Radiant Comics

I came up with a new bit of fluff this week. Bucket-heads. There is a goofy name for you. Bucket-heads are an offshoot of the comic book sketch covers that I’ve been making for the past year or so. Sketch covers are comic books with blank covers on them that you can draw on. I bought a “Batman: Li’l Gotham” sketch cover and was trying to think up something to draw on it. There have been small and cute versions of super-heroes for a lot of years now (I’ve heard them called “Super-deformed” characters but not in a while ) but I have never drawn anything in that genre. “Cute” has never been my forte but “Li’l Gotham” was up that alley so I figured I’d give it a try.

There is a lot of cute stuff being done these days. The first thing I noticed that is all had in common was big heads. Cute often means big heads and big eyes so the place I knew I had to start on that “Li’l Gotham” cover was the heads. I started doing some sketches but instead of drawing a giant circle for the head I drew a tapered cylinder. A bucket if you will. I’m not sure why I thought of that shape but it somehow worked for me right away and I drew a Bucket-head Batman for that cover with a little bit of Bucket-head Joker thrown in too. I thought the sketch cover came out well and moved on to other stuff without giving it much more thought.

In showing around some of my sketch cover to friends most of them liked that Bucket-head cover. People really do love that cute character stuff. Especially characters they already know. This is mostly to my chagrin since I like making up my own stuff and don’t really like using other people’s characters but since I was already dipping my toe in that water with the sketch covers I figured I’d see what else I could do with the Bucket-heads.

Recently I’ve been using social media more than I have in the past to get my work out there. Being that I have no idea what I’m doing that means posting more stuff than usual. Mostly to Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter. I have tons of my own stuff to post and have been posting photos of my artwork and street photos. I have no idea if this will help me in any way but at least it gets a few people to look. I decided that the Bucket-head drawing might get me a few more views since there are a whole lot of people who like cute Batman drawings. So I set out to make some Bucket-head art cards.

Art cards are, of course, the 2.5×3.5 inch baseball card size drawings that has become a standard format. I’ve made a lot of them over the years and they seemed a good format for the Bucket-heads. The first thing I noticed when trying to choose which super-heroes to draw was there are a lot more famous male super-heroes than female ones. I knew that going in but never having drawn a lot of super-heroes before never had to face that in terms of figuring out who to draw that someone might be interested in seeing. Being that I usually make up my own characters and no one cares about them I’ve never cared about what others might want to see.

If you were to count up the genders numbers in my work I think it would skew towards more females but with the number of androgynous figures I draw I’m not positive. In taking a quick poll of paintings lying around my studio I get seven males, fifteen females, and fourteen androgynous figures. That’s nothing like the world of popular super-heroes. If I’m conscious of gender I usually split things fifty-fifty. When doing my “Message Tee” comic I make half of the people in t-shits male and the other half female. That seems to work for me.

In starting to do a few Bucket-head art cards I picked the first super-heroes that came to mind: Batman, Superman, Wolverine, and Spider-Man. It was only after I made those four cards that I realized that if I continued to do super-heroes I’d have to find some female ones to do to. Most people associate comic books in general with super-heroes in particular. If you tell someone you read comic books they assume you know all about Superman, Batman, the X-Men, Spider-Man, and ann the other big names. I know all about those guys up until about 1987. After that not so much. It’s tough trying to figure out which female super-heroes to draw when I don’t know any of the new ones. When I think “New female super-hero” the first name that pops into my mind is Jubilee from the X-Men and her first appearance was in 1989! That’s how out of the mainstream I am.

Anyway I eventually evened out my male to female ratio and ended up making twenty eight cards over the last couple of weeks. In looking back at them there is only one character created after about 1978 in the bunch. The new Captain Marvel. I happened to see an article on her and liked her new costume and knew I could find it easily. I had to reference all the character’s costumes and am glad we have the internet these days to do it. Even then it can be confusing. Wolverine has had a million costumes so I had to find one I liked. I went with the brown and yellow brown John Byrne one. The Vision, Phoenix, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Captain America, Big Barda, and the Invisible Woman, just to name a few, have all had a lot of costume changes. I think I picked most of the costumes from the 1970s.

So I had a little fun making these Bucket-head cards. I took to them easier than I thought I would and doing “Cute” ended up being a little easier than I expected it to. Plus they’re colorful and I always like colorful.

I made it down to Bryant Park to take some photos in New York City a for couple of Saturdays in September. It was the first time I’ve gotten down there in about two years. Time sure does fly. I like to take street photos in NYC but most of the time I end up taking park photos. That’s because people are sitting still in the park rather than walking. It’s a little easier to take photos of a stationary subject.

I like the everyday moments in life. That’s what I usually take photos of when I’m in the city. Besides my friends on occasions I haven’t worked with any models but instead take photos of strangers on the street. Or in the park. Strangers doing everyday things like hanging out in the park, eating, reading, and more often then ever before looking at their phones. Since Bryant Park is near Times Square in Manhattan it’s a big tourist park. You can hear lots of languages spoken and see lots of people consulting maps. Downtown in Union Square Park you’ll see many more young hipsters and I sometimes go there to take pictures but Bryant Park is still my favorite.

I used to care a lot more about what kind of camera I used. I guess I still do to an extent but these days with all sorts of digital devices being able to take pretty good pictures I think about it less. My current digital camera is already a few years old and I bought it as a fairly cheap stop gap camera until I could save up to get a nicer one. My own personal economy crashed so I never got that new and better camera but the Canon SX30 IS has served me well. Mostly because it has a ridiculously big zoom lens on it. I can stand well away from whoever I am taking a picture of and not disturb them. It’s a little like taking wildlife photos. I don’t want to disturb the wildlife but want to record them in their natural habitat.

One of the odd things that I like taking pictures of is other people taking pictures. I don’t know why but it amuses me. Maybe because it’s so easy to find people taking pictures. Being a park in the middle of NYC it’s easy to find a lot of people taking photos in Bryant Park. It’s even easier around the block at the Midtown Public Library. That’s the library with all the steps in front and the two famous statues of lions. Bryant Park is the library’s backyard. When I’m tired of the park I walk around and hang out in front of the library. Everybody stops there to take photos. I take pictures of people taking pictures and of the people in the pictures that people are taking. I’ve also taken a lot of pictures for people. Every time I’ve been there at least one person has asked, “Hey can you take a picture of us” and handed me their camera. I always do because I’m there to take pictures so why not.

There are often photographers and their models in Bryant Park. Probably in about one out of three times I’ve been there I’ve seen some sort of photo shoot going on. A couple of weeks about was the biggest one yet. There were about seven or eight models, at least, two photographers, and a make-up artist too. I have no idea what they were shooting for but they were in the park for at least a three hours shooting away in various parts of the park. At the end when all the models were in on a single shot they had quite the crowd watching them. I took some photos but from a distance. I didn’t want to disturb anyone or get in the photographer’s way. Plus I got some more shots of photographers photographing. It’s meta.

Oddly enough after I got home I read a blog where someone complained about a photographer “Stealing” another photographer’s photo. That’s not when a physical or digital photo is lifted or credited wrong but when a photographer goes to all the trouble of coming up with a concept, arranging for some models, finding a space to shoot in, and then some other photographer shows up at the location and takes pictures. Usually the second photographer gets his photos out to the public first. I imagine the photographers have to run in the same circles for this to happen but I never even knew that type of stealing was a thing. Weird. And what I try to avoid doing when I see a photographer and models in public.

I even had some fun shooting video on the street. I’ve mostly used my pocket camera, the Canon Powershot S95, for shooting video over the last few years. I totally forgot that my larger super-zoom Canon can zoom while shooting video. The small one can’t. I had a lot of fun sitting on the library steps looking for little visual stories to tell of people’s comings and goings as I panned and zoomed around. On my second trip down I even revived my old habit of videoing as I walked on the streets of NYC. That is not an easy thing to do. I had to walk on a crowded sidewalk in and out of the crowd as I tried to hold the camera steady. The weaving part is tough but a video of the back of someone’s coat as I follow behind them is pretty dull so I gotta move. That’s also when it’s good to be a fairly big male that people don’t want to bump into.

In my past years’ trips to Bryant Park I’ve often taken some time out to sit and draw. I didn’t do that this past month. I spent the whole time taking pictures. I tend to draw a lot more than I take photos so I wanted to walk around and take as many as I could. I could draw at home after all. That made for a tiring day. I got into the city at 10:30 AM and caught the 3:00 PM train home. That made for a good four hours of walking around and taking photos. When I eventually make it home I always end up with a headache. I forced myself to sit down and rest a little more last time and I think it helped with the headache. Getting old is no picnic.

This week I went to my stack of paintings and picked out one of my 18×25 inch acrylic on canvas paintings to write a piece on. This one has the date on it of 2/7/2012 and is named “Since You’ve Been Gone”. That wasn’t forever ago but I had too look at it for a few minutes to remember it and remember what I was thinking when I made it. The first thing I notice is the stained background. When I first got a batch of these 18×25 inch canvases I was trying something new. I was trying to work with thin areas of stained color rather than my usual building up of paint. Turns out I really didn’t have much to say with stained areas of paint and I mostly obliterated them with my normal method of building up paint. You can, of course, still see areas of the stained color in the background and I think it works pretty well but I wanted it to be the main focus of some paintings and it never was. The background has some interesting areas such as the orange stain over the yellow and the last hints of three different layers of blue rectangles but it all sits in the back.

Actually the stained background was the first thing I noticed when I walked up close to the painting. The thing I noticed right away was the flaming breasts the woman has. How could I fail to miss them? There are quite a few influences going on in those breasts. First off they reference the real life world of corsets. The tightness of the outfit around the ribs reminds me of that. Secondly they look like braziers. Those are portable bowls that they used to put fires in for light and heat. And thirdly they reference fantasy paintings with women wearing form fitting metal armor that would in no way actually protect them. That’s more references in a single pair of breasts than I usually have in any given painting. It could be me or more likely that our society gives a lot of importance to breasts and my paintings and I are along for the ride.

Now that I’m no longer distracted by flaming boobs I notice another thing about my stained color field approach to this painting. The red of her face and neck is actually the stained color field rather than a color I put over top of it. I’m remembering how I did this and I tried to make an abstract geometric stained color field painting and then lay my image over top of it. Turned out I was terrible at stained color field painting but, at least in this one, I was pretty good at integrating an image with it. I might have to try that again.

I think the stained color field face helped me out with the lips. I often find mouths problematic to paint. I not exactly sure why except there are not a lot of choices when painting lips. Since I mostly work with forms that I’ve simplified I can take the simple shape approach to lips or I can make them a bit more three dimensional. I just don’t have a lot of lip techniques in my bag to work with. I’m always deciding between those two techniques and always questioning that decision. That doesn’t seem to happen with other features. But here I had the additional choice to make the lips opaque since they were going over a transparent color background. Usually everything is opaque in one of my paintings and I don’t have that choice. So I went with it for the lips and I think it works.

The most unusual choice I made for this painting is the small little squares on the left side. I’ve often used geometric shapes, brush stokes of color, and little tick marks of color in my paintings but I think this is the only time I used little squares like this to basically fill in an area. I used them because their opacity works nicely with the light transparency of the background. They move forward a little bit and become objects filling up the space without being literal. I often have a literal background but here wanted the stained color field to be the background. I like how the opaque yellow of the squares harmonize with the transparent yellow of the background yet remain separate.

I used a lot of outline in this painting. Being that most of the forms are very flat things don’t separate without the outlines. Interestingly it’s mostly the complementary colors of orange and blue that I used as outlines. I wouldn’t think that would work. They are what I added last to the painting and pulled the painting together. I remember this was one I didn’t like until I got those last few brush strokes on. It was too flat and not coming together until I put down those little boxes on the left and the outline brush strokes. I like the orange ones in particular around the flaming bra. They seem to hold the whole thing together.

There are also much more subtle outline brush strokes in there though. The thin lines of yellow and dark orange on the very outside of her arm work well for me. They tame the thicker line of blue a little bit and make it less overwhelming. The blue came a little too far forward in that area but the little bits of orange and yellow bent it back in space. Then the yellow strokes on the glove bring it forward. Yes , that’s a glove on her hand which isn’t even in the picture. It’s mostly just a large shape to balance out the shape of her upper sleeve but it’s also a glove that shows my comic book influence. For some reason in the 90s there were a lot of super-heroes who had a giant glove or giant gloves on. I think the artists liked drawing them and that’s kind of what I did here. Without you actually being able to see the whole glove.

One final thing is the blue and purple corset. I find that a strange color combination. The blue is from the stained color field and the purple is painted on top of it. The colors don’t blend well together and tend to shimmer a bit. That’s not something that usually happens in my paintings but I like it here.

I pulled out two five by seven inch marker drawings from my pile to write about this week. They are called “Edge of Empire” and “Missing Man Formation” (yes, more random names). In checking the dates on the back of them it turns out that I made both on the same day: May 13, 2013. I guess that’s why I thought they looked visually related to each other as I wanted to pick out a pair of drawings to examine. Both drawings have their origin in my books of ink drawings as I pulled the basic images from one of my inkbooks and worked them up into these drawings.

I’ll start with “Edge of Empire”. The first thing that strikes me is that it’s the more somber of the two drawings. Probably because the face is not smiling and the top of the eyes are curved downward in a sad-eyed way. The purple color that dominates this one also seems a bit somber. Overall this piece is a good example of my love of composition, faces, and geometric shapes. The face is the central part of this picture but it’s not in the center. It’s pushed up into a corner but is emphasized by being the second brightest color in the piece while being framed by the brightest color. The eye is drawn in by the orange and settles into the bright pink. And it’s shape reflects the shape of the paper.

A lot of my pictures use geometric forms rather than natural ones. That’s easily seen here with all the triangles that make up this person’s shirt There are also plenty of little rectangles in there. The shirt could even be referred to as armor. It seems to me to be influenced by my love of ancient art and looks vaguely like a cross between some sort of ancient Japanese and Mayan outfit. The triangular spike on the shoulder is interesting in that it’s the element that separates the foreground from the background yet it doesn’t call attention to itself like the face does. That’s because the color is the same as the shirt and it’s a triangle that sits in a triangular space so it settles down. It’s important but fairly silent.

The white highlights in this drawing go a remarkably long way in defining the space in this piece. They take the flat geometry of the piece and bend them towards us a little bit. The small rectangles gain a third dimension and pop out of the the deep purple gaps that separate them. The collar under his chin seems to be made of some sort of precious stone rather than just flat rectangles. I often use white highlights that I draw in with a white charcoal pencil but they’re rarely as important as they seem to be here. Since this piece has a lot of geometric flatness in it that small amount of dimension goes a long way.

Overall I’m happy with this drawing. It says something to me. I like its limited color palette, its blue sky, the framed face, and the Chiclet-like space of the costume. They all come together to make me believe this piece is taking place for real somewhere out in the world. Or some world.

The next piece, “Missing Man Formation”, is much more peppy. It has an odd smiling man. Once again I’ll point out that a lot of my figures are androgynous. I think of both of these drawings as pictures of men but they could just as easily be women. Especially the first one. So if you think they’re women go right ahead with that. This one looks even more Japanese than the last one as he seems to be wearing old time Japanese armor. Sure the color is wrong and the rectangles don’t overlap in a real way but the gesture it there. Plus I think there is an ancient Egyptian look to the headdress. I really have been influenced by the art of long ago people.

One of the interesting parts of this drawing is that the brightest color in the piece is the background. The orange and yellow sky is the whitest white and stands up in the drawing. It almost makes the piece look like a backlit photograph. It’s a strange use of color and something I don’t usually do. It takes the idea of a foreground standing out and a background receding and flips it on its head. But it doesn’t go too far because the neutral brown striped walls on the sides help balance things out. Without them there the background would be too strong.

The coloring is also odd because it flips the cool colors recede and warm colors come forward idea on its head too. The whole outfit, from shirt to headdress, is made up of cool colors while the background is warm. Even the hair, which is in the back of his head, is a warm color. Normally I wouldn’t even make hair and the rest of he figure complimentary colors since complimentary colors often clash with each other but here they separate from each other in a pleasing way. Somehow the pink of his face make the orange and blue play together nicely.

The composition in this one is yet another example of my use of asymmetrical symmetry. It appears to be somewhat symmetrical but isn’t. The diagonal horizon line takes care of that. If this picture weren’t on a slant it would actually be symmetrical but instead we have the appearance with a bit of interest thrown in. I usually don’t go for diagonal horizon lines but it works here.

The armor has the same little highlights in it as the other drawing but I think they’re less important here. The geometry of the armor is more important than its three dimensionality. Its shapes are the basis for the order in the drawing. This drawing has a lot of order in it which contrasts with the blurred shapes of the sky.

It’s been a little while since I made one of these marker drawings. I made a bunch of them back in the spring or early summer but I’ve been working on my new “Organics” comic as of late. I’m going to work a few of them into my comic though. We see how it goes.

I’ve been inking a bunch of stuff this week. Mostly I’ve been inking stuff that is going towards making my “Organics” comic that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago but I also inked a couple of drawings for prints that I’ve had lying around. That I’ve been inking stuff all week is a sign that I haven’t been able to get a lot of other stuff done. Some weeks are like that. Creativity can run out for a while. Ideas and purpose can disappear. This is a state of affairs that is terrifying for an artist in his or her twenties but is less scary in your forties. When I was young and I thought I lost something I feared it might not come back. As I got older I realized that’s the ebb and flow of things. As much as I want to I can’t always be on. Though no matter what your age it’s still an empty feeling when you search yourself for what you want to do and nothing comes to mind. It’s a good thing I have a lot of old unpurposed drawings lying around that I can always pick up, ink, and at least have the brief feeling of accomplishing something.

Inking is something that I find takes less creative energy than other tasks. The hardest part of figuring out how a drawing is going to work is already done and what is left is finishing the drawing in ink. There is a lot of craft to inking in that I have to figure out which of my various pens and brushes to use and how exactly I want to use them to make the finished drawing. Craft is all about knowing how to make something. I’ve used the tools before, I’ve inked lots of drawings before, and now I have to finish this particular drawing using that knowledge and experience. In a drawing there is more figuring stuff out going on. That’s when things often don’t work so I have to erase and try again. With inking all that is done and I just have to make it look good. Sometimes I don’t have the energy for thinking so much but I can go on a kind of autopilot and do some inking. That’s where I’ve been this week.

Last week I was working on some pages for my new “Organics” comic but I ran out of energy. I had been penciling and inking a bunch of pages based on some of my automatic drawing methods and completed quite a few of them. It was a good run but all runs end. This week I started making some more pages based on a different method. I started digging through my pile of drawing to see what I could find and use for pages. Just like as this week I’ve been inking some weeks I just draw. That’s part of my process. I’ve got a drawer full of somewhere between fifty to seventy five pencil drawings that were finished but never turned into anything. They mostly sit there waiting for me to look through and maybe use one someday.

This week I did uses some. I decided to take a few of the drawings and turn them into comic book pages. Or half pages as things went. I’ve also been trying to incorporate some of my five by seven marker drawings into my new “Organics” comic. I’ve been having some problems figuring out how to do that. All the pages I’m doing are ten by fifteen inches so the smaller marker drawings will just be a piece of that larger page. But I don’t know what the other pieces should be. That’s where this weeks inking has come in. I’ve been picking from my pile of drawings and making those drawings into parts of pages. The problem is that I still haven’t quite figured out how those newly inked panels fit with the marker ones. It’s all a work in progress but still I got some inking done.

I’ve got a few basic inking tools that I’ve been using for years. The main one is a Winsor Newton Series 7 number 3 sable hair brush. This is the classic comic book inker’s brush and I’ve been using it for decades. It’s my favorite. I also use a few pens too. A lot of inkers use a Hunt 102 crow quill pen for inking but I never warmed to that one. I use the much harder to find Gillott 1950 pen. Those are both old fashioned dip pens. You have to dip them in a bottle of india ink to use them. Waterproof india ink is what’s used to ink comics.

I also use a variety of markers for inking. Twenty years ago there weren’t many good markers to ink with and I mostly used technical pens but these days there are a ton of markers with high quality archival waterproof ink in them. I still use one technical pen to ink. It’s one of the larger sized and lays down a thick wet india ink line that I find a marker can’t easily duplicate. All the thinner technical pen lines are easy to duplicate with the much easier to use markers.

I did revive one pen technique this week for these pages. It’s more of a pen modifying technique actually. Y’see I like sign pens. I first started using them years ago with the Pentel Sign Pen but have since found another Japanese brand that I like called Computer Sign Pens. The only problem with them is that the ink they use is not waterproof nor is it archival. They’re not really meant for artwork. Back when I only knew about the Pentel sign pens I used to refill them with india ink. If you pull off the back plug on the pen you an take out the cylindrical sponge inside that holds the ink. Refill that sponge with drops of india ink and the pen will keep on going. At least until the tip eventually wears down. The only problem I had with this method is sometimes the india ink would be too thick to flow through the pen properly over time. Eventually that got a little annoying and I stopped doing it. This week I started doing it again because I recently purchased some technical pen ink. You can use regular india ink in a technical pen, as I had been doing for years, but technical pen ink has a little bit of glycerin in it that acts as a surface tension breaker and makes the ink flow easier through a pen. I used some of this ink in a sign pen and it worked beautifully. It flowed much better than my regular ink. I think I’ll keep doing it.