Radiant Comics

Yesterday was another day of getting small things done. It seems that has been the theme of this February. Well, I did get some big things done in the form of my large ink drawings but I’ve also had days where all I could manage was bits and pieces. Life is like that sometimes.

One thing I got done was a handful of art cards. Those are 2.5×3.5 inch drawings or paintings. That’s baseball card size. Art cards generally break down into four categories for me. The first is cartoon art cards. These are the ones of talking heads that I make for my “Drifting and Dreaming” strip. I didn’t make any of these this week. The second category is smaller versions of my larger drawings. That’s when I take an already existing drawing and scale it down to art card size to see if I can make it work that small. I didn’t make any of these type either. The third type is spontaneous ink drawings. That’s where I work directly in ink so there in no erasing possible. I started a couple of these but as I’m writing this I haven’t finished them just yet.

The fourth category of art card is the one I was working in. I’d make a little pencil drawing, ink it with a sign pen, and then color it with my Copic markers. I don’t draw much in pencil these days as a first step. Usually I draw in ink, then pencil, then ink again. For some reason I think better in ink. I don’t worry about erasing and making things perfect when I draw in ink at the beginning. Trying to make something “Perfect” should be later on in the process. So I had to get used to drawing in pencil as a first step and not get caught up in too much erasing.

The cards I made sum up a few of the genres I work in. The first is Art Card 1032. A man’s face made with simple lines. Triangle mouth, big black dots for eyes, a strange swooping nose, and some sort of weird hat or hair. These are the elements I rearrange and play with all the time for small faces. The marker I use, a sign pen refilled with India ink, is perfect for this type of even lined drawing. Unlike a brush drawing where I’m making thick to thin lines and lots of different marks the sign pen makes just a couple of marks and I like that simplicity. The background is slightly abstract but the colors are straight forward with a little shading in them.

The second drawing is Art Card 1033. A small figure drawing. This is a good example of me using triangles to draw figures. The two obvious triangles are the one from her shoulders to her waist and the one that makes up the bottom of her dress. But her arms and legs are also elongated triangles. Her hands are a couple of little triangles too as well as her hair being a big triangle. For whatever reason I often think in triangles. It’s tough to get my thick lined sign pen to make such small lines so things like her face and feet get a little clumsy. But it’s just a little art cards so I try not to sweat it too much. I like the color on this one with the bright orange in the background and the ground being blue. Not my favorite card but it’ll do.

The third card is one of my robots. Art card 1034. I like to draw robots. My robots have nothing to do with technology though. They have to do with line and shape. They’re modern art robots as much as anything. They give me a chance to draw human type figures without it having to look totally human. I mostly color them grey or some light color as I have here but I also use splashes of color like his red swirly eye. Or the blue cupcake like thing on his chest. The background is simple as they often are on these cards but I kept this one fairly normal to ground the image a little. I used a blue sky and some green grass. Sure there is some purple in there to make things sparkle but overall I think the background helps keep things real.

Art card 1035 is one of my masked figures. I like drawing faces and I like drawing masked faces. Not only are they mysterious but though the masks are still faces the rules of drawing faces can be exaggerated or even broken. Here I did a little exaggeration. She also has my simplified rounded cartoon bosoms. I mostly use them along with sharp angles in the shoulders and waist to get some contrast going. I like the green dress here but the purple mask starts to blend with the blue sky. There is nothing wrong with that but it was unintentional on my part and sometimes things bother me if I didn’t plan them even if they work. I’m more comfortable controlling the space rather than having it thrust upon me. But, oh well, it’s okay to let go.

The final card, Art Card 1036, has got another woman in it but this time with an angled bosom. It’s less cartoony than my rounded one but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was realistic. It’s more of my drawing of triangles coming into play. Each breast started out as a triangle and in some of my drawings they stay that way but here they got connected. That’s because it’s an upshot. For some reason I decided to go with the unflattering under the chin angle for her face and her chest followed. I like the lines of her face in this one. I think I managed to capture a bit of awkwardness with simplicity. I also like the way the red and blue work together. The blue at the bottom is a Tahitian blue (B04) Copic marker that my favorite blue. I seem to always like it.

So those are the simple drawings that I got done this week. I think they ended up being a pretty good cross section of the types of drawings that I commonly do.

It’s been a very snowy winter here in the northeast US of A. We’ve gotten two to three times the normal amount of snow of an average winter and it’s trying my patience and motivation. I’m lucky that I don’t have to commute through the stuff but it’s still a pain. This is my fourth winter in a row cycling all through the winter and I’ve had to miss more days this year because of the snow and cold than in the previous three years combined. Right now I’m looking at missing a full week of cycling for the second time this winter. I haven’t lost a full week of cycling in any of the previous three winters. Or summers for that matter. SO you know the weather is bad.

In January when I missed a full week of cycling because of snow and cold I was surprised at how much my lungs burned on my first ride back. Maybe I was a little too excited to be riding again and didn’t pace myself properly but I was really sucking wind on that ride. Not having missed more than a couple or three days rides over the years it hadn’t even occurred to me to take it easy after a week off. When I finally get back on the bike again I’ll have to remember that.

All the snow has affected my own work too. We had four snowstorms in about two weeks. It’s tough to get things done when I have to go out and clear the driveway and walkways so many times. Besides the fact that it’s physically tiring it also makes life seem awfully repetitive and pointless. Clear the driveway, more snow, clear the driveway, more snow, what’s the point of it all? You know the drill.

Oddly enough I got quite a bit done in the first part of the week. Well, maybe it’s no so odd since that was before all four storms hit but I was on a roll. Besides the large 20×28 inch drawing that I wrote about last week I got two more of those size drawings done. I was getting it done for a little while. Since I always have a bunch of pencil drawings lying around I looked through the pile and found a couple that I wanted to make big black and white marker drawings out of. So I did. I had the focus, concentration, and motivation to get them done. It’s always cool when that happens.

Then the storms wore me down. It started with six inches of snow on a Monday. Then on Wednesday another ten inches hit. Somehow between then and the Thursday a week away a “Wintery mix” became a Nor’ Easter which dropped a foot of show on us followed by another six inches on Friday. Luck was with on on Saturday as that storm was only a couple more inches. Today’s storm on Tuesday dropped three more. Did I mention that it’s been below freezing most of the time? None of the snow had time to melt before more snow fell. It’s at the point where there is no more room to put new snow on the sides and back of my driveway. It’s crazy.

I got those two large drawings done mostly in the week between the storms. I think the third one overlapped with the big Nor’Easter but after finishing that one I was a bit cooked. On Saturday I managed to get my usual five “Four Talking Boxes” strips done for the week and a little bit of drawing but not much else. I spent a lot of Sunday organizing old drawings.

Years ago I attached two drawers underneath the surface of my drawing table. It’s an out of the way but completely handy place to keep drawings. Somehow over the years I’ve come up with a system where the right hand drawer holds my drawings that I haven’t made into anything finished yet and the left hand one holds the drawings that I have made something finished out of. Eventually when the left hand drawer is full I have to find a place to put the drawings. That was what happened. I made a box out of old matte board to put the drawings in and stuck them on a shelf. I also cleaned up some vertical files with all sorts of odds and ends of drawings in them.

I spend a good deal of that Sunday organizing time cutting up odd size pieces of drawing paper into 5×7 inch and 2.5×3.5 inch pieces of paper that I would use. That odd size paper has been sitting around for years waiting for me to get to use it. I finally decided I never would use the paper in its current form but it’s still good paper. It took me a couple of hours to cut it all to size but I didn’t have the energy for much else anyway.

Today, besides writing this, I painted four “On the Rough” drawings. These are the 5×7 inch ink and watercolor drawings that I do on super textured watercolor paper. I haven’t made any since December but since they’re a spontaneous kind of work I do okay with them on a low energy day. I didn’t end up liking any of the four of them very much but that could just be my mood.

One other odd thing happened this week. I use my inkjet printer a lot in my work. I’m forever scanning in drawings, blowing them up, and printing them out in blue line to redraw. My habit is that when I run out of a color I go to my reserve box, pull out another ink tank of the same color, put it in the printer, and then immediately order a replacement ink tank to put in my reserve box. That way I always have a spare of the color I need. Except this time I didn’t. I ran out of magenta, went to my box, and saw no new magenta ink. I had two ink tanks of light magenta though. I guess I somehow bought the wrong one last time. I’ve had an inkjet printer of one kind or another since 1996 and that’s the first time I was caught without ink. Of course that was on Thursday when the Nor’Easter was hitting. The ink tank was supposed to arrive on Saturday but too many storms kept it away. Then Monday was Presidents’ Day. Today, as I write this, it’s Tuesday and it’s still not here. Oh well, maybe I’ll be able to print again tomorrow.

Pencil Drawing 9×12 Inches

This week I finally pulled out my big paper and black markers. By big paper I mean that it’s a full sheet of watercolor paper. That makes it 22×30 inches. With an inch of white border all around the final size of the drawings that I make on it are 20×28 inches. It’s been well over a year since I last made a black marker drawing that size. Back then I made about a half dozen of them and really enjoyed drawing in marker so large but life got in the way and I never got back to making any more. This week I finally decided to pull out the big paper and marker kit.

The paper I use for this is not my usual fancy and expensive watercolor paper. It’s cheap watercolor paper called Blick Studio Fabriano. It’s made by Dick Blick art supplies and Fabriano paper to be a low cost alternative watercolor paper for students and artists. I find it hard to even erase pencil off of this paper so I don’t know how good it would be for real watercolor work but for big black marker drawings it works well. It’s a couple of bucks a sheet rather than ten dollars.

The marker kit is a bunch of different style black Copic markers that I even bought a marker wallet for. I’ve got a regular black marker, a black sketch marker, and extra wide black marker, and one that I fitted with special calligraphy nibs. I use all these plus I have Copic black ink refills so I can constantly refill the markers as they get empty. And using them on large sheets of watercolor paper they get empty pretty quickly. I also have extra nibs to replace the marker tips that get damaged. Since I use French curves and straight edges in these drawings the marker tips can get beat up quite a bit. The felt fabric tip will shred.

Ink on Paper 20×28 Inches. Half way there.

The drawing that I made this week is titled “Sideways Pieces”. It’s named that because in looking through my pile of pencil drawings for something to make into an ink drawing I came across some old attempt at a comic strip named “Sideways”. I don’t even remember what the strip was about but I liked the woman’s face in the panel that was in front of me. It had no background though so I used a second panel of the same woman and digitally added it into the background. I then printed that out in blue line and drew over that to make a 9×12 inch pencil drawing. Then I had something to make a finished marker drawing out of.

If I was making a painting this size I normally would use a grid to transfer the drawing to canvas. But since this paper is hard to erase on (I’d have to draw the grid and erase it) I use graphite transfer paper to move the drawing over. Therefore I need a printout of the drawing the same size as the final drawing. I don’t have a 22×28 inch printer so I printed out the drawing on four 13×19 inch sheets of paper and then taped them together. After that I taped the drawing over the paper and in-between the two I place a sheet of graphite paper. I then take a hard 2H pencil and trace over the top of the drawing. The pressure of the pencil transfers the graphite from the graphite paper to the watercolor paper. This can be a tedious and messy process so I have to be careful. Once the drawing is transferred I remove the printout and graphite paper, clean things up, and redraw. The process of using graphite paper is less than perfect so I have to make sure the drawing looks good on the watercolor paper.

Now come the markers. Being that these drawings are black and white and very graphic looking with almost no shading I find myself using a lot of curves and straight edges with the markers to get things just so. I especially like the 24 inch adjustable ship’s curve that I bought years ago. It’s good for making long flowing curves with. I also use a few French curves for the smaller arcs I have to make. It’s important to keep the curves as clean as possible when using them like this. Since I’m using them with a marker I’m actually drawing on the edge of the curve with the marker ink. Too muck ink on the edge will get on my hands and then on the paper. I want the white parts of the drawing really white so I try to avoid that and wash my edges twice a day or so.

This drawing is all about the face. One of my favorite subjects. Well, the face and those two large spirals of hair. Plus the deep negative space of the background. There is a bit going on here. More than half of the drawing is taken up by the woman and her hair but since half of her face is off-stage then the drawing isn’t totally about her. She’s the star but the woman behind her is a co-star. Though we only get a hint of her so she’s not a big co-star. Her booking might even be beneath the negative space between her arm and body and its op-art effect.

Ink on Paper 20×28 Inches. Finished.

This drawing and this style of drawing are very much about shape and technique. Most of the black shapes such as on the woman’s neck and face are not even in my initial pencil drawing. All those black shapes in the woman’s arm and on her dress are drawn in after I make the original black line drawing. Once I use the markers and curves to make the initial drawing I like to see what I can see. I look for the shapes that suggest themselves. That’s when I draw them in with a light 2H pencil to get them just right before committing to ink.

I also use my Haff hatching machine with these. That’s how I got those straight and parallel lines that make up the sky. The Haff is like a little t-square that’s attached to an arm. When you press down on the little lever/button the arm moves down from one to ten millimeters. Whatever you set it to. Then you move the marker along the straight edge to make a straight line, hit the button, make another line. Easy to use and I like the results.

Yeah, it was good to get back to this type of drawing. They’re so big and hard to scan in that it’s not easy to show them off but oh well. I can’t make 5×7 inch drawings all the time.

This week I was working on some drawings in a bit of a new style. Or maybe it’s more of a new technique. I’m not really sure. I always like trying out new ways of making pictures. I find it fun. This one harkens all the way back to my high school days. I had a good art teacher back then and he liked to encourage us to try new techniques and experiment a bit. One of the things he had us do was to mess around with watercolor to see what we could do with it. It wasn’t about drawing or making an image though.

We students would grab a big sheet of paper. I can’t remember the exact size but it was probably some kind of poster board and that probably puts it around 14×17 inches. Maybe 16×20. Either way I remember it being bigger than any of the usual notebook sized paper I would normally draw on in high school. I can remember wetting the paper in one of those giant high school art class sinks and then we’d put some watercolor on it. Or we’d put some watercolor on the paper and then run it under the sink. Either way it was about seeing what watercolor, water, and paper could do. How the colors would mix together and what kind of edges they would form. How the colors mixed on dry paper differently than wet paper. How everything changes as it dried. The ultimate result wasn’t that I made any good pictures but I sure liked how all the colors mixed together and could repeat the steps.

Fast forward about ten years to the mid 1990s and the time I was learning to paint with gouache. Not always being a fan of white paper I sometimes wanted a toned background but I was also not a fan of working on grey paper as is often used for toned background stuff. So I grabbed a big sheet of 22×30 inch watercolor paper and ran some water and watercolor paints over it to make my own colorful background. I cut the paper up into smaller pieces to use for various paintings and it ended up working out well. Gouache is an opaque watercolor so I could cover up any areas I wanted with solid opacity and let the colorful watercolor background show through in another places. Every now and again I’d pull out another big sheet of paper and splash some watercolor on it to make more toned/colored paper.

This week I was using that watercolor background style but with a different technique and on a different scale. I’ve been struggling a bit lately about what I wanted to work on and still haven’t yet come up with a plan. But I try not to let the lack of any current plan paralyze me so that I sit around and do nothing. Sitting around never leads me to a plan so I try to keep busy until I can come up with one. That means I often pull out my 5×7 inch watercolor paper. 5×7 is a good size when I have no plan. It’s not a lot of commitment and leaves me the ability to change gears quickly.

I wanted to draw some faces but not just in black in white. I wanted some color. That meant I had to figure out what technique I wanted to use for the color. I’ve been using a lot of marker over the last few moths but I was kind of bored with that. I was bored with gouache too. I also didn’t want to go with my rough paper watercolor technique that I’ve used a lot this winter and fall but that brought me to thinking about my old watercolor backgrounds. Maybe I could use those in some way?

I didn’t grab a big piece of paper this time. I ruled a small border around the edges of the 5×7 inch paper and grabbed a pan set of watercolors. I used a big brush to spread the paint around and mixed in three or four colors, mostly oranges, reds, and yellows with a bit of blue tossed in. I kept the edges and blends fairly soft and ended up with some nice and colorful pieces of paper. After the paper dried I grabbed a pencil and drew a face on the paper. Once again I think of most of the faces as female but they’re pretty androgynous. They all have weird hats and weird hair with not a lot of upper body showing to clue us in on their gender. Then I pulled out my Series 7 brush and inked the faces.

What makes these paintings different than my gouache or marker ones is that I used the background color as the face color. Instead of opaque gouache I added modeling and other color in with markers which are transparent. That’s also why most of the faces have an odd skin color. That’s what I was going for when I made the backgrounds. With four different colors blended together to make the background there is a variety of tone and color to be found throughout the piece. I tried to use the color from the markers to separate the face from the background a bit. I not only did a little light to dark modeling but tinted some things here and there. I tried not to go too crazy since the whole idea of using the background color also as the foreground color was to unify the piece. I didn’t want to go opaque so I kept away from the gouache. The final part I added was a color border outside of the black border. This gave then a little extra splash of color. I like that.

I still don’t quite have a plan yet. That’s how I ended up doing nine of these faces. For a week I just kept making them. They didn’t take up all my time or anything like that but they take some work. Right now I’m a bit tired of making them but in the future I might make some more. Now who’s got a good plan?

“Green Dress” Gouache on Paper

This week I’ve been working with some gouache (an opaque watercolor) for the first time in a while so that inspired me to pull an old gouache painting out of my files and give it a look. This one is dated December 1996, is named “Green Dress”, is 6.5×9 inches, and is done on 300 lb cold press watercolor paper. That’s a pretty literal name so it is obviously from back before I named things with random phrases. I’m sure I moved to random phrases because if “Green Dress” was the best I could do then I was quickly going to run out of distinctive names.

This is an early gouache painting of mine. I had probably only been working in the medium for a couple of years at most but I can see some of the things I had down and some I had to learn. It’s also more illustrative than my later work turned out to be. It’s not super-illustrative but there is a lot of moving from dark to light and rounding of forms on the arms. I get bored doing this technique which explains why I moved away from it but I can see that I haven’t quite let go of it yet.I’m not quite sure I ever let totally go of that illustrative dark to light shading but it’s no usually as evident as here. The gouache I was painting today had more of an illusion of shading than actual shading.

This is also from a phase when I was drawing a lot of dancing people. I can remember first being interested in drawing dancing people back when I was in college (1984-1988) but I didn’t have the drawing skills to pull it off. I tried a few times to come up with a composition of dancing people but it never worked out. By the time I made this drawing I had more skills and had made a few drawings of dancing people. This is one of them. I think my love of drawing dancing people comes from those animated “Peanuts” specials because all of my dancing people dance oddly. This is a strange and awkward pose but that’s what I wanted.

One of the things I find unusual about this painting is that I have her face hidden. Since I love to draw faces it’s odd to find many pieces of mine without a face. But here is one of them. I think that’s because I really wanted to make this piece about the contorted figure and a face might take away from that. And, by the way, she’s also got some big arms. Most photography and drawings about dancers are about slenderness and grace and I was going for the opposite of that. There is no grace here but plenty of strength. You’ve got to be careful around this dancer because if you accidentally get in the way you might get knocked down. Now that’s dancing.

One of the things I see in this painting that I never do anymore is contour lines. Those are the blue stripes that surround the dancer. They’re sort of like action lines found in a comic book and sort of define the negative space around the dancer and sort of just get in the way and make a mess. I can remember using them a bunch of times when I was first learning to use gouache but I never really liked them. Though they work okay in this piece I think they show lack of confidence in the spaces I create. There are better ways to emphasize negative space that don’t include filling them up with lines.

I like the blue of the lines though. They work well to calm down the orange background and red boxes underneath them. I imagine that’s the reason I decided to go with the blue lines in the first place. Those orange and reds were too hot and overwhelming the woman in the green dress. One thing you never want in a painting is for the background color to overwhelm the foreground color. In this case the blue lines team up with the green dress to put the red and orange in their place.

It’s the arms and the green dress that make this painting for me. As I wrote before the arms are illustrative but the green dress is more stylized. There are indications of dark to light modeling but down around her legs the dress takes on a more modernist quality. The lightest green ceases to be a highlight on a form and starts to be a decoration or some such. It flattens out and becomes graphic. It starts reminding me of a Chinese dragon. I find that interesting.

The hair also teeters somewhere between illustrative and stylized. There are some dark to light transitions but it’s not hair I would call realistic. That red hair tie is something I can remember using a bit too. It’s made in a fairly realistic manner so it’s a way to ground the hair in a little more realism without the hair itself being too realistic. It’s also a way to bring a little color to an area in the painting. The red of the hair tie plays nicely with the red shoes.

There is an interesting technique that I am using here that I haven’t done in ages. The brown line around her arms is underneath the final layers of paint. I painted the brown edges first and then put the lighter skin tones over it. The brown line lightens and darkens in places. This means the line becomes a negative shape. It’s defined by the positive shape of the lighter color put down after it. This is the opposite of what I normally do since I’m an artist who loves line and like to give it a lot of importance. Rarely do I make the line a negative shape.

One final observation about this painting is that most of my bits of shapes and colors seem to disappear on this one. I have red and yellow along the left and bottom and green, blue and, yellow along the right but I barely notice them. The blue lines and orange background dominate so much that the other bits fade away. This one was a learning experience.