Radiant Comics

This week color makes an appearance. Way back in the olden days of the late 1980s and the early 1990s I, and many others, used to make color sketches with watercolors or markers. Markers could be easier but they also could be more expensive. The point of a color sketch is to figure out exactly what colors you want everything to be. That can save a lot of time compared to trying to figure all the colors out when working on the final painting. Especially if you make a mistake in color choice on the final. It’s easier to figure it out before hand rather than fix a mistake. And mistakes will be made.

These days all my color sketches are done on the computer. It makes things so much easier. I used to have to make a drawing with each color sketch and that can be time consuming but with the drawing scanned into the computer I can change colors easily. The drawing is on a separate layer than the color so trying new colors or fixing mistakes is a snap. I can try out ten color schemes in the time it used to take me to try out one. The computer really is a beautiful tool for me at this stage.

This first color sketch is an oddity in that it even exists. When looking for the color sketch for this painting I ran across this file. Usually I only have one color sketch file since since I can try as many color schemes out as I need in just one file. This color sketch was also done over the penciled version of the drawing. This is not unusual since I don’t normally have an inked version of a drawing for my painting but in this case I do. I must have gotten part way through this color sketch and said, “Forget it. Things aren’t going right so ma

Now here is the finished color sketch. You can see that the line quality is totally different than the pencilled version. It’s drawn in ink now. I also notice that I got rid of those triangular shapes that were at the top of the painting. They were obviously causing too much visual clutter for me so I eliminated them and went with just a bar of color up top. I bet that’s why I was having so much trouble with the first color sketch. I couldn’t make all those little shapes up top work with the rest of the color. I can see now that I was going with a simple analogous green and blue color scheme for my base color with all the bright strips of color to be added later. Normally my color isn’t this sedate but I knew I was going to liven things up later.

The next step is to transfer the drawing to canvas. I do that by “Gridding Up” the drawing. You can just make out the grid in this photo. The grid is made up of a bunch of two inch squares. I also make a proportional grid over top of the color sketch on the computer. I then print out the drawing (minus the color as there’s no need to waste the ink) with the grid on top of it. Now I use the gridded drawing as a guide to make the big drawing on the canvas. Just draw what’s in each little box. It’s easy. This is how artists have been making small drawings into big drawings for a long, long, time and it works well.

After I transfer the drawing, in pencil, onto the canvas I get out my brushes and black paint. The black paint in an acrylic because I don’t need it to have any surface and I do need it to dry fast. If the black was an oil paint it would take a week to dry and it still might make a mess. I know this because back in my student days I used black oil paint and a cobalt dryer to do this part. Things went much smoother after I switched to black acrylic paint.

The line quality of the black doesn’t matter as much as it would in an ink drawing because of the way I put on the color paint. The color is an oil paint and it’s thick. I drop it on in the middle of a shape and work the brush stroke in the direction I want them to go in. I bring the paint as close as I can to the black line and then change how I how the brush and push the paint up to the black line. I shape the black line from the outside in. Sometimes I make a mistake and have to scrape some paint off, paint the black line back in, and re-push the paint up to it but do to the oil paint’s opaque nature it’s pretty forgiving for this type of correction.

In this next photo you can see how I put the paint on. Usually from top to bottom and from left to right so that I don’t make a mess. I like to finish off enclosed areas but you can see that I didn’t do that with the sky because if I was to paint underneath the face at this point the wet paint would be in my way. Better to finish the face first. You can also see my brush strokes and how I push the paint up and around the ear. I’ll then pull back in the direction I want the brush stroke to go in.

I really should have taken a photo after all of the initial color was painted on and before I put all of the brush strokes on top but alas I didn’t. It pretty much looked like the color sketch anyway. Still it would have been nice. I can’t put all of those brush strokes on top of the paint for a couple of weeks. The surface of the paint has to dry a bit first and since it’s oil paint that takes a while. This gives me timer to contemplate what I’m going to do with the top strokes. I’m not saying I think about it 24/7 but at any given moment I can contemplate it. It make a nice chance of pace from the relentless sort of “Get it done” mentality that it takes to put the paint on the canvas as I do.

Here is the finished piece. Since I analyzed it a couple of weeks ago I’ll be quiet now.

It looks like this week’s post is going to be a “How-To” post. Or maybe I should call it a “How-I-Did-It” post because that’s a more apt description. After all I don’t expect anybody to be following my steps. but I do want to document them. Occasionally I have taken some photos of my paintings in progress and by pure chance it turns out I did that with the painting, Weeping Strings, that I wrote about last week. I kind of just took the photos on a lark with no idea that I was ever going to make anything of them but they’re good enough to serve an illustrative purpose. I also managed to track down the drawings and sketches this painting was made from. Computers and scanners sure make it a lot easier to organize and find things. And remember, kids, put dates on your stuff.

I’ll start with the sketchbook page that I drew the original drawing on. You can see it on the top of the page. It’s a 5.5 x 8.5 inch book so that makes the drawing about 5 x 3 inches. The date on the back of the page is March 26, 2010 and the date on the back of the painting is May 8, 2010 so I must have liked this image right off the bat to make it into a painting so quickly. That happens on occasion but I’m usually going back into these inkbooks of mine to find images to work with long after I drew the images. This is book ten and I’m currently drawing in book fourteen so often years pass between when I make an initial drawing and when I make it into something finished. A month’s time is quick and fairly rare. I think I also made a small 8×10 inch painting of the image of the two faces in panel four. Often I never use any of the drawings on a page so that to have used two of them on a single page means I had a good day.

I scan all of my inkbook pages into the computer as a matter of habit. I remember reading a story written by “Concrete” cartoonist Paul Chadwick about how he used to always carry a sketchbook around until one day while he was out he left it behind somewhere. He went back to the place but the sketchbook was long gone. All that work was lost to him. From then on in he carried only loose pieces of paper to draw on while out so that he would never loose an entire sketchbook’s worth of work again. That’s a solid cautionary tale but I have a hard time carrying loose pieces of paper so I stuck with my sketchbooks. But that story never left my brain. I also stuck with sketchbooks because this was before the days of my inkbook style of drawing and my sketches were almost worthless to me as tools. I was just a bad sketcher.

As I started working in my inkbook style my sketchbooks (inkbooks as I now call them) became much more valuable to me as a tool. They became my source of images to work with. The Paul Chadwick story became even more real to me as my inkbooks became more integral to my art but I still didn’t want to give up on books. They’re convenient and I like them. Luckily for me it was the early 2000s by then (I think Paul Chadwick’s article was from the early 1990s) and the digital age was well under way. I decided I should not only scan in my inkbook work but scan it in fairly often. I should make a habit out of it. So that’s what I did. So now if I lose an inkbook, though I would be upset, I would have scans of all the work. At most I’d lose five or six pages of drawings but not fifty or sixty pages.

The original drawing from my inkbook was drawn spontaneously in ink. After the page is scanned in I make a copy of just that drawing, blow it up in Photoshop, and print it out in blue line. All those light grey lines (if I had scanned this in color they’d be blue but it’s easier to drop them out if I scan in greyscale) that you can see underneath the thin grey lines are the original sketch blown up. I think the size of this drawing is about 9 x 12 inches. At least that’s how big the paper is that it’s drawn on. After it’s printed out in blue line I draw in pencil on top of the blue lines. This is the for-real final drawing. You can see how I changed things from the initial sketch.

The next step is an ink drawing. I scan in the pencil drawing, blow it up even bigger (this ink drawing is around 10 x 15 inches), print it out in blue line on bristol board, and ink right over the blue line with brush, pen, and ink. Though I almost always do this when I’m making a comic or a print this is not a usual step in my painting process. Since making a black line with a paint brush on canvas is so different from using a much smaller brush on paper it usually doesn’t help me to make an ink drawing first. I’m not sure exactly why I made one this time. It could have been that I was planning to make a print of this but changed my mind and decided to make it into a painting. That’s happened before. But I have a vague memory of doing this for the painting. I think I wanted to work out the line weights a bit before I started the painting. Once again that’s something I usually don’t do but I think, in this case, there were so many long and sweeping lines in the piece that I wanted to work some of them out first rather than do it full size as I usually do.

Those are the drawing stages of this method of mine. Next up is the color.

Taking a break from writing about my past artwork to write about some current stuff. Specifically my little red sketchbook. As I’ve written before I, like most artists, have a great affection for sketchbooks and have more of them than I have time to fill them up. I have them in all sorts of shapes, sizes and paper types. Over a year ago I bought a small 3.5 x 5.5 inch Moleskine sketchbook. It’s has a red hardcover hence I’ve been calling it my little red sketchbook.

I have certain sketchbooks that I buy all the time to do certain tasks in but when I get a new and different sketchbook I try to do something in it that I usually don’t do. So for this little red sketchbook I decided to draw in it with only a red pen. One of my favorite markers to draw in is an old time Pentel sign pen. By old time I mean the 1970s or so but these pens were ubiquitous throughout my childhood. They’re not around as much anymore but they can still be found and I rediscovered them in the late 1990s and have been using them ever since. I usually use the black ones but since they come in red too I decided they would be perfect for my little red sketchbook.

Since this sketchbook is smaller than the ones I normally use I decided to drawn in it slightly differently than I normally do. I’d treat the page as one whole unit and wouldn’t be drawing boxes on the page to draw inside. The only borders to be found would be the edges of the page. There would also be no underdrawing. It would all be spontaneous drawing right in pen with no going back to change anything. Each page would be its own finished drawing made up of a lot of small images interlocked. Don’t ask me how I decided this was how things were going to be done it just kind of ended up that way as far as I remember.

Things always take longer than I think they will. That’s one of the truisms I never seem to be able to escape. All of the pages of my little red sketchbook are dated. It took me about an hour to draw a single page. That’s not too bad. With forty one pages in the book that’s forty one hours. That doesn’t sound like too long does it? It took me over a year to fill the book. The first page is dated 1/11/12 and the last page is dated 2/17/13. That took a much longer time than I expected it too. Partially that was because this wasn’t a main project of mine so it only got done in between the cracks of other things I was working on but also because I underestimated what it took to do that type of drawing.

I’m used to drawing spontaneously in ink. It’s how I start a good percentage of my art work. But it’s how I start things and not how I finish them. Part of drawing spontaneously in pen is allowing yourself to make mistakes because they don’t matter. The whole point of drawing that way for me is to free my mind to come up with the beginnings of ideas. The little red sketchbook was all about each page being a finished drawing. Turns out that takes a completely different type of concentration. I have to be “On” with each stroke of the pen and make things spontaneous as well as minimizing mistakes. That turned out to be a lot harder to do than I anticipated and I could only get it done when my concentration was good. I made good time at first but slowed down to nearly a halt as the summer came and finally got things finished this winter. After getting ten pages done in the first month I never thought it would take me a year to finish the next thirty one pages but it did.

Today I’ve been doing some production work on turning my little red sketchbook into a digital book. I’ve scanned in all the pages plus scanned in the book itself. The idea is to keep it looking like the actual little red sketchbook and you’ll be able to turn the digital pages in it. I have a story that’s going to go alongside the drawings that’ll tie things together. I haven’t written the story yet but I’ll get to that as soon as I get all the scans set up.

Doing the production work on my own stuff can be the most boring thing in the world. Production work is all the technical stuff that needs to be done in order to be able to make something into a book or some such. I have to scan in all the pages, line them all up at the correct size, come up with some sort of design, and them put all the pages into their proper place in the design. Everything has to be done in a certain order and in a certain way and it’s all kind of tedious. I’d much rather be doing something creative with my time but this has to be done if I want to see this project through.

I have to say that I’ve enjoyed working in my little red sketchbook over the last year. I think that’s mostly because I actually came up with an idea for it that I liked. Most of the sketchbooks I buy on a whim and try to come up with a theme or project for never end up as anything special. Most of them get mixed in with my utilitarian sketchbooks after a while because whatever they I had going for them petered out as the idea was not so interesting to begin with. It’s tough to come up with something different to do with a sketchbook. I’m glad I finally did.

Since I went all the way back to my student days (the mid to late 1980s) to describe how I first learned to paint now I’m going to move forward in time until May of 2010 and the last oil painting that I made. It won’t be the last oil painting I ever make but for the last few years I’ve been trying my hand at painting in acrylic paints. They’ll be some of those to come but first this one to show you where I went after twenty years of painting. I took some twists and turns before getting here but those are also for another day.

This painting in titled “Weeping Strings”. The title has no particular meaning except I’m in the habit of naming my drawings after I make them with whatever title pops into my head. I found this to be necessary if I want to find things. I scan in all my drawings and sketches as I do them and sometimes I look through the scans and other times I look through my drawings on paper so I need a name on things to keep them organized and find things. I also like titles in general and it’s fun to make them up. And who likes to see a painting named “Untitled No. 54”? Not me. That always make me think the artist was lazy. C’mon, just put a name on it!

This painting is forty eight inches wide by thirty nine inches tall. If I remember correctly the stretchers (the wooden frame the canvas is attached to) are actually from an old painting that I made back in my school days. It was a terrible painting that I didn’t have the space to keep but the stretchers were good (I built them all from scratch in those days) so I stretched a new piece of canvas over them. I only did that with a couple of paintings so it’s an odd little coincidence that this one happens to be one of them. It ties my last two blogs in with this one in some strange time travel-ly way. Or maybe it’s just that I want a time machine. That would be fun.

The first thing to notice that is different from my student work is the color. There are no vast areas of white paint anymore. My student days are long gone and there was no longer a need to limit myself as I did while I was learning to paint. Here I know how to paint. The type of composition I used is different in this later work as it is mainly a face rather than a figure. Faces have developed into one of my favorite things to draw. Not from life or from photographs but drawing faces out of basic shapes and lines and then adding markings and colors. I once had a teacher remark that my paintings were looking at the viewer harder than the viewer was looking at the painting and I agreed with that. I liked the idea. I like when a drawing or painting of a face is so alive that it seems like it’s looking out at the world. I enjoy finding that life.

The stage-like composition of my early paintings is gone too. There is a landscape space behind the face rather than a blank room. It defines distance in the painting in a different way than when I used to use just negative space for the background. Gone also are the odd little creatures that I used as interesting tidbits but also to clarify the space of the painting. In this painting the composition is defined by the geometry of the face and his clothing. It has much more positive space than my old student paintings but the negative space still has an important roll to play.

My composition still involves a lot of positive and negative space fighting with one and other. In this painting I have the background fighting with the foreground. But it’s the positive shapes in the background. Those pyramids keep wanting to move to the front of the painting. This is accomplished by closing down the negative space between the face and mountains and keeping the color of the negative space close to the color of the face and far away in value from the color of the mountains. The eye wants to join up the sky with the face and push the mountains forward. This is where the main action of the painting is happening and the rest of the painting swirls around this focal point.

Gone from my student days are the brush strokes going in only one direction. In this painting I’m following, defining, or fighting against the form or shapes as defined by the black lines with my application of the paint. I swept the brush across the top of the neck (in blue) but went top to bottom with it on the part of the neck in the shirt (in green). In the face I was following the flattened form of the cheek, the chin, and the lips. The hair is made up of swirls. That’s what I like to do these days with my brush strokes. Use them to make the light dance around the canvas. It takes a lot order to do that.

The next thing that’s easy to notice is the colored brush strokes that are on top of it all. No more boxes of color but a similar function is served by the lines of color. They have much less of a geometric element to them but they still define the space. Plus they add an element of action to the painting. I like flat space in my paintings but that doesn’t mean there can’t be depth and things can’t move around. These brush strokes of color are the final things I add to my painting to make the eye move around. They are also the most spontaneous part. Everything else has a fairly high level of planning involved but with these final stokes I fly by the seat of my pants. That and experience.

Once again I get in the Way-Back Machine to write about my art. I dug up some old slides I took back in the late 80s of my student paintings I made way back in the spring of 1988 (excuse the scratches and dirt on the slides). This was the second semester that I got to work on “My” painting. After spending the first semester on a series of twenty four by thirty six inch painting I scaled things up. These two paintings that I’ve posted here are about four feet wide by three feet tall. That makes the figures about life size. This was about the largest size I could fit in my studio back in art school. It’s still about the largest size I can fit in my studio these days but I hardly ever make paintings this big anymore. I don’t have the room to store them.

Once again these are all about me learning how to paint. I learned slowly and methodically. One of the things I added this semester was drawing from life. Instead of drawing my comic strip characters or other characters out of my head I drew this figures from life. Mostly from me in the mirror with strange heads added on but in my final semester I used live models a few times. That changes the nature of the imagery a bit and grounds the figure in real life a bit more and makes the weird things going on around it a little weirder.

Unfortunately these paintings defy reproduction. You really can’t tell from the scans of slides but all of that white paint is painted. It’s probably about an eighth of an inch thick with white paint and the direction of the brush stroke is a uniform up and down. That’s another thing I was working on as I was learning to paint. Brush strokes and what to do with them. In the beginning here I kept them all the same. Up and down. But as I learned to paint I varied the way I laid the paint down. The same color paint put down with a horizontal stroke looks different than if laid down with a vertical stroke. That’s because of the way the light hit it. The paintings I made actually had a “Grain” like a piece of wood that I could control. Surface is a very important part of painting. That’s what people don’t know if they only see reproductions of paintings.

The second aspect of these paintings that get lost is the black line. First off I was using mostly a single weight black line. Sure that was some variation in the line weight because I couldn’t resist adding some but I was trying to avoid using too many drawing techniques because I didn’t want these to be about the drawing. Clearly I had a lot of learning to do in the drawing department but I wanted these to be about me learning to paint so I cut back on the drawing challenges.

The black line also has less surface than the white. I painted the black line in thin watery paint so it only has as much surface as the gessoed canvas. I then took the white or color paint and applied it after the black paint was dry. The white and color paint has the consistency of soft butter and I pushed it up to the black line and then drew my brush away from the line. This paint pushing technique was suggested to me by a teacher who said that’s how the painter Mondrian often put down paint. It works well when you need a clean paint-on-paint edge and has served me nicely all these years. It also leaves a bead of white paint next to the black line that emphasizes the change in surface. If you could see these paintings in person in looks like the black line was cut out of the white paint.

My use of color gets more complex in these paintings too. Sure it’s still limited to just a few colors in a few shapes but I’m playing with the space that the colors create a lot more. For example the way I use color in the round bubble in the first painting distorts space in such a way that the eye has a hard time settling it all down. The smaller orange space drops back against the yellow while the light green moves forward against the blue. All while the image of that little creature in the bubble tries to sit still in space. That’s the main intersection in this painting.

There are less dramatic things happening elsewhere in painting as I was trying to push and pull on the space using the geometry of the color shapes and the composition in general. In treating the paint surface as I was with all that heavily applied white paint I was also trying to use the negative space, the space around the things, to define the space. In that first painting with the bubble I tried to make the space on either side of the main figure (the man holding up a stick) as important as the figure itself. I tired to make it like there were three columns. The pace between the couch and the man, the man, and the space between the man and the edge of the canvas. Like three tick marks on a pice of paper but blurring where the tick marks end and the paper begins. Hardly indistinguishable but maybe a little blurry.

I have one more thing to say about these paintings. Something a teacher told the class once that I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Overlap creates space. Forget cool colors recede and warm colors move forward overlap is the best way to create space”. I had never heard that said before and he was right. Draw something in front of something else and it creates a space between them. He was talking about literal things but I used that with my blocks of color. Put a block of color behind something and it sits behind it. Make that color block just the right color and shape and the eye moves it forward in space fighting against the space created by the overlap. This was another concept I was working with and learning as I made these paintings. I like learning.