Radiant Comics

Sometimes I get caught up in making things. I get so into it that I can’t stop for a little while. Usually it’s not a big project or piece, those toke a lot of planning and effort, but a smaller thing that takes less time. Of course the whole getting caught up part means that the small thing takes up way more time than initially planned. This time those small things were my “On the Rough” drawings. They are five by seven drawings that are on extremely rough watercolor paper. I draw on them with ink and a brush (and no pencil underdrawing) and then use watercolor. Except this time I used Rotring artist color inks instead of watercolor. I’ve had this set of Rotring colors since 1988 and I’ve barely ever used it. It’s a set of twelve colors in ink bottles and to colors are very bright. Much brighter than my usual watercolors. Other than that they work about the same as my usual watercolor.

Once again I’ll say I got caught up in them because looking back at the others (I had done forty four of them) I made them four at a time. I’d grab four pieces of paper, draw four ink drawings, and then put the color in with watercolor. Doing them four at a time allows me to pick up a new one as the watercolor on the previous one dries. It speeds things up compared to working on them one at a time. For some reason this time I worked on six of them at a time. Two days in a row. That means I got twelve of them done in two days. I just kept going for two days in a row. I got caught up. Now I’m going to pick four of them to take a look at.

The first one is “On the Rough” number 55. It’s one of my half masked faces. I draw masked and half masked people a lot. This person even has half a head of hair. This one doesn’t have much form to the body. That’s a bit odd for me but it ended up that way do to the process of no underdrawing and the fur. It’s not easy to draw on this paper with ink and usually I start with a little structure but here started no structure on the bottom half and let the color hold it together. The face keeps my interest on the top and the yellow and orange keeps holds my interest on the bottom. It’s almost like half an abstract painting. There is also a farm within the frame in the green background.

The second one is “On the Rough” number 53. I started drawing the face in the lower right corner and knew I wanted some big hair in this one. As I started drawing the crazy hair I noticed that the drawing started to resemble the Bride of Frankenstein. I decided to keep that going in the color and give her a streak of brightness in her hair. I like the way her face came out. The light blue against the dark blue of the sky works for me plus the red hair with the yellow streak works for me. She;s also looking out at us harder than we’re looking at her. Overall this might be my favorite of the twelve I made.

The third one is “On the Rough” number 56. Now we’re getting super-heroic with things. With this one you can definitely see that I’m drawing in ink and can’t erase any of the construction lines. There are some lines in the gloves, boots, and arms that are only there because they’re left over from the initial drawing. I don’t mind them there because they’re part of this particular process but normally they wouldn’t be. I also wouldn’t normally have his toe pressed right up against the border but with no erasing going on things end up where they want to sometimes. I like the color on this one. The three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, scream super-hero as much as the view of him flying against the aqua and purple sky. The green of the trees or whatever they are box him in and give him something to fight against. There is also a trail of purple and yellow propelling him forward and making him a little more super.

The fourth one is “On the Rough” number 48. The big orange belly. This one is all about the curve of her hip and the glowing orange color of her belly. The Rotring inks are really showing off here because that orange is bright. The pigment in my bottles is twenty five years old too. That’s remarkable brightness. Rotring doesn’t even make those inks anymore. I’ve got my usual spiral breasts but being stuck up in the corner they don’t have a lot of impact. Only one of the spirals is even pretty. The purple peeking up from underneath the orange serves to pop the orange out even more. The green and blue on the sides calm things down and are the most pleasant colors in the piece. I like the three pieces of black line that ended up in the middle of the belly. Two lines that refer to the edges of abs and a belly button. They’re far from literal and hand there like brush strokes in an abstract painting. They make it work for me.

So there you go. That’s only four of the twelve but the four I find most interesting. When making spontaneous ink drawings four in twelve is a pretty good batting average. Since I can’t go back, erase, and work on things until I think they’re perfect not everything is going to be good. That’s the nature of this type of drawing. Of course the payoff is that I can find new ways of doing things. Some drawings can’t be made if I’m thinking things through. Sometimes it’s the mistakes that lead me down a new path. And I get caught up.

marked 11×17 inch print.

Today I’m going to give you a look at something I finished this morning. I’m doing that mostly for my own benefit because this is one of those days when I can’t get anything done. I know it sounds like I got something done because I said I finished something but I really only put a few last touches on it. It might even need a few more last touches but I can’t tell right now. I hate days like these because I’m used to being able to get things done but days like this happen. Let’s see if I can write a little to get something done.

The name of this print is “Marked”. I’ve done a few prints like it over the years. They are basically nudes with drawings on the women’s bodies. They’re part tribal tattoos and part modern art. I’m really not sure what they mean to me. They started out as a project I drew years ago of various goddesses. In those drawings I put the women into highly decorative outfits with fancy backgrounds that were reminiscent of stained glass. Somewhere along the way the the women’s outfits turned into decorations on their skin.

Sometimes I use photo reference for these and sometimes not. I’ve even used a 3D modeling program in recent years. I’m a believer in shooting my own photo reference but I don’t have any nude models available so for these drawings I’ll often use a photo that I find on the internet. I’m very picky about what photos I’ll use though. I basically want a generic straight forward pose. Most figure photography is too fancy for me to use. A pose that might look wonderful in a photo won’t work for me as I’m using the body as a canvas rather than as a body. Between the generic poses and me changing the face and hair my drawing ends up looking quite different from any photo I use for reference.

Whether I’ve used a photo or posed a 3D model the next step is the same. I open up the image in Photoshop, create a new layer on top of the image, and draw the figure. This becomes my underdrawing as I then print that out in blue line and draw the figure again on top of the blue line. This time in pencil. After I finish that drawing I scan the pencil drawing in, print that out in blue line, and then draw it once more in ink. This ink drawing is my final drawing. I scan that in too. I still find it faster and easier to draw on paper and scan that to draw all digitally.

I’ve actually had this particular drawing lying around for a while. At least the pencil version. It’s weird because after I drew the thing I lost interest in it. I think that’s because I’ve grown bored with the color technique that I’m about to describe. Mostly because it’s done on the computer and I’ve been into paints, markers, and inks lately. Virtual hasn’t down it for me. But I was looking for something to do the other day and I picked this up and started working on it again. I think I finished it just out of habit.

After I scanned in the drawing I set it up to be colored in Illustrator. That’s a vector drawing program that I sometimes prefer over the Bitmap based Photoshop. At this point I run through a series of technical steps to separate the black line from the color to make the coloring a littler easier for me. The basic color is then pretty easy to do. For some reason even though this piece ended up as a blue woman I did the initial coloring as if she were a caucasian. I find that to be an easy starting point and can change the colors later on.

This is the part where the tedium starts because I now have to draw shapes of color to create the shading. I use Illustrator’s pen tool to create points and adjust the lines into curved shapes. Since there is no shading going on these shapes that I draw will end up being solid color and they have to be just the right shape. I’ve tried using some of the faster but less precise tools in Illustrator but they don’t work for me. So it’s make a point, make another point, bend the line between the points, make another point, and bend that line into the right shape. Repeat this for about a hundred shapes.

Though I prefer drawing on paper and scanning to making these shapes on the computer it really is faster to do this step on screen. One time I tried drawing all the shapes on paper and then scanning them in and lining them up in Illustrator but that was more trouble than it was worth. I ended up having to do so much clean up of the shapes that it was easier to rebuild them as vectors. I never did that agin and now build them as vector graphics in the first place.

I make all these shapes on four different layers. The first layer is the dark layers. These are where the shadows go. The second layer is the light layer. This is for the highlights. The third layer is for colored reflective highlights. These are not quite as bright as the highlights and represent a little bit of colored light hitting the scene. The fourth layer is the shadows with a little bit of color in them. Much like the colored brights they break up the monotony of the monochrome skin color. In “Marked” where the woman has blue skin the colored brights have a bit of green in them and the colored darks have a bit of purple in them. I find this technique keeps the color interesting and lively. Separating the colors onto four layers also makes it very easy to change out the whole body color. That’s why I color in pink and then swap out to something else.

One thing that has stuck with these type drawings since the beginning has been the stained glass type backgrounds. Lots of rays of light and graphic solid colors as seen here with the halo of light behind her head. They may not be goddesses anymore but I still like the felling of holiness.

One of the interesting problems with doing any kind of creative work that a person does on their own is how to get things done. It’s easy to get things done at a job when you’ve got a boss and a paycheck making sure you do things but if you want to do something like make a painting or a poem all on your own how do you do that? What’s the process? I’ve been facing that question lately as I’ve been trying to get some writing done. Usually I’m good at getting things done because I like to do things. That helps. And habit also helps a lot to. There is an old saying that good habits are as easy to develop as bad ones. The implication is that you may as well develop good habits because the effort is the same as developing bad habits. I’ve done my best to develop good habits so that I can get things done. It’s still not not always easy to get things done though.

I’ve been getting five “Four Talking Boxes” strips done a week now for over a thousand strips. That means I’ve had to write five strips a week. They generally take me about half an hour each to write and I’d squeeze that half an hour in whenever I could. Usually early in the morning, just before bed, or right after diner. The strange part was that I’d always had to ask myself, “Do I want to write a strip today?”. Too often the answer was, “I’ll do it tomorrow” and then I’d lose track of the week have to double up at the end of the week and write two strips in a day. That got to be annoying. Oddly enough my solution was to write one strip every day. That way I never had to ask myself if wanted to write a strip that day and just did it instead. The decision of whether or not to write a strip was more pressure than the actual writing. That also gave me two extra strips a week so now I’m about twenty strips ahead and they’re is even less pressure. Odd that writing more made things easier.

Tools and comfort are also important in getting things done. I’ve been writing this blog once a week for for almost eight years now and I couldn’t get it started until I bought a laptop. My desktop is at standing height and has my Wacom tablet in front of it. I could never write comfortably at it and therefore never did. Since I bought my first laptop in 2005 I’ve been writing regularly. Before that is was on and off again. I also write my comic strips on the laptop so it handles most of my writing chores. Don’t underestimate the power of having the right tool for the right job in getting things done.

One of the things I haven’t written on my laptop is my “Message Tee” comic strip. The writing for that is all the slogans that appear on the shirts but I couldn’t get them done the same way I wrote everything else. As a matter of fact I had a hard time writing them. It wasn’t until I started writing little slogans down in my little notebook as I went on some walks that I was able to finish those strips. The problem now is that I have to start writing some new ones but I haven’t been going on walks like I did last year. I’m either going to have to start walking again or find a new way to write those strips.

Recently I’ve had trouble writing other things because I have no habitual precedent for them. With no good habits to guide me I’ve had to try to find some new ones. First off I haven’t been able to get my “Little Red Sketchbook” story off the ground. All of 2012 I drew in a little red sketchbook with the idea of matching it with some prose and making a book out of it. After finishing all of the drawing, scanning it all in, and setting it up in book form to be written I’ve got nothing. I’ve started it about half a dozen times with half a dozen stories but none of them have stuck. Most of the time it sits there with me not writing it. I’m still figuring out how to get this one done.

Another writing project I finally made some progress on this week was my new “Organics” story. That’s a comic that I made long ago back in the early to mid 1990s that I decided to make a new one of. It’s sort of a Surrealist automatic drawing method of making a comic and I obsessively drew it for about a month. I got twenty two pages drawn but then it sat there for weeks. Luckily I had something to fall back on for this one. I’d done comics like it before. So just yesterday I put all the pages in front on me, put them in order, scanned them in, and set them up to be written and lettered. Then I wrote the first page.

I had an advantage in writing that first page in that I already had it and a few other things written on some index cards. That’s how I occasionally write. In a notebook or on index cards. The disadvantage it that I then have to type it up later but the advantage it that it’s informal and easy to do spontaneously when an idea hits. Of course the biggest disadvantage is that waiting for an idea to hit isn’t a very reliable system. It doesn’t take advantage of habit. I think if I’m going to get this latest “Organics” story fully written than I’m going to have to come up with a new habit or system to get it done. For some reason I think that’s going to involve paper as well as the computer. Maybe that’s because I wrote my other “Organics” stories years ago before I even had a computer and that’s how I remember how to do it. I’m not sure. But either way getting the whole thing set up and getting that first page written is a lot further along than I was last week. Most often getting things done depends the most on consciously deciding to do it. Do it I shall.

Computers are funny things. That’s my observation for today. That observation comes from my making of cards last week. One of the things I do is make playing card sized prints with my Radiant Comics web address on one side and one of my cartoon art card images on the other. I hand them out to anyone who asks what I’ve been doing. I could just get some business cards made up with my web address on them but I like to make things and I find the cards to be a bit of fun. I was out of them and wanted to make some more since I was stopping by the New York ComicCon for a day to visit with some old friends.

I first started making these cards years ago when I discovered double sided inkjet matte photo paper. I had never thought about printing on both sides of the paper before because most inkjet photo and art paper is coated on one side and not two. After getting the idea I found the toughest part about printing on both sides of the paper is getting things to line up. I print an image on the front and an image on the back and if they’re not in the same exact place then I can’t cut them out like a playing card.

I found trial and error to be the only way to get the cards to line up. There was no template for this sort of thing so I had to make my own. First off when making a template that you have to print don’t waste ink by printing the full color image. Make some thin lined black boxs on the edges of the art you want to print and print those boxes. Also type the word “Front” on one of the boxes that represent the front of the cards and “Back” on one of the boxes that represents the back. The other word you need to type is “Top” on the top of the documents for both front and back. Believe me this alleviates a lot of confusion. You’ll always know which side of the printout is the front and which direction is up. That’s easy to lose track of with multiple printouts of blank boxes.

After that is all done you print out the front of the card, flip the paper over, put the paper back in the printer, and print out the back. Now hold the paper up to the light and see if things line up. The tops have to both be on top otherwise you flipped the paper over the wrong way when printing the back. I’ve done that plenty of times. If the boxes don’t line up then you have to go to back to your document and nudge the image left, right, up, or down. I leave the images of the fronts of the cards alone and nudge the back images. If takes a few tries and a few printouts to get things right but eventually things line up correctly.

My Photoshop document now has six 2.5×3.5 inch cards on one 8.5×11 inch piece of paper. I print out the six fronts, let the ink dry for a minute, flip the paper over, and print out six backs. Now they all line up. That’s good stuff. After printing them I laminate the cards. I bought a laminator back when I first stared making these cards. It was surprisingly cheap. It was only about thirty dollars. I had never priced laminators before and I guess I always just assumed they were more expensive than that. You also have to buy some thermal laminating pouches to use with the laminator but they’re only about ten bucks for fifty 8.5×11 inch pouches. You turn on the laminator, let it heat up, put the printout into the laminated pouch, and run the pouch through the heated up laminator. It’s real simple.

The next step is to cut out the cards. For this I use an X-Acto knife and a metal straight edge. A good edge on the cards is essential and you don’t want to use scissors. Line the ruler up with the edge of the card and cut. You don’t have to make it all the way through the card in one pass so go easy. Draw the knife across the card a few times and it should cut easily. This part takes some concentration so take your time.
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The final step is to round the corners of the cards. If you look at real playing cards you’ll see the corners are always rounded. I think my cards look better with rounded corners too. At first I did this with the X-Acto knife but I soon discovered there are such things called corner punches. Crafters used them to make round corners on paper. They’re little hand held things that you stick a corner of the card in and press down on a button to cut the corner. It’s tougher to cut through a laminated card than a piece of paper so I find it easier to press down on the button with a palm sized piece of wood (help in the palm of my hand) rather than my thumb. At four corners a card that’s a lot of punching so be prepared but after the corners are rounded everything is done.

So what about my “Computers are funny things” observation? Well when I was trying to make some new cards the back and fronts weren’t lining up. I had printed these same ones before so there was no reason for them not to line up. I checked my documents and printouts. My document which was 7.5 inches was printing out at 7.625 inches. No wonder it wouldn’t line up. It was printing out larger than it was set up to be. I could find no reason for this. I checked all my settings, preferences, and everything else I could think of and found nothing to change this. Finally I gave up and made a new document and pasted the card front into it. That new document printed out fine. I have no idea why the old one didn’t.

One of the things I like to make is art prints so I’m going to give one of them a write-up this week. It’s one of my newer prints as I finished it in September of 2011 and is from a series of prints all with the words “Unchain Your Brain” on them. Yeah, I came up with a theme. Most of my prints are hand drawn and then colored on the computer and this one is no exception. It all started with a small drawing. A lot of small drawings even. That’s what started my “Unchain” series.

One of the problems I’ve had with making my prints is that I integrate both words and pictures and I don’t always have words. Or at least I usually have more pictures than phrases that fit well hanging around. Plus I often draw weird little drawings that don’t bring any words to mind. They’re too far out there for words. I find that for most of my words and pictures prints the words will have a literal link with the pictures or else the pictures are so complex that it’s easy to find links even if they are just coincidence. But with my drawings of weird singular images it’s hard to find words that work. That’s why I decided to go with a series that could have a name and I could use that name on the prints. I chose “Unchain Your Brian” for the rhyme and to make a statement about seeing things differently. Or at least looking at things that are different.

It took me a while to settle on “Unchain”. I resisted it because I thought it might be too much like ad ad slogan for my taste. It still might be but it was the best I could come up with. I then set about thinking up the format I would use for the series. I knew I wanted something simple but simple is usually very complex to achieve. I’m not sure which font I went with but it might have been “Impact” or something like it. That’s a fairly common font that is simple and bold. If it is “Impact” then I stretched it and changed a couple of the letters. Or I could have just used a similar font. I can’t remember. Either way I decided to cut the letters out of a black bar. The background color of the print forms the letters on top and a ghosted version of the foreground art forms the letters on the bottom. This is the format I came up with. That and the two links of chain on either side of “Unchain”. I remember struggling with how many links to have and if I should put them on “Your Brain” too. Eventually I decided to go minimal.

This image is just the weird kind that fits well with “Unchain”. I mean, what is it? It’s obviously a person/creature of some kind but of what type I don’t know. Is he wearing a helmet or is that his face? The blue eyes are blank with no pupils and the smile seems painted on so that makes me lean towards “Helmet”. But I don’t know for sure. The flat bottom says “Helmet” but then I’m not sure if the flat top of the neck is a shirt collar or not. Since the shirt is the same color as the neck and ears then maybe it’s not a shirt at all but his skin. That might lead me to “Head” more than “Helmet” but I’m still not positive. And is that some sort of flower pot on his head? That’s what I mean by a strange drawing. It invites questions us to what it is. I’m not terribly interested in definitive answers to the questions either. I like to ponder them. That’s what the whole “Unchain Your Brain” series is about. Let’s ponder.

I haven’t made a whole lot of prints over the last couple of years because I’ve grown bored with coloring on the computer. I find it tedious and would rather use paints, markers, and inks than pixels. I’ve tried different techniques over the years to try and make computer coloring a little more interesting for me to do and this is one of those different techniques. First off there is a lot of texture to the color. There a little specs of dark color throughout the foreground of the piece and that is not part of my usual technique. This is also a subtractive technique. Instead of adding color to make things darker I cover the whole thing in a mid tone and then take away some of it to make it lighter. Overall it giver it a slightly modeled look that’s soft and inviting. Though a nice change from my usual computer coloring it really didn’t make things any less tedious to do but I like the results.

The background in this one is very simple but that’s up my alley. Once again I’m not sure exactly what it is. The purple curved shape could be a mountain behind him or a whole planet rising up above the horizon. There is a heavy texture to it that I probably made with a few different Photoshop filters. I’d guess I started with the “Add Noise” filter. A lot of recipes for Photoshop textures start with the “Add Noise” filter.

As I write this I’m looking at an 11×17 inch physical print I made of this on my Canon printer and I have to say that the printer does an exceptional job with the blue of the sky. It really looks nice. That blue might be my favorite part of the print. It does nothing but sit back and be the sky while looking good. It’s actually the sky and the word “Unchained” so maybe that’s what I’m liking about it. It sits back and stands up to be read at the same time. The bottom “Your Brain” part is much less striking as it is filled with the much more complex background image.

This is “Unchain Your Brain #3” by the way. Since my prints are usually named by what the words say in them this series had to be numbered. That’s always more confusing than names but I guess I’ll just have to live with it.