Radiant Comics

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A lot of my art has to do with the search for meaning. What individual things mean isn’t as important to me as trying to find meaning in general. That’s why I like to make weird stuff. Art and images that no one has seen before. Then I wonder how I thought of it and what it means. That’s interesting to me.

I the 1990s I made a series of short comic book stories that I called “Organics.” They were made back when I first started learning Surrealist automatic drawing. If a story was going to be ten pages long I’d get ten blank pieces of paper and rule borders on them. They would look like blank comic book pages, which was what they were, and I’d close my eyes and then scribble with a pencil on those pages.

After I was done scribbling I’d look at each panel on each page to see what I could make out of the scribbles and then draw that thing I saw. It was kind of like finding faces in clouds. It was a weird technique and I ended up drawing a lot of weird stuff.

After I drew all ten pages I’d lay them in front of me and decide what order they went in and what story they told. Usually with comics you think of the story first and then draw it but with “Organics” the images came first and then the story. Plus the story didn’t have to match the images literally. It had to tell its own story.

To me this was all about the search for meaning. I had a story written in words and a bunch of weird drawings but what did they mean together? My mind used to find ways to fit the words and pictures together and that was interesting to me. It wasn’t interesting to most people though. It’s not like I’ve ever had a ton of fans for my work but most of my friends, with a couple of exceptions, had zero interest in my “Organics” comics.

The first few of the comics were the most off-putting to people. I was working in this really opaque drawing style where I was trying to blur the line between the foreground and the background. Sort of along the lines of that classic face and vase optical illusion. If you concentrate on one part of the drawing then you see a face of if you concentrate on another part of the drawing you’ll see a vase. This was sort of the kind of think I was going for in the beginning.

No one really got what I was going for so over time I made the drawings more illustrative. They were still weird but it was a better defined weird. People liked them better and I think it was a better way to go. People may as well be able to tell what I’m drawing if I’m going to spend time drawing it. Foreground/background confusion was a dead end.

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This ties into one thing I’ve been doing this past week. Checking out using AI to make art. Talk about a search for meaning. I’ve been using an app called Photoleap. It does a bunch of stuff but the thing that it does that I’m interested in is that it turns a sketch or photo into a finished piece of art based on thirty one different Anime/Japanese Animation styles. It’s push-button art. I load one of my sketches into it and hit a button. That’s it.

With the app I would make various pieces of art from my art and I would also be asking myself, “Who’s art is this?” It exists because of my art and because I pushed a button but it doesn’t look or feel anything like my art. What does it mean? I don’t have an answer for that question but it fits into my liking to search for meaning.

So at some point during my playing around with this app I remembered my “Organics” strips from the 1990s. I wondered what would happen if I ran a page of that comic through Photoleap. I thought that I might have to deconstruct the page of comics into its individual panels and run those through but that wasn’t the case. When I ran a page of “Organics” through Photoleap it kept all my panels but filled them with completely new art.

This new comic book page was based on my page but since my art was so weird and dream-like the Photoleap page was also weird and dream-like. It was so strange to see and I started calling it “Art from the machine.” Because it really wasn’t art form me. I was the starting point but certainly not the ending point.

I decided to run an eleven page story through the machine but I had to prep the pages first. These comic pages were made before the days of digital lettering so I had to strip the lettering off the scan of the original art and then art correct the hole in the art that was left by deleting the lettering. Finally I had to re-letter the comic digitally to be matched up with the new AI art.

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Page by page I ran my art through Photoleap and even saved it in three different styles:
Romantic, Fantasy, and Isekai. I don’t know what that last style means but it seemed to add greenery to the art. After doing that, it took about forty minutes, I transferred the art to my computer. Most of the time was spent saving the files and keeping things organized. The actual creating of the AI art only took seconds per page. Finally I matched up the art with the lettering as with any comic.

I like the way this new version of “Organics” came out. The art that the AI made was sufficiently weird and interesting. I even made a version with my old art side by side with the new art that came from it. That really makes me say “Who’s art is this?” I still don’t know. It clearly comes from my art but it also comes from whatever art the AI is pulling from, mixing up, and putting back together to match my stuff. But it doesn’t feel to me line it’s mine.

I’m baffled by the who process and don’t know what it all means but I don’t think I can just ignore it. AI art isn’t going to go away just because I want it to. Art from the machine and the search for meaning will continue.

As an artist I am not a huge fan of AI art. But me not being a fan of it is not going to make it go away. That’s for sure. I have little interest in sitting here, writing prompts, and seeing what the machine can come up with. Yet I also think I have to find ways to use AI art to my benefit or I’ll get left behind. So that’s what I did this week.

I wrote recently about the one hundred and twenty faces I was drawing for my Great Gatsby illustrated project. I finally fished them and that took some time. I would estimate that it took me about two hundred hours to draw all those faces. That’s with me being able to leverage cartoon art faces I had already drawn over the years that cut down the drawing time quite a bit.

I was happy to have finished the faces and I took the time to try and work them into the overall book design but I faced a problem. All of my other illustrations were in color but these faces were black and white ink drawings. They looked a little out of place and I wanted to color them. But after coming off two hundred hours of drawing them over a month’s time I didn’t want to put another two hundred hours into coloring them. That’s what it would take. So I set about looking for a way to use AI to automate the process.

The drawings were only going to be printed about three inches high. I didn’t want to color to be complicated but even keeping it simple would take me a couple of hundred hours. So I was looking at AI apps on my iPad, I often check them out, to see if any of them would be of use. I found one called Photoleap. It promised to turn photos or simple drawings into anime characters. Color anime drawings.

I tested out a few drawings and it seemed to be okay. There were even about twenty different anime styles to choose from. It would take my strange black and white cartoon drawing and render it in color as an anime drawing. It was clearly using preexisting eyes, noses, hair, and other facial features and putting them together in a form that resembled my drawing.

The problem with the whole process is that these anime drawings were clearly not my work. Nothing of my cartoon drawing remained in them except the basic shape. It was also a little disheartening that the anime drawings were actually pretty good. I would guess that your average person would probably like the anime drawings better than my black and white cartoons. I found that depressing. But I had to get over that and press on.

My next step was to bring the AI anime drawing into a Photoshop file with my cartoon drawing. I did that and they matched up well. I set the black line drawing on “Multiply” so that the color drawing would show through beneath it. Then the problem was that the anime drawing was too dominant and over all it didn’t look like my work anymore. So I set about to change that.

The first thing I did was to turn the opacity down on the anime drawing to 80%. This make it less prominent. But it was still too prominent. I selected the anime drawing’s background colors and blurred them. That turned down its strength nicely but overall the anime drawing was still too strong. So I ended up going into the black channel of the anime drawing and turning it all the way down thus eliminating its black line. There was still a dark grey line there but it seemed weak enough.

I ended up liking the way the drawing looked so I automated the process. I made a Photoshop action (a macro) where I could open the files of the anime drawing and my cartoon drawing, hit a single button, and it would join the two together just as I described. That saved me a lot of time. But I still wasn’t done.

I had three problems with the combined drawings. The eyes, noses, and mouths. Being that the app was turning my drawings into anime ones the eyes were all too big, the noses too pointy, and the mouths too small and pouty.

The nose was the easiest one. Since the app made all the noses pointy upturned noses I had to eliminate all the nostrils. The app uses a dark shape for the nostrils so I had to select that dark shape and then use Photoshop’s content aware fill to eliminate them. That type of fill looks at the pixels around where I have selected and tries to guess what they should be in the space I have selected. It works pretty well when my selection is just a brown spot.

The eyes were done about the same way. I had to select them and then shrink them down to the size they were in my drawings. That usually left a cut out white spot in the place where they used to be so I had to select that spot and use content aware fill on them too. That was also fairly easy. Content aware fill saves a lot of time.

The app also added long eyelashes on every character. That worked fine for the women but I didn’t always like the look on the men. I ended up solving that problem just by blurring the eyes. I’d select both eyes and then use the Gaussian Blur filter on them. That made them fuzzier and the lashes less prominent. That was also fairly quick.

The last thing was the mouths and all their pouty lips. Sometimes I would just put a solid pink/red color over the lips and be done with it but other times I used the scale and warp functions to fit the pouty lips into where I drew the lips. They I used content aware fill to fix the areas that were cut out and white was left behind. This took a minute but still went quickly.

I had to tweak other individual things here and there but in general it was these three things that I had to do for all the drawings. I eliminated enough of the anime look of the color so that they now look like my drawings again. But I still had one problem. Overall the color schemes were terrible. Most of the flesh tone of the faces was fine but the hair, clothes, and background colors were not great. I would never had colored them like that. They really looked awful in general as group.

I fooled around with them a bit and ended up solving the problem by eliminating the color. I turned the color into sepia tone. I figured that would fit in with the 1920’s Great Gatsby theme anyway. All these sepia toned cartoons of the partygoers sets a mood. I think I might use them as end papers.

In the end I think I got all the coloring done in under twenty hours. It amazed me how much of the process I automated with actions (macros) and content aware fill. Plus it would have taken me ten times as long without the AI anime drawings. I obscured them enough so that without me writing this no one would be able to tell that’s how I did it but I still have my reservations about AI Art. After all this same App can take any photo of a person and turn it into an anime drawing in seconds. That’s scary for people who took the time to learn how to draw like that.

This week I finished one of my “Covers to comic books that don’t exist.” That’s a series of ink and marker drawings that I’ve been working on for a long time. I like comic book covers in general so I draw my own even though they have no comic books to go with them. The piece is “Dreams of Things” number 191.

Back when I started drawing my covers I had a bunch of different series that I would draw. I had “Deep Space,” “The Acid Ram,”High Tension Adventures,”Hypno-Love Girls,”Retro Futurist,” and a bunch of others. I did a handful of them all and switched between then to work on which ever I felt like at the time.

All of these covers were a lot of work to do so originally “Dreams of Things” was supposed to be less work. The concept was to come up with a single dream like image and build a cover around it. You can see that in the early covers in this series. The problem with that approach was that simple is not always easier than complex. It’s often harder to distill a single image down into its most basic form and still keep it interesting than it is to add complexity to it. So I found myself spending a lot of time on these simple images.

As I was already spending a lot of time on my “Dreams of Things” covers that lead to them getting more complex over the years. I kept adding one more thing to them. Number 191 has a really complicated geometric pattern in the background that’s full of patterns and colors. That type of drawing isn’t found in the early ones.

This past winter and spring I also bought a whole bunch of new markers. Not that I didn’t have about a hundred colors to choose from before then but I added another forty colors to the mix. That changed the color palette I was working with and the latest ones have gotten even more saturated with color in combinations that are new. They do look different.

The pencilling stage of these covers has changed over the years. In the beginning I used to pencil the pages at the same size that I did the finished ink and marker. Eleven by seventeen inches. First I’d pick one of my thumbnail drawings from my inkbook, then I’d do a rough drawing at six by nine inches, finally I’d blow up that rough drawing to eleven by seventeen inches and make a finished drawing.

At some point in time I decided to work smaller with the pencil drawing and only blew it up to nine by twelve inches. Then at some time after that I decided instead of a rough drawing at six by nine inches I’d make the finished drawing that size. It’s a little bit odd that as the drawings got more complex I made them smaller.

The drawings still get blown up to their final eleven by seventeen inch size so sometimes that leaves me a little bit of drawing work to do in the final inking stage. Usually that’s in the smaller faces. When a face goes for a half an inch high to an inch and a half high it has to be redrawn. That’s okay though. I expect it and can take care of it in the inking stage. The six by nine inch drawings have served me well in recent years. Maybe because the size helps simplify the complexity.

The first of my “Dreams of Things” covers that I finished was on January 22, 2016. As it’s June 11, 2023 as I write this that means that I’ve been working on this series for over seven years. That’s quite a long time. It’s also a little strange that all my other cover series fell by the wayside as at a certain point I only worked on my “Dreams of Things” series. It wasn’t a conscious decision but just sort of happened. I don’t think I drew more than ten covers of any other series.

I’ve been getting one a week of these “Dreams of Things” covers done for most of this year. That means that I’m just a couple of months or so away from getting issue two hundred finished. That’s a big number. I want to do something special for that one but I’m not quite sure what. I might have the beginning of an idea though.

I show off my in progress shots of these covers on my Patreon and I also show a finished cover on my weekly YouTube comic book haul video. On one of the YouTube shows I mentioned I was coming up on issue two hundred and on a whim I said I should use two hundred different color markers on that cover. That got me thinking.

One of the things I really like to draw is faces. Usually one face per drawing but I’ve also made these drawings that are nothing but faces. Twenty, thirty, or forty face all bunched together to make up a drawing. I think I even made one on a comic book sketch cover before. I think I can take that idea and use it for issue two hundred.

I already have pencil drawings through issue one ninety seven done so it’s almost time to draw issue two hundred. I’m also thinking about making it a wrap around cover but as I’m writing this I’m coming up with another idea. I can make it three connecting covers that somehow incorporate the numbers 2-0-0 into the mass of faces drawn on them. See, I’ve already figured out how to triple my work! (Why do I do that to myself?)

I recently put all of my “Dreams of Things” covers into eleven by seventeen inch portfolio books. Before then they were all in a pile and were hard to thumb through. As I put them in books and watched the years pass by as I looked at the dates on them I also noticed themes. I go though periods of big faces, landscapes, figure interactions, and whatever else. I never noticed these themes as I did them. It’s interesting to see new things in them. After I finish issue 200 I’m going to take some time to contemplate them. I’ll let you know what I see.

I’ve mentioned my “Three Pen” technique before but I thought I’d go over it in detail. It’s fairly self explanatory in that I use three pens to make an ink drawing. Three different size pens to be more specific. A big tip pen, a medium tip pen, and a small tip pen. A Deleter NeoPiko Line 2 (2.0 tip) is the big pen, a Pentel Sign Pen is the medium pen, and a LePen Drawing pen (0.8 tip) is the small one.

I originally developed this technique to make some quick 6×9 inch drawings. I’d go through one of my inkbook sketchbooks, find some thumbnail drawings that I liked, and then print them out in blue line on some 6×9 inch sheet of Bristol board. Next, without even penciling anything, I’d go right into drawing over the blue line with the markers.

I wasn’t drawing anything particularly realistic with these drawings. They were all my dream-like images that I make in my inkbooks. So I was mixing up how I was thinking about the ink drawings by imagining some parts as “Real” and other parts as graphic design. In practice that meant using a thicker marker to outline the foreground stuff in the drawing while using a thinner marker to outline the background stuff.

I usually started with the middle marker but I often switched between them. A little thick, a little thin, a little medium, and then maybe back to thick. I didn’t really have a set method. I’d go back and fourth until I felt the need for a change in markers. Often I’d use the thin marker at the end to add some small elements to the drawing.

I’ve made a lot of drawings that way over the last five years or so. It’s a pretty fun method that’s all about me acting and reacting to the lines and marks I put on the paper to build up the image from the thumbnail that I made previously.

I also make short Instagram videos of these drawings. I like a clean border of white around my drawings so before I start making them I put tape on the edges of the paper. That way I don’t have to stop the pen when I get to the border. I can keep moving and draw right over the tape. Otherwise I can get hesitation in my line as I’m nearing the thin black border I have on the outside of the drawing before it reached the white border.

The videos I make are actually of me pulling the tape off the paper and leaving clean borders behind. I found pulling the tape and revealing the border to be a small cathartic and satisfying experience. I propped up my iPad on a box above my drawing and recorded the tape pull. After I posted it on Instagram a bunch of other people commented that they found it satisfying too. I haven’t posted one in a while but I will again.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the Gatsby faces and they are another bunch of drawings that I making with my three pen technique except I’m doing them a little differently. It starts with the fact that I swapped out one of the pens. I upped the size on the smallest pen. Instead of the LePen I’ve been using a Micron12. It says on the barrel of the line that it makes a .7mm line. The tip of the pen is about twice the width of the LePen.

I decided to go bigger with the pen size because I want these Gatsby drawings to eventually see print and I thought a bolder stroke to the drawing was needed. The original drawings are 6×9 inches but they’ll probably be smaller than that when they’re printed. I didn’t think the tinyer line would print well. So a different three pen technique it is!

With the Gatsby faces I’m making a lot of them. Around a hundred and twenty of them. I’ve finished about sixty of them as of this writing so I’ve got a good grasp on what I’m doing to draw them. Unlike the previous 6×9 inch drawings I make a pencil drawing of a face to start the Gatsby faces. It’s more of a sketch than a drawing but it gives me the guidance that I need.

After the sketch is done I use the Micron12 as my first drawing tool. It’s got a hard tip and doesn’t have any line weight variation when I draw with it. So I do the whole drawing as a single line weight drawing. Usually I start with the eyes, then I move to the nose and mouth, third I draw in the jawline. After that I do the hair, neck and collar, and ears in various orders. I mix it up.

When I’m done with the single weight drawing I erase all the pencil lines.

Once that is done I grab the thick marker and make some of the lines thicker. Usually the outlines of the piece. Sometimes I use the thick marker on the jawline but not always. Sometimes the character is wearing a hat so I might thicken the underside of the brim. Mostly the big pen is a graphic design tool that might add some realism.

It’s when I grab the third pen, the medium one, that I add some realism. It’s not a lot of realism. The Sign Pen has a little bit of give to the tip so I can make thinner and thicker strokes with it. I like to thicken the lines that make up the underside of the face to give the face a little more depth.

The chin gets a little thicker to show a shadow and the same thing happens with the nose and lips. I thicken the bottom of those to indicate a shadow and therefor a little bit of form. I also thicken some of the lines of the hair. Sometimes to make shadows and sometimes because it’s good for the graphic design. The underside of the bangs of a haircut usually gets a shadow. Hair is tricky though. You don’t want too many thick lines in hair. It’s supposed to be light and wispy.

This is the method I usually use but there have been times I’ve gotten bored with it and changed it up. That is I’ve changed the order I used the pens in. Sometimes I grab the big pen and put all the lines that need to be thick in first. I’ll do a few drawings with the big pen and then switch over to the smallest one. Since I’m making a hundred and twenty of these faces mixing things up keeps me from burning out.

It’s good to mix things up.

I’ve written about this subject in the past but I’m going to write about it again: sometimes it’s hard to work on the photos I’ve taken over the years. It’s like they’re a glimpse into a world that was once my everyday world but now it’s gone away. It’s gone to wherever time puts things when it’s done with them. It can be emotionally draining. Especially working on a lot of them at once.

First off I’ll give you the technical details. It has to do with my iPad and Apple’s need to change things around over the years. In the early 2000’s I scanned in all of the negatives of my photos so I could have them in a digital format. That took a lot of time but I got it done. At that time it was only a dream to have something like an iPad or iPhone to act as a portable digital photo album but I wanted to be able to carry all my photos with me. I knew it was on the horizon but it wasn’t there yet.

I didn’t get an iPhone when they first came out but when the iPod Touch came out in 2007 I got one right away. It was small but it could do the job that I wanted it to do. It could be a portable photo album.

When I scanned in all of my photo negatives I did it at a high resolution and saved then as tif files. That’s the file format I save all my work in. It keeps things high resolution with no lossy compression. If I were to save the files as jpegs it would make them much smaller but jpegs throw out information to compress the file. Jpegs are fine for making things smaller so they fit on an iPod Touch but you still want your master tif file too.

Since the iPod Touch had a small hard drive and a small screen I had to resave all of my scanned photos jpegs and also make the DPI smaller. I think I went from 600 to 150 DPI with them. I now had two sets of all my photos. Full size and iPod Touch size.

The first iPad come out in 2010 and the second came out in 2011. I let the first model pass me by and bought an iPad 2 in 2011 to use as my newer and bigger portable photo album. But the screen resolution wasn’t particularly good on the iPad 2. That meant that I could still use the 150 DPI versions of my photos and they’d look fine on screen. Everything was all right. I rolled with that iPad until 2018.

In 2018 I got a ten inch iPad Pro. That machine has a lot more power and screen resolution. I still use that one five years later. But the 150 DPI photos were too low resolution for this iPad. I had to figure out what to do. It ended up being fairly easy. The new iPad could convert my tif files itself to use the converted files on the iPad. I hooked the iPad up to my computer, pointed it to the folder I wanted it to sync with, and it converted all the photos and put them on the iPad. It took a long time and this is the only time this process went smoothly.

Anytime I wanted to add photos to the iPad I had to click on their new folders and sync the iPad. That worked for a couple of years until it didn’t.

With one OS update Apple added in some facial recognition into their photo app. You could put names to faces and the software would find all photos of that person. I spent some time putting names to faces. Then the next time I had to add new photos on I went to sync the new folders with the iPad and things went Kablooie! When I hit the sync button it took all the photos off my iPad and put them all back on again. Plus the new ones. This took forever and wiped out all the facial recognition names I already put in there. After that I didn’t bother with facial recognition and only added new photos to my album maybe once a year.

Just a couple of months ago I decided to add some new photos for the first time in ages. I did the same thing I did in the past except this time the iPad erased all the photos, supposedly put them and the new ones on the iPad, and then crashed. This process took about three hours, I tried it three times, (which took nine hours) and I ended up with no photos on my iPad. My iPad stood empty of photos for weeks and weeks.

Finally I decided to try something new. All of my photos from about 1990 until about 2010 were all tif files (I had 23,000 photos on the iPad) so I thought if I converted them to jpeg files at full resolution (unlike my 150 DPI versions) the iPad might have an easier time with them.

It took a week to do. I used a Photoshop action to covert the photos to jpegs and that went quickly but keeping everything in order is what made it take a long time. It also made me wonder where time goes.

I had to take frequent breaks as I was doing this and spread it out over time because it was like watching my life go by. It’s not even like I was checking each photo but I saw enough of them to get that “Time is passing” feeling. That’s not always easy to deal with.

In the end the conversion of the photos to jpegs did the trick. I set up the new folder full of photos in folders for the iPad to sync with and it did. All of them copied over and fairly quickly too. It took about 90 minutes instead of three hours. It somehow even had a the names I entered a while ago. I don’t know why it did this time.

On the day after I finished this task I got to see a bunch of my friend who were in a lot of these photos over the years. The strange thing was that as I was talking to them I would sometimes see a photo flash by in my minds eye. It was a little weird. For a brief moment I would see the past. What a strange thing.