Radiant Comics

Art Cards. I’ve made a lot of them. Why? I don’t even know but I liked the concept when I heard of it years ago. Art cards are baseball card sized drawings and paintings. That’s 2.5 by 3.5 inches. They’re also known as sketch cards in some circles. I first heard of them as sketch cards back in 1997 or so. Trading card companies were hiring artists for a couple of bucks a card to make one of a kind sketches that would be randomly included in a pack of cards. That still goes on today but the art cards I make are of a slightly different variety.

It was probably the early 2000s when I first saw the term “Art Cards”. It was used to describe the small baseball card sized pieces of art that artists would make and either trade with other artists or sell to the general public for a few bucks. An Ebay there is a category for it: ACEO. That stands for Art Card Editions and Originals. I thought that was a pretty cool idea so I made a bunch of them. Turns out that no other artists I know ever makes them and no one ever really cared to buy them either. Ahh well, at least I eventually figured out a way to make some comic strips from them. See my “Drifting and Dreaming” strip. I post it on Sundays.

I’ve made all sorts of art cards over the years. Pencil drawings, ink drawings, marker drawings, watercolor drawings, and even a couple of colored pencil drawings. I almost never work in colored pencil. They seem to fall into two general categories: Ones I make for sale and ones I just make. What’s the difference you ask if I never actually manage to sell any? Well with the made to sell ones I draw things that other people seem to be interested in: pretty women, super heroes, and random pop culture characters. The other ones that I make are just me drawing whatever I want to at the moment. A lot of my usual weird stuff goes on in them.

One of the reasons that I still make art cards is that I’ve got the paper. I often work on paper that’s 11×17 inches. That’s a standard size for drawing comics on so I got used to working at that size. Plus that size paper fits on my scanner and in my printer so that I can scan in and print out my drawings in blue line at that size. Except the pads of bristol paper that I buy are 14×17 inches. I always cut that paper down to 11×17 and end up with an extra 3×17 inch piece of paper. For years I couldn’t figure out what to do with all those extra long and narrow strips and ended up tossing most of them out eventually. Now I cut them up into art card size pieces. As an old by-hand paste up artist I’m used to working with an X-Acto knife and a straight edge so it’s easy for me. I’ve got lots and lots of pieces of 2.5×3.5 inch pieces of bristol now so I may as well draw on them. And I do.

I weird though because not all of my usual habits apply to making art cards. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Usually I’m a methodical artist. I start at the beginning with step one and then go through all the necessary steps to complete a piece. Sometimes I do that with art cards. I decide to make a bunch of them and go about doing it. I decide on the medium, draw some out, maybe ink them, and then maybe color them. But that’s not always how it goes. Often I’ll pick up a pencil or a pen and just draw one. Then it’ll sit there unfinished for weeks until I decide to put some color on it. Some never get finished and get thrown away because I don’t like them. They’re not all winners. Art cards sit around unfinished for longer than any other of my paintings or drawings.

I’ve developed a few different art card styles or themes over the years. The first one that leaps to mind is my orange/blue/black drawings. I happened to have three markers that ended up in my desk tray. Most of my markers have places in my sets or groups of markers but these three didn’t: an orange retractable Shaprie, a black thin lined drawing pen, and a Tahitian blue Copic marker. Since they were always sitting there I stared doing some art card drawing with those three colors. I never would have thought of that color scheme on my own but it ended up working. I’ve made a few drawing with those three pens.

The next odd little theme that leaps to mind is my green paper drawings. Way back in 2005 I bought an iPod shuffle. It came in a bright green box. I liked the color and paper it was made out of so I cut up the box into art card size pieces and made a few drawings on them. The paper was coated so it was super smooth and the green was really strong so those art cards were as much gimmick as anything else but they came out okay. I think I still have a few more pieces of that paper. I’ve cut up all different papers into art cards including black mat board but in the end I rarely draw on anything but the bristol.

Art cards are one of the few places where I’ve done finished pencil drawings. Usually pencil is just a stage of a drawing that I make and eventually the finished piece will be in paint or ink. I don’t do many finished pencil drawings because of that. Some art cards I set out to do a finished pencil. It was interesting. They’re not magnificent or anything but not bad.

So there are some unfocused ramblings on art cards. The cards taken as a group tend to be unfocused so I think that’s appropriate. Since I number the backs of them I know how many I’ve done and it’s 937. They may be unfocused but that sure is a lot of them.

Words and pictures. That’s been my path. I don’t always have words in my pictures but I often do. My comics always do, my prints often do, and my paintings sometimes do. I like the way words and pictures work together to create a unique space in my head. A space that either one of them alone can’t create. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a new words and pictures thing. On my iPad of all things.

I bought my iPad back in the fall of 2011. It’s an iPad 2. I got it because I though it had some creative potential in the area of photography. Since I digitized all of my negatives years before and have been carrying them around on my iPod touch since 2007 using the iPad as a photo album was a no-brainer. But there was a hitch. Y’see I’m picky about the presentation of my photos. I hate looking through bad snapshot photography so I took the time to edit all of my photos before I put them on the iPod touch. I didn’t do a ton of editing on them but I cropped them and made them presentable. The problem was that the iPad was a much higher resolution than the iPod touch so all the photos I prepared were no longer presentable. Youch!

Since I didn’t want to re-edit all those photos again I just dumped my raw scan master copies onto the iPad. They weren’t nearly as presentable and I had to start using one of Apple’s photo management programs, which I don’t like, to handle all the photos so the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. The iPad never became the creative tool that I hoped it would be and I mostly ignored it as a photo album too. That is until recently.

Over the past nearly two years I’ve been buying or trying out lots of photo apps for the iPad. Some, like Hipstamatic, help in taking photos and some, like Snapseed, are about editing photos. Since the iPad 2 has a really bad still camera I haven’t taken a lot of photos with it and therefore don’t use the photo-taking apps all that much. It’s the photo editing apps that I’m most interested in. Since I’ve been working in Photoshop on my computer for almost twenty years I know my way around a photo editing software pretty well. There is not a huge learning curve for me but most photo editing apps didn’t offer me much. They seemed to do one gimmicky thing and that was about it. I’d get a new app, try it out, figure out what it could do, and then it would sit there. Then a few weeks ago I finally hit some kind of tipping point.

As I said before I like words and pictures together and that’s what I’ve been doing with some of my old photos. I’m an everyday moment snapshot photographer. Since the late 80’s I’ve been taking pictures of my friends at our social events and in everyday life. Those are all the photos that are on my iPad. I’ve been taking them and pairing them with some words. We’re all familiar with what “Memes” look like these days and my photos and words look like that except prettier and not seeping into the publics consciousness. I post them on Facebook for my friends to see but the point isn’t for them to somehow go viral. They’re for my friends and I to enjoy.

I use about six different apps to make the photos but I don’t use them all at the same time. Snapseed, now Google Snapseed, was one of the early ones I like and still one of the best. It has all sorts of filters and you can easily make basic adjustments and use special effects. It’s such a good program that Google bought it. I also use Etchings and ToonCamera which are photo-filter programs that kind of just do one thing. They make photos look like etchings or cartoons as the names imply. I recently got two pretty good masking programs, PopAGraph and ColorSplash, that help mask out photos so that color or effects can be applied to specific areas rather than the whole photo. I’ve been messing with them a bit this week.

The two apps that put me over the top were “Over” and “Tangent”. “Over” is the program that I use for putting the words on top of my photos. It’s a nice app. It gives me all sorts of controls over the type and is easy to use. “Tangent” is the one that I seem to like best. It’s an app that lets you put colored patterns on top of photos using various masks and opacities. This program was a bit more unfamiliar to me than all the rest and it took me a little while to get the hang of it but after I did I really liked it. You can take a circular mask and add a dot pattern outside or inside the circle, make the dot pattern a color, scale the pattern up or down, and change the opacity of the color. Since I like pattern and color it helps me add areas of visual interest to my photos. I try to use it subtly since it can easily overwhelm a photo and that’s not what I want.

One side effect of me using all these photo editing apps is that after ignoring them for years I’m actually looking at all my old photos. That’s fun. I flip through the photos on the iPad until I find one that interests me and then I spend a few minutes editing it with whichever apps I think will work. It doesn’t take a ton of time and mostly I do it when I’m sitting down taking a break. I then come up with a caption for it. Sometimes that takes a few minutes and sometimes a few days. Thankfully it’s usually closer to minutes. I drop the type on and post about one a day on Facebook right from the iPad.

It’s taken a while but this is what I originally thought I’d be able to do with my iPad. I didn’t expect it to replace my computer and Photoshop but I hoped to be able to find something creative the iPad was good at doing. I can edit photos in a fun and easy way with it. Someday I’ll get a newer iPad with a better camera and then I hope to find something similar in the way of taking pictures. Until then I’ll stick with this.

Once again I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing. Seems like I’m always doing that in one way or another but this week I’m talking about making comic books. I’ve been making comic strips and my Message Tee comics for a few years now but I haven’t made and comic book material in a decade or so. It comes down to the fact that it’s too much work for something I won’t get paid for and I’d rather spend that time on other projects. I think I have more to say with my painting and prints. Still, over the years, I’ve attempted to figure out a way to make some comic book stories that say something unique and don’t wear me out making them. I’ve never quite done that.

This week my interests in making comics were revived once again but the revival was because of comics I made in the past. About fifteen to twenty years ago I used to do a comic that I called “Organics”. They were all eight to ten page stories and they were weird. They were non-literal comics. By that I mean the pictures didn’t match the words.

I used to make the comics by first ruling out the panel borders on ten pages. Then I would scribble in pencil all over the paper. After that I would look into the scribbles and draw what I would see. It was sort of like finding faces in clouds. This was my way of using “Surrealist Automatic Drawing” to make comics and, I think, the first time I used that method of drawing extensively.

After drawing all the pages in this way I’d put them all in front of me and look at them. Then I’d put them in the order I wanted them to go in and I’d find the story that went along with the pages. The story was always some sort of narrative but there was no literal connection with the pictures. I tried to connect the stories with the rhythm of the pictures and make something that was different than usual. I liked them but most people didn’t get it at all. A few people liked them but most people didn’t relate to them. Eventually I grew disinterested and stopped using that method.

This week I decided to give it a try again. I was tired of drawing like I’ve drawn for the last ten years or so. That’s been mostly spontaneous small marker drawings, then pencil drawings, followed by ink/paint/marker. I decided to go back to finding faces in the clouds. Part of it was also me wanting to make some comics and remembering a time when I made some unique comics that weren’t a huge struggle. They were the ones I could do without worrying if they were good enough because people didn’t get them anyway. I wanted to be able to draw without thinking as much as as usually do yet also get something finished.

I’m still not sure if, in the end, I’ll have anything finished but I did pencil and ink two pages of my new Organics. I ruled panel borders for two pages, scribbled all over them, drew what I saw in the scribbles, and then inked the pages. I even partially wrote them. I was writing stuff down on index cards of all things as I was going along. I only have part of the story but that’s more than I’ve had in ages.

I also stumbled onto some of my past failed attempts and I think I can work some of that in too. I found a couple of pages from last year where I tried to make another new Organics strip that I completely forgot about. Instead of using my old method I tried making up pages by drawing spontaneous ink drawing as I often do. The pages were more literal than my old Organics one but still not wholly literal. I can see that I was trying to figure out a way to do them efficiently because they’re on 9×12 inch paper rather than my usual 11×17 inch paper. I didn’t like them in the end and stopped after finishing just two pages. I still don’t like the way I finished them but I see something in the early stages. I think I can go back and work them into something that can work with the two new pages I did.

Another idea that the non-literal nature of Organics opened up for me is to tie in some of my other weird drawings that have no place to go. I have a lot of finished ink drawings that never even got made into prints. One of them that I made last week was sitting on my easel and I thought that maybe I can make it into some sort of splash page for my Organics story. I’m not sure how but I think it can be done. I have a lot of orphaned stuff to choose from. I’m going to continue to draw some new pages but also think about where to put old things.

One more thing that has leapt to prominence with this new Organics work is my little red sketchbook project. I made little red drawings in my little red sketchbook last year and then last month tried to write a story that went with it. It didn’t quite work out how I wanted it to and I abandoned the story. I haven’t come up with a new one yet but I came up with an idea to tie the sketchbook drawings into my new Organics story. It’s not what I had planned for the little red sketchbook but I think it might work. We’ll see.

That’s where this whole project is at right now. It’s in the “We’ll see” phase. But I drew two pages. That proved to me that I will get an eight page story done. I’m not sure if any of my other ideas will get incorporated but I will get eight pages done. I’m sure of that now. That’s the surest I’ve been about making a comic book story in a decade.

Here is something I have done yet in writing about my art. I’m going to write about a painting that I finished just a few hours ago. My freshest one. It’s an 18×24 inch painting that is done in acrylic paint on stretched canvas. It’s the last canvas in a set of six blank canvases of that size that I bought last year. I haven’t made a painting this size in a few months (they’ve been small ones lately) and I decided to just dive in and paint before I lost the habit entirely. That’s what happens sometimes when I lose the ambition to make larger paintings. I have to decide one day to put everything else aside and do one otherwise I fear I’ll never do one again.

For this one I picked an image that I had already worked up a drawing for. I made the drawing a while ago, on 12/28/2011 to be exact, and it’s been sitting near the top of my pile of drawings because it’s one I like. It’s called “The Left Rotor”. I’ve seen the drawing so many times as I’ve flipped through the pile that it’s really familiar to me. I may have even done another small piece with it but I cant remember. It could be that it’s so familiar that I think I did something else with it. It’s a drawing of a masked face. Or half a face, if you will, because we don’t get to see the whole thing. Half of the face/mask is covered with hair or is cut of by the end of the canvas. There is a big eye on the mask/face so this is one of my paintings that is looking back at the viewer. The eye might be on the mask of might be looking through the mask. It’s unclear.

Since I had the drawing all worked out already I just had to make a color sketch of it. I do that on the computer these days so it’s easy to try different colors. Since this painting had mostly large shapes in it the color sketch went quickly. A blue mask, green hair, pink skin, a purple shirt, and brown eyes. And let’s not forget those red lips. Nothing too complicated there. After that I transferred the drawing to the canvas by use of a grid. I draw a grid on the drawing and draw a grid on the canvas. Then I use all those little boxes as a guide map for drawing the same thing only bigger.

The painting process starts easily enough. First I take a brush and dark purple paint and paint over the lines of the drawing on the canvas. After that dries I fill in the various shades of different colors from my color sketch. It’s sort of the same as coloring in a coloring book at this point. I even type on top of my digital color sketch what paints I used for what color. That helps me if I have to go back and fix something. I have about six different shades of green paint mixed and I can’t always tell exactly what shade I used the day before on any given area. Paint is a slightly different color in its wet and dry states and more than once I’ve put a brush stroke of the wrong shade in the wrong area before I started always keeping track.

I’ve heard it said before that a painting should look finished at every stages it passes through. I think that’s total crap since why would anyone ever finish a painting then? If it looks just as finished after three hours as thirty then why ever paint for thirty? That and at this stage in the process my painting looks its absolute worst. I’ve been worrying about getting the basic color down and right and not in making it look finished. If I were to try and make it look finished at this stage it would take three times the time and all that work would be covered up as I actually finished it.

Now is when the the middle part comes. I’m not quite finishing things yet but I’m getting there. First I build up the base layers of paint a little more to get the opaqueness that I want and then I work on the lines. I stared with a purple line but I don’t want to end with one. I lay down orange, blue, red, and whatever other color lines I like down next to the purple ones. They cease being lines that just hold a shape and become a bit of a shape themselves. It’s almost becomes a blurring of the edges technique not because anything is blurry but because which edge is “The” edge becomes a question. At one point the pink edge seems to be “The” edge and at another point it’s the purple one. I’m also working and reworking the areas of color at this time where they interact with the edges of the line. Sometimes I get overzealous with those lines and they have to be knocked back.

The final part of the painting is all those little brush strokes of color that sit on top. I think I developed those because acrylic paint doesn’t have the same texture as oil paint. When I paint in oil I use the texture of the paint a lot as part of the painting but acrylic doesn’t hold a brush stroke in the same way. So instead I somehow ended up using these tiny brush strokes of color to be the texture of the painting. Figuring out where they all go can be a bit tiring because it takes a while.

I really don’t have a describable technique for figuring out where they go because it’s mostly me looking. I look at the painting and see where it needs some brush strokes of color. Oddly enough the process is usually linear. I see a place to put down a series of green brush strokes so that’s what I do and then I look again and the place to put down a series of blue brush strokes jumps out at me. This goes on for a couple of days. When I’m in the middle of it I always wonder if I’ll know when to stop but I always do. I stop when no more places to put color jump out at me. It’s an odd thing but this is the improvisational part of the painting.

So that’s the painting I finished this afternoon. Not much to say about the image since it’s similar to many of mine except that in a painting like this I have to pay special attention to the eye. I used a bit of a different technique on it than usual and I like the way it came out. If the eyes and lips don’t work on a face like this it all falls apart. I kept the lips simple and the eye complex. I think that worked out okay.

This week I’m going to write about a painting that I just took off of my wall. It’s an 10×8 inch acrylic on canvas painting called “Dropped and Dragged”. It’s dated 7/10/09 and though it has been one of the paintings that hang on my wall I don’t think I’ve given it a thought since I finished it. I don’t know why that is. It’s probably my habit of always thinking about the next piece rather than the ones I’ve already finished. I guess this bit of writing is reversing that habit. At least for the time it takes to write this.

This was never one of my favorite images that I’ve come up with but as I look at it now I like it. It’s not really about a face as the face takes up less of the composition than is usual for one of my face paintings and it’s not so much about the body as the body is much more hunched and formless than many I have painted. So what is it about? It seems to me to be mostly about shape and color.

The first color that strikes me is the yellow background. It’s an unusual choice for a sky but it works well with the two tone orange sun that is on the right. The yellow continues the idea of the sun in the sky except in this case the sun is the sky. That little triangle of yellow on the left is what really completes the idea of the yellow being the sky. The color yellow is the brightest color in this painting and makes the background move forward in space more than one usually does. That makes the figure look like it’s sunk into the sky. That is an interesting bit of yellow.

The pink face is a shade less bright than the yellow but due to it’s position far from the mass of the yellow it sits forward in space without fighting with the yellow. The face is rooted in place solidly and hangs on as the only thing in the painting that my eye sees as undoubtably real. The rest of the painting tends to slide towards abstraction but the face remains real.

There is a lot of color in this one to look at. A lot going on. It’s not easy to make all those colors play nice together and I think the key to it all is only having a small bit of red. Aside from following my “Always make the lips red” rule the rest of the painting has none. Even the orange is toned down. The full strength orange of the sun is in a cage of purple, blue, and green and up in a corner. This is the strongest orange but it’s under control. The orange on the shirt has been toned down to almost brown and placed next to an actual brown to give it a visual anchor. The dots of orange on top link it to the sun without being overpowering. Color dots are goof foe that.

Blue and purple, being next to each other on a color wheel, are analogous colors. This means that the play well with one and other and blend into each other. Not that I’m doing any blending here but the blue and purple form an arch over the top of the brown/orange shirt. It’s a main thrust of the painting but a subtle one. The colors don’t leap out at you as the pink and yellow do. They sit back and form the main visual shape of the painting. The field of blue under the face is an interesting bit of color. It flattens out. The rest of the drawing follows some simple rules of perspective and makes a relatively real figure but the blue collar stands up where is isn’t supposed to. It changes the space in a way that I like. In a world where things are obviously not real some things are even less real than others.

The green hair is on its own. It has the same grey scale value as most of the blue around it and that helps it not stand out but it still does a little bit. That’s its point. It’s a little bit different than the rest of the painting but not so much that it calls out for too much attention. It plays a little bit of the game with the red lips that complimentary colors do when near each other. Complimentary colors fight for attention in our eyes and can make you bounce between them. That happens here but not as much as if there were more of the two colors.

The final parts to this painting are the dots and brush strokes of color. They get put on last and sit on top of everything including the black line. Mostly they are made up of the same colors already used in the painting but in this case one more color is introduced. The blue/green strokes on the left and throughout the person’s shirt. This new color brings everything into balance for me. It links the analogous greens and blues and makes all the colors play nice together. The color lines are there, in general, the help things out. They emphasize shapes and create gestures for the eye to follow. The brush strokes and dots become part of the decorative, abstract, and painterly nature of a painting but the strokes of color are more specific. They go in specific places as opposed to the brush strokes which can take up the whole top or side of a painting.

One final thing about this painting. The three purple boxes on the upper right are odd in that they nearly disappear to me. They are part of the cage that locks the orange sun in place but I barely notice them. They do their job and stay in the background. Sometimes you needs stuff that does that.