Radiant Comics

I feel like writing at the moment but can’t think of anything I want to write about. That happens. Sometimes I look for an idea but I can’t find one. So I looked around for a moment and decided to write about one of the first things I saw. Two of my Tiny Monster Art Cards. That’s the one good thing about writing about my own art, I have a lot of it laying about the place. So if I can’t start out with an idea as I write maybe I can end up with one. Or maybe it’s just an exercise in writing. That’s okay anyway. I can always use some exercise.

In looking at the two Tiny Monster Art Cards that have dates and numbers on the backs of them. The purple skinned fella is number 26 and has the date of June 20, 2015 on it. The red skinned fella is number 38 and has the date of June 29, 2015 on it. These dates might be a little misleading because I did these cards in two stages. First I drew them in black and white and that’s the way they were supposed to stay. They’re art cards so they’re 2.3×3.5 inches, the size of baseball cards, and I originally drew a whole bunch of them. Probably around forty of them. Sometimes I get into a particular thing for a short while. I probably liked the pen I was drawing them in and had a good time drawing little monster cards. Then they sat for a while.

I just checked my calendar where I write down such things and it wasn’t until November that I added color to these cards. I was probably having a hard time figuring out what I wanted to work on, saw the black and white cards, and decided they needed a bit of color. That happens to me from time to time. Often deciding what to do is the hardest thing for an artist. If it’s work that you’re getting payed for it’s easy to figure out what to do. It’s whatever you’re getting paid to do. But when you’re on you’re own making art figuring out what is the best use of your time and effort isn’t easy. That’s why I like little things like these cards. They can keep me going when I can’t figure out a direction. They may not quite be bread crumbs pointing me in a direction but they’re bread crumbs I can eat until a big meal comes along.

First of all these Tiny Monsters are cute monsters. They’re not very scary or terrifying. They may be weird but they’re not giving anyone nightmares. They might not be so cute that they make people say, “Awwwww…” but no one is looking away in horror. They’ve got fairly cute proportions. That means they have big heads for their body size. What keeps them from being really cute is that their eyes are not so big. One of the cute rules is the bigger the eyes the cuter the drawing. In these the eyes are just big enough to be easily seen.

These were ink drawing which means I didn’t do any pencilling first. I drew in ink and so couldn’t erase anything. So I kept it simple. The masters are standing there not in complex poses. They’re just being. I also drew the legs very short. This helps with the composition as it makes the monsters rectangular so they can fill up the space of the card better plus it makes them appear a little bigger. That’s because it’s their upper bodies that look more muscular and that’s what we count for “Big”. If I was to draw them as if they were nine feet tall on these little cards they’d probably end up looking tall and slender. It’s better to go for big and broad.

The color is made with my Copic markers. Though I like markers of all types the Copic brand ones have ended up being my favorite because they are refillable. It’ll cost you a bit up front. A marker and refill are about six dollars a piece but for your twelve dollars you get the equivalent of about ten markers. That’s a lot plus you get the security of knowing that your marker isn’t going to run out on you in the middle of a drawing leaving you high and dry. You can refill it and keep going. It took me a few years to build up a stock of markers and refills but as of now I’m all set. It’s funny though because I always see new brands and types of markers that I want to try, some even refillable, but in the end I decide I’m pretty well set so there is no reason to spend extra money.

Of course the best thing about markers is that they’re instant color and the color is dry and stable the moment you put it down. As much as I like paint it’s not instant. Watercolor is the fastest of the paints and even that take a few minutes to dry as I use it. But not marker. Lay it down and it’s done. That makes it fun to work with.

As I look at these two cards I notice I took opposite approaches with the colors. On one I made the skin tone a bright color and the shirt a neutral and on the other I made the shirt a bright orange and kept the skin close to a neutral. With both I went for brown shoes to ground the drawing a bit. It’s mostly simple color with only a hint of shading but I generally find the color to be effective. It gives a little life to the drawings. I like the choice I made of a light yellow halo around the figures. It’s subtle but lifts them off the background just a bit. The yellow and white fight a little to see which is going to be the whitest white of the piece and that gives it some life.

There you go. A couple of little drawings that gave my writing a little life for a bit.

Home printers can be tricky things. Especially when trying to make high quality art prints with them. I’ve been making prints on home printers for a couple of decades now. All the way back to when you could see the dots of an inkjet printer with the naked eye. Problems still crop up out of nowhere just like they did way back in the 1990s.

I’ve had a Canon printer for about the last five years. A Pro 9000 Mark II. Before that I used Epson printers for about 15 years. I finally abandoned Epson (the Stylus Photo R1800 being my last one) because I had too many problems over the years with clogged print heads. My R1800 worked perfectly 98% of the time but that 2% that it wasn’t working perfectly could eat up a lot of time and money. It eventually became frustrating enough for me to try a new brand when the time came to get a new printer.

The Canon wasn’t without its frustrations. Mostly because it turned out that there was a flaw in the model I bought and it would just stop working never to run again. A month after I bought the printer it died. Turns out this was a known flaw so Canon sent me a new one very quickly. The new one lasted a week. Canon sent me a third one and that one has been running fine these last five years. I’d have to say it runs perfectly as close to 100% of the time as possible because I don’t remember losing a lot of time or money to it. Except for yesterday.

Most printer manufacturers tell you to only use genuine whatever-their-brand-is products. Usually this means ink and paper. I’ve found that to be true with the ink. As much as it pains me to have to buy super-expensive printer ink the knock-off stuff doesn’t work as well when trying to make high quality prints. I’ve learned that the hard way. Paper is another story. There are a lot of third party companies that make good inkjet paper. Most of them will work with any inkjet printer you’ve got. I even still use a lot of Epson paper with my Canon printer. Epson’s matte finish papers are among my favorites for price and quality. I use them all the time.

I also like to print on semi-gloss or luster photo paper. I’ve used various brands of luster paper from Epson to Canon to whatever I could find. Over the last few years I’ve been printing out some of my street photos on five by seven inch luster paper and I keep one of the photos on my drawing table on a little easel and then change it out even few days. As a result I’ve tried a few different brands of five by seven inch paper but have lately settled on one by a company called Inkpress Media. They make some nice paper and it’s reasonably priced. I’ve been cranking out some small photos on it for months now.

At Christmas time I often make photos as presents for my family. I take old family photos, jazz them up a bit, and put them in frames. Usually these photos are on eight and a half by eleven inch paper. I was almost out of paper that size so I ordered some. I decided to go with the Inkpress Media paper that had served me well at five by seven and bought some eight and a half by eleven sheets of it. I made my photos, printed them out, and put them in frames. But as I was doing this I began to notice an odd problem. The bottom corners of the photos looked a little dirty. A tiny amount of ink was on them. Maybe a quarter inch long and a thirty second of an inch wide bit of black ink. Not a lot. I had seen it from my printer before but it really didn’t matter on these prints. I was busy too so I pretty much ignored it.

Cut to a few weeks later, I’m trying to make some fine art prints, and here come the little smudges. An art print has to be perfect so that won’t fly. That meant trouble-shooting. As I printed a photo I could hear the printer doing a weird thing at the end of the printing process. It’s like it was grabbing the paper and shaking it. I think that’s what was making those marks. Otherwise the print was fine. I opened the printer utility software and used that clean the heads, rollers, and whatever else they had. It made no difference. I looked online and couldn’t find many answers. I changed all my printer presets and toggled between different settings. None of it made the slightest bit of difference. There was that weird printer skip noise at the end and there were those smudges. 99% of the print was fine but that last 1% was not.

I must have changed things ten times and printed out ten prints all to no avail. I was getting frustrated before I decided to change one last variable. The paper. I had already printed low res on plain paper and that seemed fine but I figured that was because there was far less ink used. I got out some Canon photo paper, used the same preset as I had before, and it printed out perfectly. No weird hesitation sounds and no ink smudges. I was baffled. Still am. The Inkpress Media paper worked fine at the five by seven inch size so how come it failed in such a weird way at the larger size? I have no idea.

Also I was printing the photos with white around them. About a quarter inch of white all around. So it’s not like the smudged ink was near the ink of the actual photo. The printer should have just left it white and kicked out the photo. But it didn’t. The printer hesitated near the end and dropped some in smudges on at the last moment. It’s like it was sabotaging the photos because they were on another brand of paper. Strange.

I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions but I thought I’d write a little about what video work I want to do in the near future. I’m not resolving to do any of it but writing things down helps me figure things out. Nothing focuses my mind on a topic like having to write about it. I’m pretty good figuring things out as I go along but sometimes writing is the best way of figuring for me.

I originally started my YouTube channel a couple of Mays ago. I wanted to start working in video a little. Nothing fancy. It’s mostly comic book haul videos where I just point the camera and show comics. That’s easy to do. From there I made a couple music videos last year. I stitched together a bunch of my street scene videos and added music to it. Once again nothing spectacular but it helped me to learn some stuff. I’ve continued with the comic book haul videos since they’re simple but not with the music videos because they take a remarkably long time.

This Fall I even started a second YouTube channel called Art By Osborn to do some how-to videos and post a little bit about my art in general. I even got a special piece of equipment for this. I blew a hundred bucks on a horizontal extension bar for my tripod. That let me extend the camera out one my desk so I could more easily video myself while drawing. It still wasn’t quite as easy as I thought it would be. The problem is that I usually move a drawing as I’m working and I have to keep the drawing in frame as I go. So I have to watch both the drawing and the camera’s viewfinder. It’s distracting.

I think I’ve got an idea to make things easier for me but I haven’t tried it yet. I have an app for my iPad that turns my iPad into my camera’s viewfinder. I figure that I can set up my iPad on my drawing table and look at that as I draw instead of my camera. I tried out the app earlier in the year but haven’t messed with it in a while. Oddly, Canon (my camera brand) made a new version of the app back in the summer and I have yet to get that one to work. Luckily for me it wasn’t an update to the existing app but a whole different app. That way I still have the old, working one, on my iPad. The whole set up might be even more cumbersome than the old one but I’ll have to try it to see.

The next thing I have to figure out with my art channel is what I want to film. I started out with a bang. I think I made half a dozen videos in the first two weeks. I had all sorts of ideas fling around my head. Then it all stopped. I have no idea why. I may have lost interest or lost energy but I’m still not sure. It’s been at least a month since posted anything there. That’s why I’m writing this. To try and get the ideas flowing again.

One problem I have with ideas about making videos about art is that art takes a long time to make. Most people just use time lapse photography but I was never a big fan of that. Plus I’m not sure exactly how to do it for a long project. I figured out how to make a speeded up version on one on my fifteen minute ASMR drawing videos but filming myself drawing all day is a horse of a different color. It usually takes me a couple of hours to make a drawing and if I’m going to make a painting we’re talking sixteen to twenty four hours worth of work. Surely I can’t point my camera at my easel and video for three straight days. That would be a lot of gigabytes worth of information. I can’t imagine that would be the right way to go. Data overload.

I might have to use my iPad to film. At least I know its video camera has a time lapse mode. I can set it to take a single photo every so often. But I’m not sure how often. Every minute? Ten minutes? What if I’m not standing in the correct position at the time it takes a photo? That’ll mess with the final video. I’m not even sure if the iPad’s camera shoots time lapse video or stills. I’ll have to check my Canon camera too. There might be a time lapse mode buried in there somewhere. It all comes down to I’ve never shot time lapse before and will have to figure out the best way to do it. Hence I’m thinking in writing.

I also have some ideas to make some video from my existing artwork. Once again a problem with art on video is that art is static and silent. I’ll have to think up something to do to liven it up. If I write some sort of accompanying piece I can narrate something as I do something visual with the art but I’m not sure what.

One final thing I want to do with video is read my comic strips. Way back in the late 1970s or early 1980s I remember a local cable channel running some weird shows that were people reading comic books. It was DC Comic’s Sugar and Spike and Mystery in Space Comics. It was especially weird because those comics were from the 1960s. They would just point a camera at a comic and someone would read the captions and word balloons. As they would finish reading one panel they’d them move on to the next one. I figure I could do the same thing with my “Four Talking Boxes” strip. I’d use iMovie to go from panel to panel and then record me reading the word balloons. It’s a dumb idea but I still want to try it. I have a lot of trying and figuring things out when it comes to video.

I am an art supply geek. I love trying new art supplies and finding new tools. I love looking through art supply catalogues and searching around art stores. Not all artists are like that. Some like to find the right tool for them and then they stick with it for a long time. I do that with some tried and true things but I also like to find new stuff. Sometimes new stuff sits around for years and years before I figure out what to do with it. Sometimes I figure out how to use it right away.

I can remember this one time in the early 1990s, just a year or two out of college, I found some drawing pen nibs in the clearance bin at an art store. I think they were only a nickel or a dime a piece so they were dirt cheap even for a kid in his early 20s. I was never a big user of drawing pen nibs since I preferred a brush but I bought a bunch of them to try out. I probably bought ten or twenty different types of nibs in that batch. But only one of them a piece. Since I never found a lot of use for drawing nibs they sat there for years. One day I finally decided to put them through there paces and see what they could do. After all was said and done there was one nib in the batch that I really liked a lot. I ended up using it all the time but the problem was it was the only one I had of that type. Plus it was some weird off-brand that I have never seen since that clearance sale.
I protected that nib the best I could for a long time. But nibs wear out and I think I eventually dropped this one and it bent. To this day I question why I didn’t buy all of the clearance nibs and not just one of each. Probably would have only cost me ten bucks. Oh, well…

This subject comes up because I got a new art supply for Christmas. It’s a tabletop easel. It’s something I put on my wish-list a few months ago. It’s a wooden easel that’s made to sit on a table and be worked on. It’s not a display easel but a drawing easel. I remember that when I saw it I had an idea for using it for a specific task. Only right now I can’t remember that specific task. I can thing of a general task. Using the easel to help me paint my eight by ten inch acrylic on canvas painting. I normally paint those by laying them flat on my drawing table but I’d like to try standing them up on the little easel. I think that would be easier than using my big easel. Except I don’t think that was the task I had in mind when I first saw the easel. I wonder what my original thought was? I guess I’ll have to see if I can think it again.

I still have a new brush sitting on my desk too. It’s a type I haven’t used before. It’s an inexpensive number six round brush with synthetic bristles. I hardly ever uses synthetic bristle brushes but it caught my eye in the art store one day and I decided to get it. I had wanted to make a video of me trying it out. I started an art channel on YouTube where I show some how-to videos and explain some of my art making process. I thought it would be fun to make a video about a brush I had never tried before. I will probably still make that video but so far the brush has just sat there. Sometimes the time is not right.

One thing that helps me get things done when it comes to any specific art supply is to have that supply around and in sight. I bought a bunch of 18×24 inch canvases early in 2015 and worked on some of them in the early part of the year. Then August rolled around and I put them away because I was having my annual backyard BBQ. And they stayed put away. I don’t know why. A few of them usually hang around the studio but I had none of them out until late November. Plus when they were tucked away I had no new ideas for them. They weren’t in my mind except even now and then I wondered why they weren’t out. Since I pulled them out again I still haven’t worked on one but I have ideas brewing. I can see them forming in the back of my mind. That’s why I can’t tuck everything away.

One thing I’ve missed out on this year is a big art supply order. I’ve been getting the necessities in dribs and drops this year but sometimes when I have some extra money to spend I like to get a bunch of stuff all at once. Usually I order from a website when that happens and for a couple of weeks before I put in the order I look around all the nooks and crannies of the catalogue looking for new and interesting things. It’s fun. I have to give myself some time with it though. Hence the two weeks. At first I add anything that catches my eye to my cart but then I come back and see if it’s something that really interests me. Sometimes things survive that second look and sometimes they don’t. Plus there are choices to be made based on value. Cheap and interesting usually wins over expensive and interesting.

There is only one art supply in recent years I can think of that I still haven’t done anything with. That is the set of powder pastels that I bought a few years ago. I haven’t worked with regular pastels a whole lot but they offered this new type that was these little plastic containers of powder that you rub on the paper to draw with. I thought that was an interesting idea and dropped about twenty bucks on a small set. I messed with them for a little while but never quite figured out what to make with them. But there they sit. Waiting for their day to shine. Maybe someday they will.

This week I worked on another cover homage. Two weeks in a row! Not something I’ve done a lot of but here we go again. This time it was Flash number 174. A Carmine Infantino drawing. I’ve never been a huge Infatino fan. I grew up reading comics in the mid to late 1970 and that was not when Carmine Infantino was doing his best work. A lot of people like his Star Wars issues but I don’t. I didn’t like any of his stuff that I bought from the ages of ten on up. But in looking back on his 1960s work there is a lot of nice stuff there. He especially drew a lot of nice covers that he also designed quite well. He was really trying to innovate in those days and he had the talent to back it up. That’s the work he referred to as his unfinished symphony as in the late 1960s he moved from being an artist to being the publisher at DC Comics. His work for Marvel in the late 1970s after he lost his publisher job lacked the ambition of his younger days.

I looked through online scans of a bunch of his covers and eventually settled on Flash 174. It was a tricky one though. I wasn’t sure how hard it was going to be. At least half of the cover was taken up by a giant version of the Flash logo, and that part was easy enough, but there are also seven figures on the cover. That’s a lot. I figured the easy part would make up for the hard part but I’m not sure it did. This was a hard cover to do.

First of all I couldn’t find a good scan of the cover. Ideally I’d like to have the issue on hand but that’s not always possible. I’ll settle for a good scan of it but in this case I had to settle for a mediocre scan of it. At least it wasn’t a totally low resolution scan. I put the scan into my DC Comics original art template that I made for the Batman 241 cover I just made. I’m not even sure if that’s the correct template since the Flash issue was from years before the Batman one but since I couldn’t find a scan of the original Flash 174 art I used what I had. I printed it out on eleven by seventeen inch paper in blue line to draw over.

I did not have an easy time redrawing this cover. There is a simplicity and effortlessness to Infantino’s drawing that I was having a hard time keeping up with. I could tell that he had drawn these characters over and over and was very familiar with them while I was not. Each had their own characteristics and quirks in their faces, postures, and costumes. The cover was a lot more complex than it first appeared to me. And I originally thought it was pretty complex. I decided that the only way to do it was a little bit at a time.

It was good for me that I decided to do this cover as I was scanning in some old family photographs and negatives. The negatives are medium format 120 size and they take a bit of doing to scan in. I have a scanner that can do the job but that means putting two negatives at a time into a special holder and then using the special scanner software to scan them in. The scanner takes about five to eight minutes per negative to scan. That means I’ve got a few minutes of hands on negatives work and then ten to fifteen minutes of waiting. It’s tough to wait and it’s tough to get stuff done during that wait. That’s why scanning a hundred and twenty negatives is such a drag.

Those ten to fifteen minutes did offer me the perfect opportunity to work on the Flash cover. A little at a time. Even at one and a half times larger than the printed size those super-villain figures were smaller than I was used to working. I often use a .7mm mechanical pencil for my drawing. That actually seemed to big and clumsy for this work so I had to pull out my .5mm mechanical pencil. I don’t use that one very often but it was necessary here.

Being right handed I preceded to start in the upper left and work my way across one figure at a time. Ten minutes at a time as I scanned. First I’d figure out a head, then I’d figure out a hand, and then maybe a shirt. Since his style is so different than mine I had to figure out what he meant by each line. It wasn’t hard but I had to really look. His effortlessness took a lot of effort on my part to figure out how to duplicate. Since the scan I had wasn’t great I had a bit of trouble seeing some of his small feathering techniques too. That was annoying but since I wasn’t duplicating his technique I let it go. It took me a lot of negative scans to get all those figures drawn.

Once I had the figures drawn I drew the logo which was easy. It’s just a series of straight lines that I had to follow. Then I scanned it all in, added the smaller logos and trade dress elements digitally and printed it all out to be inked. This time instead of printing the pencils in blue line I printed them in grey line. They looked more like pencils that way and were going to get covered by ink in any case. I had to ink the piece just as I pencilled it. A little at a time.

When it comes to inking I’m normally a brush person. But that’s not how this cover was inked and wouldn’t suit the style. I was going to have to ink with a pen. I decided I was going to try one of my Copic drawing pens that I had refilled with India ink. I never liked a Crowquill dip pens very much that are often used for inking so I figured it was best to stay away from it. The drawing pen really suited the task for me and little by little I scanned and picked away at the drawing. It really took some time but paired up well with the scanning.

In the end I like the cover. I think I captured some of Infantino’s original natural effortlessness but he probably put a lot more effort in it than it appears. It’s amazing how much effort it takes to make something look easy.