants nothing more than to cheer her up. The whole mood of the episode changes. We feel her pain. The last hand is drawn out with the girls backing Rachel and the boys backing Ross. And on the last hand Ross has pity on her and unbeknownst to her lets her win a big pot of money. Joey and Chandler realize Ross let her walk away with the pot.
The final scene is them playing Pictionary and is the culmination of all the “Monica is competitive” jokes in the show. It’s a good closer. Over all it was a pretty good episode for season one. It was a little too “Boys vs. Girls” for my taste but they were generally funny about it.
I just checked with the website “Uncut Friends Episodes” and it turns out that second Aunt Iris scene isn’t even in the broadcast and streaming HD episode. A handful or other one and two line jokes were cut too. That’s why I stick with the DVD edition.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got six new comics.
Check them all out here:
I like to make pictures. That’s my main focus as an artist but what does it mean? I contemplate that a lot. What does it mean to make a drawing, painting, or even a photograph? It’s one of those questions that really doesn’t have an answer but I try to dig through the reasons I like to do something and I also like to dig through the reasons that I like a picture I make when it comes out well.
I used to spend more time studying why a piece of art didn’t come out well but I don’t do much of that anymore. I think that’s an exercise that’s better for young artists. Once you reach a certain skill level and have confidence that you can make a good picture then you’re better off analyzing and applying those skills. As an artist gets better fewer pictures are failures and it’s better to move on from failures quickly. After all by that time you should have the confidence to know the next one will be better.
I’ve also had to learn the difference between a bad picture I made and one that I just don’t like very much. The difference is that a bad picture is a struggle and when it’s done, or more likely abandoned, I can see its problems. That’s all I can see. So can most other people. A picture I just don’t like is one that doesn’t move me. What I made wasn’t what I wanted to make but it’s still done well. I have to accept that even though I don’t like it other people might like it. That’s a weird thing. I put in the failure pile but someone else tells me it’s amazing. In my younger days I’d tell them they were wrong but I’ve learned over the years not to say that anymore. Then genuinely like it and see something in it that I miss and there is no reason for me to spoil that. It’s egotistical of me to try to spoil their enjoyment.
I like to make original images that no one has ever seen before. That’s a tall task and, if I may complain for a moment, a bit of a thankless one. Most people don’t have a fondness for original images. We live in a society where big companies work hard and spend a lot of money trying to get people’s attention and entertainment dollars. And for the most part they are very good at it. As a consequence most people have characters and images they’ve loved for years. People love Mickey Mouse even though he hasn’t been anything but a corporate image for years and years. Put one of my images next to Mickey Mouse and way more people (maybe all of them) will be interested in the mouse. That’s the way it goes.
Being a comic book fan I occasionally draw other people’s characters but not that often. I’ve drawn a few comic book covers of Spider-Man, Batman, the Avengers, and others but not many. I’ve also draw an bunch of Marvel and DC superhero art cards but way more of my own art cards. I draw the superheroes to try and get a little bit of attention but it doesn’t usually work. It’s tough drawing a picture of Batman because you’re competing with a lot of good Batman drawings that artist have been doing for decades. But it does have its advantages.
I consider making a Batman drawing to be like celebrity photography. Taking a picture of a celebrity means that more people will look at it and like it than if the photo was of any old person. We all have favorite pictures of out favorite celebrities but is the picture really any good? A picture of a person who interests us is almost automatically more interesting to us than a picture of an unknown subject. How do we know if we really like the picture or the subject of the picture? It’s tough to know for sure.
I made two pictures in recent days. Or at least I made finished ink drawings of them. I made the pencil drawings a while ago and they’ve been sitting around waiting for me to make finished drawings of them. I finally decided to this week. I’ve been in the doldrums of creativity recently and that’s just what these pencil drawing I keep around are for. For some reason the finished ink part of the drawing comes easier to me when I’m not in a good creative mood. I can get behind the “Task” part of working with different ink techniques and get things done.
Finishing a drawing takes patience. I was lucky I had some of that on the day I finished the 15×10 inch piece “Communal Cup.” I say that because it took all day to do and until I pulled it together in the end it wasn’t thrilling me. That’s where experience and confidence come into play. I wasn’t happy all day with the piece. I have no explanation why except that I was in the doldrums in general. But I just kept picking away at it.
It’s a picture of five people standing around posing for a picture. They all have weird outfits on and one of them appears to be a giant. I rally like the way it came out. It speaks to me of five individuals gathered together to make a whole. The original pencil drawing didn’t have a lot of distinction between the different people. That all came in the inks. I wasn’t even sure how I wanted to make them distinct. I worked at it. First I made them all the same.
I did all the basic inking with a technical pen. Sometimes thats the easier way for me to work when I’m not feeling it. A pen and a French curve. I line up the curve along the pencil line and then drawn the pen across it. It doesn’t take a lot of creative energy. It’s a task that needs to be done. I worked like this for a lot of the day on and off as I tried to get something done. It wasn’t easy. Well, it was easy to do but it wasn’t easy to get myself to do it. Sometimes that’s the toughest part.
After I had all the technical pen lines done I pulled out my brush and had at it. I thickened lines and added textures and patterns. This took a while. I added a texture here then some more there and took a break. I repeated that pattern for a few hours. I added details in the hair and to the background. I even pulled out my Hunt 107 pen to make some thin single weight lines. I still wasn’t really into it but I kept going.
A strange thing happened at the end of the day. It all came together and I really liked it. I like the image. I liked the originality of it. All the people in in seemed to be different and feeling different things but they hang together as a group. It makes me feel good. It’s amazing that can happen with a piece that I wasn’t feeling good about making as I made it. I’m really glad I got it done.
The next day I inked a 9×12 inch piece called “Tip of the Game.” I didn’t like the way that one came out. It doesn’t make me feel anything. It’s just a miss for me. I have no interest in analyzing why. I’ll just move on the the next one.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got nine new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’ve recently been working on a lecture about my history with digital art. Here is part three of three.
My photography, and most everyone else’s, has been greatly affected by the digital age. I was an early adopter of digital. I bought my very first digital camera back at the turn of the century. It was a Nikon Coolpix 3.1 megapixel camera that I bought in the year 2000 ( a year that was once way off in the future and is now way off in the past). It cost a lot of money, somewhere around $800, but I was glad to be going digital. I don’t have any nostalgia for the era of film.
Before the age of the smartphone if you wanted to take photos you had to carry a camera. Around 1991 I bought my first pocket camera. It was a 35mm Olympus Stylus camera that was about the size of a large bar of soap. It wasn’t as small as today’s pocket cameras but it was small enough to carry with me every day. I became known as the guy who always had a camera so on occasion people would ask me to take a picture for them. That never happens anymore since everyone carries a camera now. Everyone is the guy who carries a camera.
I kept the prints from my film days in photo albums. In the early years of digital I kept that up because there was no other way to show people my photos. They weren’t going to look at photos on my computer. It was too inconvenient. I’d print them up myself at 4×6 inches and put them in albums for people to look at. My very last album has the date on it of April 2004 so I kept printing for four years after I went digital. It was only when I saw portable digital viewing devices on the horizon that I stopped printing my photos. It took a while to finally buy a digital photo album though. I got the first generation iPod Touch in September of 2007 for just this purpose but I had been looking around for something similar for years before I bought that one.
The initial price of going digital in 2000 was high but the cost of shooting and processing was low. A roll of film cost somewhere around $6 for 24 exposures and getting prints made was around $10. Digital had no film costs and I was printing the photos myself so it was cheaper but eventually I stopped printing them and had no cost.
No cost shooting also opened up street photography for me. I had tried it before and even bought a special film camera for it in the 1990s but it didn’t work out. I never got the hang of it and it was way too expensive to burn off shot after shot hoping to get something good. My street photography aspirations were put on hold.
Digital photography added one more thing to photography in general and that was instant results. That was a big thing. I could see if I got the shot right away. In the film days I had to wait until the film was processed, printed, and I could pick it up at the store to see the results. There was always a bit of excitement as I thumbed through the photos but there was inevitably disappointment too. I, and usually everybody else, missed more shots then I got. Plus whatever gathering or event I was taking photos at was long over so there were no second chances. With digital I’ve go the LCD screen to preview the photos before and after I take them. I can always take another a few seconds later if I decide I don’t like what I see.
It took one more innovation a few years after going digital to really affect my photo making. That was burst shooting. That’s when a camera will take multiple pictures as long as you have your finger on the button. My early digital cameras had poor burst shooting if any. There was a lot of lag time between photos as it saved them. I never really used it much. But then one of my new cameras, probably one I bought around 2008, had a burst mode that really worked. It was instantaneous as long as there was a lot of light and the shutter speed was fast.
Burst mode really opened up street photography for me. I like to take candid street photos so I stand far away so as not to bother people and take photos. With burst mode I could capture gestures, movements, changes in expression, and generally have a better chance of getting a good photo. A lot of photography is playing the odds. You have a better chance of getting a good photo if you take a thousand pictures as opposed to a hundred. Shooting in burst mode I can take about 5,000 photos in a five hour period when I’m down in NYC taking street photos. That would be near impossible and too expensive to do with film.
Sports mode on my camera has also changed my shooting. That’s a mode that’s made for taking photos of moving things. It keeps the autofocus moving and refocuses between shots. I’m pretty sure this mode was available on film cameras but I never used it. I never had a camera fast enough to exploit it and I wouldn’t want to burn through all that film anyway. With digital photography fast and cheap is built in. I only started using the mode when I started photographing bicyclists on the days they close Park Avenue to cars. I had been avoiding the mode until I got a new camera and decided to give it a try. Along with burst mode it worked great. It’s been a staple of mine ever since.
The digital age also changed post processing of photos. I was once limited by what a photo lab could do for me. I’d occasionally get 8×10 inch photos made but everything else was 4×6 inches. Now I can print them just about any size I want them. And then there is Photoshop. We can now manipulate photos in ways that weren’t even dreamed of in the film days. There are all the basics a photo lab could have done such as adjusting color and exposure but digital photo apps are so much more.
I have an iPad these days and not only can that take photos but there are tons of apps available to manipulate those photos. I look for apps that can do at least one thing well and juggle between them. I treat each app as if it were a layer effect. I do the effect, save the photo, open it in the next app, apply the effect, and repeat until I’m satisfied. A photo viewer that also edit your photos? Who could have ever dreamed that could happen in the pre-digital days.