Radiant Comics

I wrote a piece last year about looking through photographs and here I am writing about the same thing again. I only have one thing to say about it right now and that’s that it takes a long time. Normally when I look through photographs I don’t have a specific idea in mind and I look through them for something that sparks an idea. This time I have a specific idea and since it’s far from what I usually do it’s taking even extra time.

I’ve taken a lot of street photos over the years. On any give trip into NYC I can take four thousand photos. That’s the age of digital photography for you. Set the camera on burst mode and then keep taking pictures. What would cost me four hundred dollars to do with a film camera costs nothing when shooting digital. I easily have tens of thousands of street photos in my “Bryant Park and Street Photos” folder on my hard drive.

Most of my street photos are about casual moments. They’re taken of people on the street from far away who don’t usually know I’m there. I like to try and capture moments in time that are not usually recorded. Quiet moments here and there of people going about their ordinary lives. I often don’t even know what I’m shooting in a conscious way. I’m looking for anything or anyone that catches my eye, composing the shot, taking the burst of photos, and them moving on. It’s a fast moving process and I’m almost never thinking about the shot I just took. I’m thinking about the next one. And thinking might not even be the correct work. It’s more like I’m reacting to what is going on around me.

I’ve ended up with a few unintentional themes over the years as I shoot in and around Bryant Park in Manhattan. Since Bryant Park and the Midtown Library (which is connected to the park) are big tourist destinations there are always people taking photos there. So I’ve taken a lot of photos of people taking photos. A subcategory of “Photos of people taking photos” is one I call “I wonder what his or her selfie looks like?” Those are when I take a photo of someone taking a selfie. There are a lot of people out on the streets of NYC taking selfies.
I also have a couples theme. Couples in the park, sitting, standing, or doing whatever. The park can be a romantic attraction. One final theme is photos of tourists posing for photos. There is a lot of posing going on near the famous Midtown library and their sculptures of lions. They also have a grand building with columns and a great set of steps to take photos on. So I take photos of people posing for their tourist photos.

This time I was looking for none of my usual moments to make finished photos out of. This time I decided I wanted to try and make a photo of NYC in general. Sort of a generic photo any tourist would want to take home with them after a trip to the city. Sounds easy right? At least it sounded easy to me but then I discovered I don’t take many of those types of photos. Almost all of my photos are of people and not places. Photos of NYC are of places.

I remember taking some generic place photos because sometimes I’d find myself in a spot and think “This is an interesting spot” and take a picture. Turns out that thought didn’t occur very often. So far I’ve looked through about 10,000 photos and pulled out a dozen that I though would suit my needs. And none of them jumped out at me.

In order to break the tedium of looking through all those photos I’ve been taking breaks and drawing some faces. My “Drifting and Dreaming” comic needs some drawing done for it so that’s what I’ve been doing. It fits in well with the looking through photos. I only have to draw one face at a time so I can concentrate for a bit on that and then put it down until the next one. It’s easier than working on a big drawing that takes hours of concentration.

I used to draw when I went to Bryant Park. I would take my painting kit with me. A set of pan gouaches, paper to paint on, a container of water, and a paint rag. Bryant Park has a bunch of chairs and tables in it so it was good for painting in. I wasn’t painting the scenery or anything like that. I was painting the same weird paintings that I made at my home studio. I think that’s why I eventually stopped painting at the park at all. I never made a good painting there. Or at least a painting that was in any way distinguishable from the ones I made with much more ease and comfort in my studio. It got to be a bother.

I had been learning how to take street photos at about this time. At first I’d paint a bit and then walk around and take some street photos and then paint some more. After a couple of years the street photos took over and the painting and drawing went back to the studio. After all there was no reason to travel all the way into NYC to do the same thing I was doing at home. Taking street photos was something I couldn’t do at home so it was better to concentrate on that.

That brings us to me ten years later looking through a huge digital pile of those street photos. I’ve looked through them many times before and some stand out in my memory but most don’t.

Once again I decided to pull a painting off my shelf to look at and write about. It’s been sitting on my shelf among my other 8×10 acrylic on canvas paintings for quite a while. I’ve got a lot of them on those shelves and they’re in various envelopes, bags, and boxes to keep the dust and light off them so I don’t often get to see them often. This one in named “Annie Enigma” and had the date I finished it on the back. October 3, 2006. Wow, this painting is going to be twelve years old this Fall. Time sure flies.

The first thing I notice about this painting is that I nailed the simplicity. It’s made up of only eleven colors, five of which are shades of blue, and only a few visible brush strokes. The color has a very flat and even surface. My acrylic painting has gone in a busier direction in the last five years so seeing a painting that captures a face and hair with such simplicity looks novel to me right now. I think I managed to capture something nice in this one.

The main color in the painting is blue. At first glance I thought there were only three blues in the hair but there are five. In the hair in front of her face I used two shades of blue and in the hair behind her face I used three other shades of blue. That is a lot of shades but they work well together. They remind me that I used to have a lot of different shades of paint mixed and at my disposal.

One of my habits I developed when I first started to paint in acrylics in the early 2000s was to save my paints in small plastic containers called cubbies. I would buy tubes or jars of acrylic paint but even though I bought many varieties of colors that wasn’t enough. I would usually need a slightly redder version of a purple, a lighter version of blue, a greener yellow, or some such. Color right out the tube is great but mixing my own colors from them was essential.

I was always searching for the perfect shade of a color to make my painting with. As a consequence I mixed a lot of paints. After I’d mix the color I wanted I’d save the extra in a cubby and place it in my box of paints. I’d even put a sticker on the cubby with what paints were used for the mixture for when I needed more. I ended up with about ten different shades of blue to chose from and the five I picked for this painting work well.

Alas, I haven’t been doing a ton of acrylic painting in recent years so much of the paint in those cubbies has dried out and is useless now. When I made an acrylic painting a month ago I had to start all over again with my color mixing. As a consequence I don’t think that new painting has the same subtlety of color as this one does. That doesn’t make the new one worse but it is different.

The black line on this painting also looks good. It’s a really dark and rich black. When I first started painting with a black line, way back when I was in college, I learned about Ad Reinhardt and how he mixed his black paint for his all black paintings. He would start with color paint and then keep adding more colors into the mix until there was so much pigment it made black.

I tried this technique to mix the black for the black line of my painting and it worked out pretty well. I kept at it over the years because I liked it but every now and then I mixed a black that was extra special. I never kept a recipe for it because it was too complicated to keep track of but every time I mixed one of these extra dark special blacks I wished I had. I think this painting has one of these blacks. Or at least the black line sure seems to be extra dark and shiny to me. It could be that I’ve been using a more subtle purple line for the last five years or so but the black line really pops for me.

Her face is a straight-from-the-tube color. It’s portrait pink. I like it. I had a lot of different pinks mixed that I used for faces but this color worked best when I was looking for a vibrant pink that bordered on the unrealistic. I also notice that I didn’t draw a nostril on her nose as I often do in a side view of a face. That allows the pink color not to be interrupted by a black shape and makes the pink work as an object a little bit better.

The lips stand out not only because they are the main red in the painting but because the red paint has been applied thicker than the rest of the painting. That gives the lips a little more literal and figurative volume as compared to the rest of the face. They’re in a spotlight.

I think the orange headbands are from a tube of orange paint that I liked a lot but they stopped making it. It was a Windsor Newton paint and I can’t remember the name of it. I was sad when I read they stopped making it. They replaced it with another orange but I liked this orange better. Oh, well.

The final thing to comment on are the green lines and colored dots. They are at a minimum in this painting compared to others I’ve made but they serve a function beyond the decorative. The green lines hem in the composition and keep the eye from wandering off the top and bottom of the canvas and the blue and red dots add the sweep of a line without interfering visually with the other lines in the piece. The green lines also help balance the eye color.

Overall I’d say this is one of my better 8×10 acrylic on canvas paintings.

I’ve been working in video a bit lately. Nothing big but I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to present my artwork on video do I can post it on YouTube, Instagram, and wherever else I can. So far it hasn’t been an easy nut to crack. The main problem is that my art is static and video moves. How do I marry those two concepts? People have been trying to film art and artists for a long time and it’s not easy because art really has to be seen in person and at size to be appreciated. That and it generally takes a long time to make a piece of art and there isn’t a lot of action to it.

More often than not artists have faked making art for the camera to make it more interesting. Big sweeping gestures and fast motion look good on film but making art is mostly small gestures and slow build up. I’ve made lots of videos of me drawing but when I do I draw small, 5×7 inches, and in my automatic drawing style. That way I can finish a piece in about 15 minutes of non-stop action.

I even made a couple of videos showing me drawing large drawings. I uses the same automatic drawing method only on a larger scale. The drawings were 20×30 inches and drawn in a thick black marker. The videos came out okay but I don’t think the increase in scale helped at all. After all the final video is the same size no matter what the size of the drawing. So a 5×7 inch drawing looks about the same on screen as a 20×30 inch drawing does.

Nether of those approaches helped my because I was thinking more about presenting a drawing than filming one. At least the marker moved when I was drawing so there was something going on. With the art already made what was there to do besides hold it up? That was my question and I had no answer. It held me up for a long time.

I finally started shooting some video over the last two days. I’ve been pondering this problem for ages and came up with no solutions so I finally decided to just start. I actually did some other stuff along these lines a couple of years ago. I wanted to do a pop-up art show so I brought some small pieces with me to Bryant Park, showed them off on camera, and then posted them on YouTube. It wasn’t very successful by any measure. I didn’t like it very much and neither did anyone else. It wasn’t terrible but it had no hook. No idea behind it to grab anyone.

I shoot my regular YouTube comic book haul videos very simply. I use my iPad to recored the video in pieces. I point the camera at the comic with me off-screen and talking. Each comic gets it’s own little one or two minute video and then I put them all together in iMovie on the iPad. I do it that way in case I get interrupted or hem and haw too much as I’m speaking. It’s an easy way to do it. There is no real video editing as I’m just adding one video onto the end of another. It’s nothing special but it works and I like the results.

When I’m making a heads-up video for YouTube (that’s one where I’m facing the camera and talking rather than aiming the camera at comic books) I use my digital camera rather than my iPad. I started doing that back when I had an iPad 2. That devices’s forward facing camera is of lower resolution than its rear one. So I couldn’t see the screen if I was recording myself on the iPad 2. I got a new iPad last Christmas so that’s not a concern anymore but I still use my digital camera for the heads-up work. It’s just habit at this point.

I’ve taken to making Instagram videos in recent months to show off my artwork. They’re also simple though. For years I’ve showed photos of my art on Instagram but with video I decided to show my face on because I think it helps humanize my art. It helps people understand that a person makes this stuff. It’s mostly just me holding top some art. Not the most exciting thing there is but the videos are short. With the last few videos I’ve taken to changing the angles around and moving the art a bit. It’s not the most spectacular video but I’m trying.

So far most of the shots I’ve made are me and the art. I made a video about some Batman sketch covers I’ve drawn. I took some video of me standing and holding the comic and sitting and holding the comic. In order to get some movement I put the comics on the easel behind me and would turn around, grab them, and show them to the camera. I’d even move them across the camera.

I’ve also taken some shots of the art by itself. I placed the comics on my drawing table and panned across them. I came up with a little drop for some of my art card stuff too. I set up the camera on my drawing table, held an art card in front of it, and then let the art card fall flat onto the desk. I still haven’t perfected that drop but I’m working on it.

I did cut the video of me holding the comics, moving them off the easel, and the still shots into a final video. I tried to cut it pretty sharply but not quite in that YouTube remove all the air from in-between the words staccato style that’s so popular on YouTube. I may try something in that stye eventually but until then this is all I have.

“Nothing. I’ve got nothing.” That’s one of my moods. It’s also a quote that comes from my Marvel Comics days back in the mid 1990s. I’d guess 1995 if I had to. In those days Marvel was in the middle of transitioning from traditional cut and paste publishing to newfangled desktop publishing. As a consequence we in the Bullpen were figuring out how to do our jobs on computers instead of on drawing tables.

The computers we were using were Apple computers running System 7. That was the name of Apple’s operating system at the time and I remember it because the sound files it used were called “System 7 Sounds.” It used those sound files even into System 8. I remember that because we made a lot of System 7 sounds. Computers were fairly new at the time. They weren’t everywhere like they are today. No one carried one all day to make phone calls on. We were discovering new things about the computers all the time in the beginning of our desktop publishing days and one of our most fun discoveries was playing sound bites and alert sounds.

Alerts sounds are those little beeps a computer makes when it wants to let you know something. They’re sort of what ring tones are today because back then you could customize them. You might still be able to customize them but I haven’t bothered to in decades. But back then when everything was fresh and new we were customizing sounds all the time. Plus we were recording each other.

There were two ways to make System 7 sounds. One was to sample things from already existing sound files such as movies or TV shows and then you would click on the System 7 sound file to play the sound. We played a lot of sound bites from the movie “Aliens” and from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I swear I can still hear a lot of those sounds in my head. We used to use them all the time to punctuate conversations and amuse ourselves. “Help, help, I’m being oppressed!” became part of our everyday landscape.

The second way to make System 7 sounds was to record them and record them we did. The Macs came standard with a microphone and it was a good thing they did because they used their own proprietary mic jack in those days. No standard eighth inch jack for Apple. They had to make their own. So we’d all say goofy things into the mic to make sound drops out of. Over the months a few favorites developed.

One of my favorites happened one day as my friend John was randomly recording stuff. He shouted across the room at Thomas to get him to say something. Thomas responded “I got nothing.” Then you can hear John say “Say it again.” Thomas responds more loudly, “I’ve got nothing!” That’s it. That’s the extent of the exchange caught as a System 7 sound but it still resonates with me. It’s a mood. I’ve got nothing.

I haven’t played that sound bite in a long time but it’s still alive in my head. To this day whenever I’m trying to get something done, think of something to do, or generally try to motivate myself and fail that sound bite goes off in my head. “I’ve got nothing. Say it again. I’ve got nothing!” It encapsulates that mood so perfectly.

I bring this up because of my mood cards. They’re something I came up with this week to add to my art card oeuvre. They aren’t ground breaking or fancy but more along the lines of simple things. First I have to think up a mood. Not things like happy, sad, or chilly but more succinct. I pulled out one of my little writing notebooks and wrote things down in it that I felt during the day. Hopefully pithy things but not always.

Along with “I’ve got nothing” I have other ones like “Is this a live show? Because I want a second take” and “Something weird made me smile.” It’s not easy to put moods into words but so far I’ve been able to write down about twenty five of them in a week. It’s a strange thing but in order to write these I have to be on the lookout for whenever I feel something that can be put into words in a way that people can relate to. It’s also hard not to fall into the negative. There are a lot of bad moods a person can be in and I’ve found that dwelling in those is not very amusing. I’ve been trying to keep it positive.

After I’ve got my mood and decided I want to work with it I get one of my 2.5×3.5 pieces of Bristol board and start the lettering. I chose to go with a freeform lettering style and not even rule lines to letter between. I try my best to make them straight by hand. First I write the sentences in pencil to get my spacing correct and then I letter right over top of the pencil with an ink marker. I’ve been using a black .5mm Copic Multiliner for that task. I have other pens that work just as well but the Copic handles the task of erasing the pencil lined best. Given the chance to dry the Copic marker doesn’t smear when I erase over it. I lot of other markers smear. Even if I leave it all day to dry.

Then I draw my mood. That’s not an easy task. I draw the face of a character with simple lines. I try to muster up the mood on my face and then look in the mirror and draw what I see. Trying to find just the right little cartoon takes some doing. I draw it in pencil first and then ink it. Since it’s so small I’ve been inking them with a pen rather than my usual brush. I ink the letters, ink the face, wait for the ink to dry, and then erase all the pencil lines and it’s done. I’ve been keeping these in black and white. I think that helps with the mood. Color would create a mood of its own and maybe interfere with the drawing’s mood.

Nothing. I’ve got nothing.