Radiant Comics

Tinged with nostalgia. That’s what the glasses I’m looking through are. I say that because I decided to pull out some old artwork to write about and I picked some painted comic book pages that I made sometime in the mid 1990s. I really wish I had dated stuff back then but I didn’t. These pages are from when I was first learning to paint with gouache and I decided to paint a short ten page comic story. I figured that was the best way to do a lot of painting at different sizes and get a good learning experience. Looking back at the pages they are solidly mediocre but I can see the beginnings of how I later painted with gouache in a much better way.

I pulled out just two of the pages to look at because that’s all I need at the moment to give them a good examination. Each page is thirteen by nineteen inches and the first has five panels on it and the second six. That’s eleven small paintings. That’s a lot of painting.

The first page has the general style of the whole piece. There is an illustrative realism to it. I think I photo referenced a lot of the figures in the story so they came out a lot more life-like than if I tried to make them up out of my head. I think the first panel is pretty good. A close-up on a face and hand. I worked best with this technique at a larger scale. Every artist has a scale and mine tends to be large rather than small. The hand is a little thick and clunky and the hair lacks technique but I like the mouth and teeth. Still, I was never that good at realism. It doesn’t suit me. I like the geometry of the objects in the background better than the face in the foreground. I could have really made something out of that poster behind him.

Page one panel two is adequate at best. I like some of the shadows on the floor but the foreshortening on the arm and hand do not thrill me. I almost pulled off the rest of the figure but didn’t get any good shadows to root him to the spot. It’s not like he and the bed are floating but they almost are.

Panel three might be the second best panel on the page. The guy is painted okay and this time I almost pulled off a good hair technique. Illustrative painting is all about technique and I didn’t know enough of them. Of course that’s why I was doing this story. To learn. I like the hand this time and the watercolor marks behind the figure. The coat he has his hand on is only meh. Over all it’s the middle of the road.

Panel five is a complete failure. I did not get enough form in the coat he’s putting on. This one makes me wince.

Panel six is not terribly interesting. I can tell I put a bit of work into it but in the end it’s just a door on a screened in porch. The screen technique is almost there but not quite. I barely even noticed the car driving away in the background.

I was actually surprised when I flipped the page and saw the second page of these two. I can’t tell you the last time I looked at these pages but I bet it was twenty years ago. I don’t remember much of the story and it hasn’t sat well in my memory. I mostly remember it as a learning experience and not something to be proud of and show off. So it surprised me when I saw this bright green, red, and blue page.

The first two panels are more typical of the story. The close-up on the face is well done this time. I like the way it’s cropped and I think the sun glasses add some visual interest to it. Panel two is a solid little landscape. It isn’t spectacular but it’ll do.

It was panels three through six that surprised me and made me feel nostalgic. It looks like a flashback dream sequence (I’m not even sure since I can’t bring myself to read all the pages right now) so I moved it into the realm of the weird. As it turned out later in my artistic life the realm of the weird is where I excel.

In panel three the black shovel is particularly powerful. There are black borders throughout the pages but otherwise I wasn’t using much black at all. It was all color paint. So the sudden intrusion of a black silhouette is startling. The black shovel continues into the next two panels but mostly as a storytelling thing rather than a big presence like in panel three. Its presence gets bigger again in panel six as it gets bigger and cracks the dream head. I’m not sure about those shovel motion lines though.

It’s the color and line work that I like in panels three through six. The line work is mostly lines following the planes of the muscle forms but they vibrate well with the blue, red, and green all making my eyes go kablooey. It works. The story got interesting for me here.

It was these panels that triggered the feelings of nostalgia for me. The rest of the story was okay and an learned a lot doing it but in the end it was the weird panels that were my way forward. That’s not to say I didn’t try my hand at other realistic type techniques. I did continue with that after this but they all ended up nowhere. I’m just not a realistic artist.

Oddly enough despite realism not having a big place in the fine art world it’s generally the most encouraged form of art around. I think its that people respond best to it. If you can paint a chair that really looks like a chair people say, “Cool, that really looks like a chair.” But if you paint an odd creature from the edge of imagination they often have no idea how to react. So the real gets encouraged by default and artists try to paint that way even if it doesn’t suit them. And it didn’t suit me despite my trying.

What suited me was this dream sequence. I had drawn many dream like things before but I think this one showing up in an otherwise realistic endeavor made me realize I should abandon the real and enter the dream. It suits me. Now I’m nostalgic for that epiphany.

It’s a lot of work to look through photos. Especially if I’m looking through photos for ones I want to work with. To make into something. To create something out of. In these digital days it’s actually easier to look through photos than in the non-digital days but digital also means it’s a lot easier to take photo so therefore I have a lot more of them to look through.

I took my first photo class back in the Spring of 1985. I learned how a camera works and how to print black and white photos in the darkroom. Though I enjoyed working in the darkroom I only had access to one for that semester and the two after it. Since then I haven’t done a lick of darkroom work. I still took photos back in the film days but brought them to one of the many photo processing places that were around then. I would drop the film off and in a couple of days it would come back developed with four by six inch prints of each photo. Usually I would get double prints because it was only a dollar or so more.

What I took pictures of in those days were mostly friends and family at parties and gatherings. I kept the good photos in photo albums. Maybe half to two thirds of the pictures in any given roll of film were good enough to put in the album. I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the bad photos because often there was some piece of it that I liked. A face here, a figure there, maybe a part of the background, I could find something to like in most of the bad pictures. So I threw them into a box.

It wasn’t until sometime in the mid 1990’s when I saw some photos that David Hockney was doing, he was cutting them up and pasting them down, that it occurred to me that I could use just the good parts of the bad photos. I began cutting up my bad photos and rearranging them into something new. In order to do this I had to look through all the photos.

I had a box full of a few hundred four by six photos. It was a chore to look through them. Eventually I arranged them into a few topics, single person, a few people, a group of people, landscape, buildings, objects, and whatever else I could think of. That made it easier but it was still a chore. Especially since they weren’t good photos to begin with. But whenever I needed some pieces for a new work I trudged through them.

These days it’s a lot easier to look through photos on a screen. When I first went digital back in the late 1990s it was much harder. There weren’t many photo organizing apps and I had to open each photo in Photoshop to look at it. After a few years I found an app called Photogrid that I used all the time. It was made just for looking at photos. I’d point it to a folder of images and it would display them in a grid. Being that it was somewhere around the early 2000s the app was slow. I had to make 72dpi versions of all my hi-res photos in order to speed up their viewing.

These days there is all sorts of photo management software. Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and others make apps to help organize, view, and edit photos. I don’t use any of those. I organize my photos on the file and folder level. I decided, back before any of these programs came out, that I didn’t want to depend on one only to have the company change or discontinue it. I was spending a lot of time scanning and organizing my photos and that time would be wasted if I had to start over again because of some app I was using.

I mostly shoot street photos these days. I still take photos of my friends and family but there are not as many get togethers as there used to be. That and when I shoot street photos I use burst mode and shoot for a five or six hours on a Saturday. I can easily end up with four thousand images shooting that way (that would have been an impossibility with film and photo paper) and end up with a ton of photos to look through.

When I get home from taking street photos I make a new folder with the date, place, and any event that might have been happening. Usually it’s Bryant Park and street photos but sometimes it’s other parts of the city. It’s easy enough to look through the photos in the folder nowadays. I don’t even need an app. I just open the folder, hit command four, and the folder switches to “Cover flow” view and gives me a large preview of the photos. The I hit the up or down keys on the keyboard to scroll through the images. I can even look at them on my iPad these days. I have an app called “File Browser” that lets me use my iPad to look at files on my computer. It preview the photos on a grid and I can enlarge any one of them I want to see.

So now the physical aspect off looking through photos is much easier but the mental aspect is harder. I used to have a few hundred photos in a box. Now I have four thousand photos in a folder. And that folder is just for one day’s shooting. I usually choose just one day’s shooting at a time to look through. Today I picked the folder from September 10, 2016. It took me hours to look through and find something I wanted to work with. I scrolled through each photo, one by one, and as something caught my eye I’d look at the photos surrounding it to pick the best one. Then I’d mark it with a label and move one. Over and over until 4400 photos were looked at. Now I need a break.

I decided to revive an old favorite this week and do some drawing on stretched canvas. The first time I drew on stretched canvas was back in my art school days in and around the Fall of 1987. I started painting on stretched canvas the year before and did some drawing on the canvas then but that was fairly perfunctory drawing. It was a little bit of drawing that had to be done in order to complete a painting. But then in the Autumn of 1987 my paintings got more complex and so did my working drawings.

That Fall I made a series of about a dozen twenty four by thirty six inch paintings on stretched canvas. Or at least I think that was the size. It’’s been a long time since I painted them. I’m not even sure if I was drawing on the canvas for these or just transferring a working drawing over. There is a difference. If I was transferring a drawing then I would have made the drawing on paper and then used a grid to copy it onto the canvas. This is more like reconstructing a drawing on canvas rather than actual drawing. It’s more like putting a puzzle together than making art.

The following semester, in the Spring of 1988, I have a distinct memory of drawing on stretched canvas. That’s when I started working at a larger size, around three by four feet, and drawing directly on the canvas. I didn’t want to make working drawings and transfer them. I wanted to compose at the same large size I was painting at. Sometimes that makes a difference. I can work a composition out at a small size but then when things get blown up to a larger size the spacial relationships can change. What looks good at four by five inches might not look as good at four by five feet. That’s not always the case but sometimes it is.

Drawing on stretched and gessoed (a white paint used as a primer) canvas with a pencil is a little like working on rough sandpaper. The surface is really textured and it can wear a pencil down quickly. If I wanted to work on a smooth surface I’d have to add multiple coats of gesso and sand it down in between coats. That’s something I never did. I was okay with lots of surface. That’s what I was looking for with my paintings.

I can remember a fellow student, whose name escapes me all these years later, once wandered over to my part of the senior painting studios to admire one of my in progress paintings. It wasn’t even a painting yet since I was working on the pencil drawing. One of the things that happens when drawing on gessoed canvas is that you can’t really erase on it very well. I found that a brown gum eraser worked best (and crumbled fast) but even then there were grey smears left behind. That didn’t matter because they were going to be painted over but often I’d move things in the composition and I’d have to erase and that would leave ghost images behind. It was the inclusion of these ghost images that my fellow student was admiring. It gave the drawing a dimension of time that usually isn’t present in a work. He even suggested that a make a bunch of drawings on canvas that I didn’t paint over. I thought that was a good idea but never got to do it.

The drawings on canvas I’ve made since are not nearly as large. I haven’t done a lot of them either. I drew a few of them back in the mid-2000s when I started making eight by ten inch acrylic on canvas paintings. Those small paintings meant I had to do a little drawing on canvas (mostly transferring drawings though) and inspired me to make a finished drawing on an eight by ten inch canvas. That drawing was one of my female figure with lots of decorative elements around it. It ended up coming out okay but I only drew a couple of them.

Now it’s ten years later (after the eight by tens) and the memory of drawing on canvas came back to me. On some level I wish I could finally make those large drawings on canvas but I’m not that ambitions. I don’t have the energy, space, or money to make them. So I settled for some eight by ten inch ones. I already had a stack of blank canvases so I was good to go.

One of the reasons I wanted to draw on a stretched canvas was to make the drawing more of an object. A drawing on paper is flat and light. A Drawing on stretched canvas is however thick the canvas is. In this was the canvas is three quarters of an inch thick. That makes the drawing more of an object that a if it was on paper. It makes the drawing seem a little more important since its solid.

I can remember using a soft 6B pencil back in 1988. I use a 4B or 6B on paper all the time. I tried using one again on the smaller canvas but I found the pencil to be too soft. It made too much of a mess as a lot of the graphite didn’t stick to the canvas. I ended up using a much harder 3H pencil. A 3H is very light when I use it on paper but since the canvas really shreds the graphite it is much darker on the canvas.

The process is simple. I made a drawing on a six by nine inch piece of paper, scanned it, blew it up to eight by ten inches, print it out, and then transferred the drawing to the canvas. I used graphite paper to transfer the drawing. That means I put a sheet of graphite paper between the printout of the drawing and the canvas. Then I took my 3H pencil and drew right on top of my drawing. The pressure of my pencil transferred the graphite onto the canvas. It only makes a light line though so I have to pay attention.

After the drawing was transferred I had to redraw the whole thing. I had to press down hard and dark, give it some line weight, figure out a little more of the design, and fill in the dark areas. All while trying to keep the canvas neat and clean. It took me about three hours to make the drawing. I think it would have taken me half that time if I drew it on paper. But I wanted an object.

I’ve been in some creative doldrums lately. I haven’t been able to get anything big done. I’ve gotten small stuff done but that somehow doesn’t seem satisfactory. It’s odd how there is certain stuff I consider basic that I always get done but since I always get it done I don’t consider it as accomplishing anything. If I add it all up it’s an accomplishment but it’s hard to see since it’s not big like a painting or a drawing.

The first thing I always get done is my webcomic posted on this very site. I’ve posted over 2100 of my “Four Talking Boxes” strips. That’s a lot. Way back on January first of 2010 when I posted the first strips it was cool to get them done. I worked hard to figure out how to do a comic strip I would have time for. It took two years of false starts before I came up with my method.

The first part of the method was that I made my own clip art of my six characters. That took two months or so. I drew six different versions of each of their heads plus six different versions of their bodies. I drew those versions all facing left and then turned them around so that they were facing right too. In the end I had 36 versions of each character to chose from.

The next part of the method is to write the strip. In the beginning I used to write it at night. Whenever I could. Sometimes one a night and sometimes three a night when I fell behind. Each week I’d get five strips done that I’d post three months from when they were finished. When I started out the strip in January of 2010 I was months ahead with finished strips and I’ve kept up with that pace.

A few years ago I switched to writing in the morning. After I shower and I’m getting ready for the day I write. I have a template with four boxes and eight balloons in it that I write in. It takes anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes to write a strip and after I’m done I have breakfast. It’s part of my routine now so getting it done almost doesn’t count with me as getting something done. Weird.

I used to put together five strips on Thursdays. It just ended up that way. I got them done on Thursdays for a long time. Now I get three of them done on Sundays and two more done on Mondays. Or maybe on Saturday or Sunday. Or maybe all five on Sunday. I’ve mixed it up lately.

Another thing I’ve gotten done lately is drawings in my ink book. Those are my basic drawings that generate a lot of my ideas. Eight or nine small ink drawings a page in a 5.5 x 8.5 inch sketchbook. I get eight or nine pages a month done at about an hour a page. I’m on ink book eighteen and have been doing this for seventeen years. That’s a long time and a lot of drawings. It’s an accomplishment but it doesn’t feel like one because I expect that of myself. It’s basic to me. Even if it feels like I’m just spinning my wheels I can get it done.

I have managed to make a few of my faux comic book covers in the last month but not a ton of them. Last year I got a ton of them done but I haven’t been anywhere near that pace so far this year. Being that I can do then in stages, pencils, inks, and colors, I can pull one out at any time and work on the stage I want to. I finished up coloring some a couple of weeks ago but haven’t grabbed any since. I have over fifty of them done in my “Dreams of Things” series and, once again, this is an accomplishment but it doesn’t feel like one. After I do them I put them away. If they’re not lying around it doesn’t seem like I did them.

One of the things I do to help myself feel my accomplishments is to pull things out of their drawers and folders and put them all on display for myself. It’s sort of like putting on a one man show for one man. I imagine it would be a lot cooler if more people could see it but such is life.

Another thing I’ve gotten done is my “Drifting and Dreaming” strip. Or at least I’m done a bunch of cartoon art cards for it. Those I also do in stages. First I get a blank 2.5×3.5 baseball card size piece of Bristol board and then I draw a border around it and a word balloon on top. Second I draw a face in ink. I get ten of those black and white drawings done. I can do one in five to ten minutes and knock one off here and there.

After I get ten of them done I put guide lines in the balloons for lettering and then I write them. First I write in pencil so that I get my spacing correct and then I letter them in ink. I usually do all ten of them at the same time. The next step is to color them. That’s as you might imagine. I use my markers and color in the lines. Lots of little shapes and lots of capping and uncapping.

The last thing I can think of that I get done all the time is this very blog. I’ve been writing it once a week for over twelve years. That’s a long time. For the first five years the length of the posts would vary but for the last seven it’s been at least a thousand words a week. I think that’s when I started writing in a program that counts the words. I haven’t missed a week and that’s quite an accomplishment. If only such accomplishments meant anything in the world at large. Oh well, I’ll have to motivate myself in my small world.

The Super Bowl happened this past Sunday night. As a football fan I enjoy the big game in general but as a fan of the New York Giants I was not particularly interested in this one. The New England Patriots played the Philadelphia Eagles. The Patriots are perennial winners and I’m as tired of seeing the Patriots and Tom Brady win as anyone so I had no interest in cheering for them. The Eagles are a rival of the Giants I had no interest in cheering for them either. So though I enjoyed the game I was emotionally distant from it as I watched. That’s just the way the Super Bowl is sometimes.

That distance made me ponder some of the aspects of the game that I might not usually ponder if I was caught up in the drama. Specifically the game got me thinking about how the NFL defines what a catch is. It sounds like a simple thing to define but in recent years a rules change and the advent of super slow motion high definition replays have changed things and made it so that no one knows if a catch is a catch until after the referees look at the replay and say so.

There were two instances in the Super Bowl when it came into play that the referees had to decide via replay if a catch was a catch. Both of the replays went the way of the Eagles and the referees confirmed that the Eagles receivers caught the ball. But it looked to me, and to the announcers of the game, that the call could easily have gone the other way and have it be declared that there was no catch. As a matter of fact the announcers were expecting it to go the other way.

It used to be that in order to make a catch the ball could not touch the ground. That makes sense. I like that rule. Any six year old knows that if you’re having a catch and the ball touches the ground that string of catches is over. You have to start again with one catch. The whole idea of a catch is to not let the ball touch the ground. But back in 2000 there was a playoff game where a Buccaneer’s wide receiver caught the ball but it scrapped the ground as he fell. On replay the referees declared it not a catch because of that. The Bucs and their fans were angry and thought the catch should count. They argued that the wide receiver had total control of the ball and it hitting the ground was incidental. The NFL must have agreed and changed the rule so that that the ball could touch the ground as long as the receiver maintains control of the ball. I never liked this new rule. I still think the ball should never touch the ground in order for it to be a catch. But that’s not the real problem.

The problem with the catch rule as it’s continued to be interpreted over the years is that notion of the ball being under the control of the receiver doesn’t hold water. The full rule is that the receiver has to get two feet in bounds, control the ball with his hands or arms, and maintain control of the ball long enough to make a football move. Plus the receiver has to maintain control of the ball if he falls on the ground. That’s an awful lot of rules about control. The problem as I see it is that the NFL’s notion of control defies all other sports notions of control and sometimes also the laws of physics.

First lets look at baseball. When a pitcher is doing really well and can throw the ball wherever he wants, in or out of the strike zone, they say he has great control. The ball ends up 90 feet away from the pitcher but it’s still seen as him controlling the ball. Why? Because the forces he enacts on the ball controls where the ball ends up. Unless some other force acts on the ball between when the pitcher throws it and when it hits the catcher’s mitt it’s considered to be a product of the pitcher’s control.

In basketball when someone can run and dribble the ball really well he’s considered to be a great ball handler. He controls the ball really well. Dribbling a basketball consists of dropping the ball, letting it bounce up to your hand. And pressing down on the ball again so it goes back to the floor. You’re not even allowed to hold the ball in your hand. Unless some other force acts upon the ball as you’re dribbling your considered to have control of the ball.

Jugglers are masters of controlling balls. Juggling consists of throwing at least three balls into the air with only two hands to manipulate them. In order for it to work at least one ball has to always be in the air. The juggler is considered to be in control of all three balls. Why? Because the balls have to follow the laws of physics. The juggler knows exactly when to throw and catch and exactly where the balls are and have to be. Even if the ball is in the air the juggler is still in control of it. But not in the NFL.

The NFL, with it’s hi-def, super slo-mo cameras now looks for any ball movement as a player is making a catch. If they see ball movement they could consider the ball not under the player’s control. The problem is that ball movement doesn’t mean the ball isn’t under the player’s control. First of all the ball is always moving. Catching a ball is an action. All of the other parts of what makes up a catch are also actions. The player is running, getting his feet down in bounds, and moving his hands to catch a moving ball. Then suddenly the rules call for inaction to define a catch. The ball has to not move within the context of a player’s arms and hands. That defies logic.

One play this year defines to me why the current interpretation of the rule drives people crazy. In a Jets’ game a player caught the ball. As he fell to the ground he, according to the NFL, lost control of the ball and failed to regain control before going out of bounds. What actually happened was that he caught the ball, his arms loosened for a moment, and then he tightened his grip again. With the hi-def, super slo-mo camera you could see the ball was “Loose” as it was between his arms but it was still between his arms. There was no place for it to go. Even though, for a fraction of a second, he wasn’t touching it he was still in control of it. The ball was a bird in a cage. We consider a bird in a cage under control even if it can still move around in the cage. Anything in a cage is considered under control but not in the NFL.

Lot’s of NFL fans and commentators have been complaining about the current interpretation of the rule. That’s because they say the rule doesn’t pass the “Eye test.” That’s when our eyes tell us that it’s a catch but the rules say it’s not. I say the rule doesn’t pass the eye test because we know from countless other sports that “Control” doesn’t need to be defined by being in constant contact with a ball. According to the NFL catch rules a juggler is not in control of the balls he’s juggling. The problem is that we all know he is. That’s what makes a juggler different than the rest of us.