Radiant Comics

Sometimes I have to stop and take stock of what art I’ve made over the last year or so. I’m generally pretty good at getting things done but part of the process is examining what I’ve done. If art is its own reward then I’d better take the time to contemplate that reward. Thinking about what I’ve done in the past helps me get more art made in the future.

So here are some of the things I’ve gotten done over this year.

Great Gatsby Illustrated Edition. I’ve been working on these illustrations all year. I have about 20 of them done and in the last month I was working on the book design and integrating the illustrations with the text. I still have more that I want to do so this project may take a while longer. It took me nine months to get to the design part of the project but I think it is working out. I was unhappy with it at first but now it’s going along well.

Dreams of Things covers to comic books that don’t exist. These are the 11×17 inch drawings that I make. I’m a fan of comic books and I especially like the concept of comic book theirs. They promise you worlds and stories inside the book and give you a glimpse of those worlds on the cover. That glimpse is what hooks you. It’s a promise of greater things to come. I like that idea and try to make my covers as intriguing and attractive as possible. I want to know more about the stories inside the nonexistent book!

Inkbook drawings. I’m always getting these done. I’ve been filling up my inkbooks for 22 years. I get a book a year done. 100 pages of small spontaneous ink drawings that I use to get a lot of my visual ideas form. Each page has from six to nine drawings on it and I draw two pages a week. Just this week I looked through book nine and picked out six small drawings to work on and make into “Dreams of Things” covers. It’s good to have a reservoir of images.

Web Comics. My Four Talking Boxes comic strip is the one I work on every day. Each day I write a new strip and once a week I assemble five strips. Over a dozen years ago I made character sheets for all six of my comic strip characters. I pull the drawings from those sheets and paste them into my written comic strip to using Adobe Illustrator. After all these years I’ve got it down and keep it going.

I also worked on my two weekly strips: “Message Tee” and “Drifting and Dreaming.” These two run on Saturday and Sunday and I got 52 of each done. I made 156 drawings for D&D in the first half of the year and put them into strips. For Message Tee I reused some of another year’s drawings and wrote new messages for the shirts. This strip is all about the messages so I don’t sweat the drawing too much.

Gouache Painting. Having just purchased a new group of gouache paints I’ve only finished one painting as of the writing of this but I plan to get more done in the future. I’m not sure exactly what they’re going to look like though. Maybe some small 5×7 inch paintings. We’ll have to see.

Color Ink drawings. This was 2021’s new style but I continued it into 2022. Back then I bought a bunch of color inks and figured out a way to draw with them. I continued to make color ink drawings and even did some of the Gatsby illustrations in color ink. I think I’m going to mix some color inks in with the gouache paintings and see how that goes. I think the two mediums will work well together.

Big Ink Drawings. I slowed down with these this year but I still made some of them. These are my black and white ink drawings that I make on 22×30 inch paper. I think the time I spent working on them in 2020 and 2021 got taken up by my Gatsby project this year but I have been thinking about making some big Gatsby drawings so maybe I’ll mix the two things. I find these big ink drawings satisfying so I have to get back to them.

Six by nine inch ink drawings. I’ve made a lot of these ones this year. I search through one of my inkbook for drawings that I like and then blow up and print out those little ink drawings, in blue line, on 6×9 inch paper. After that I tape the edges of the paper as a mask so I don’t have to stop my hand and the ink brush as I get to the border of the drawing. This makes the drawing easier to do. I draw away on top of the blue line drawing.

Tape Pull Videos. I mentioned the part about taping the edges of the drawings because after I’m done with the drawing I make a video of me pulling the tape off the drawing and post the video to Instagram. For some reason Instagram likes those videos and they get more views than anything else I post there.

The tape I use on the edges is Scotch Removable Tape. It’s a low tack tape that’s made to be temporary. I learned about it back in 1990 when I was working in the Marvel Bullpen. Before the era of desktop publishing we had to do things by hand with paper, tape, and glue. This removable tape was made for the jobs where something had to be temporarily in place so the tape was easy to remote and didn’t rip the paper when removing it as most tape does.

It’s satisfying to remove the tape and see the edges of the drawing become nice and clean. Where there once was an abundance of stray ink marks becomes a clean area before our eyes. Other people seem to find it satisfying too. That’s what they occasionally say in the comment section.

So there you go. That’s what I’ve had going on this year. I got some stuff done. Hopefully that will help me get more stuff done in the future.

Well, I did it. I dropped $600 on a new film scanner. It’s a Plustek 8300i. The last film scanner I bought was my Minolta Dimage Scan III and I bought that one back in 2008. If that one were still working properly I wouldn’t have bought a new one but nothing lasts forever.

I first noticed my Minolta film scanner not working correctly earlier in the year. The scanner has a motor in it that moves the film holder. First you place the film in the film holder, then you place the film holder in the scanner, and then the scanner moves the film in place to scan a negative. If there are four negatives on the strip then the scanner moves the film holder to scan each negative in succession.

The problem I started having was the scanner no longer moved the negative holder correctly. It would scan the first negative perfectly, scan the second one a little off center, scan the third one even more off center, and by the time it came to the fourth negative on the strip it would only scan about half of it. A scan of a negative without the whole image in it is useless.

I had no idea if this was a hardware or software problem so I decided to download an older version of the scanner software I use (Vuescan). I installed the older version and it still did the same thing. The I decided to see if there was dust or dirt inside the scanner that was messing things up so I took a lot of screws out and looked inside. Everything looked dust free and everything seemed to be in place. Nothing loose or broken that I could see. So I put it back together and it still did the same thing. The scans were off.

I don’t use that dedicated slide and film scanner a ton so I decided to just ignore the problem for months. I scanned a slide or three on it and it was a struggle. This Friday I finally decided to spend the money on a new one. $600 is no small amount of money to me so it took me a while to come to the decision.

The new scanner is a Plustek 8300i. It’s the latest in their line of dedicated film scanners. I was also thinking about getting an old Nikon film scanner. A lot of people say that they were the best film scanners ever made but Nikon got out of the film scanning business about a decade ago. I would have to buy a used one and they go for about $600. In the end I didn’t want to spend that much money on a scanner that was at least ten years old if not older. If it was a hundred dollars I’d give it a shot but not for $600.

I got the scanner yesterday and it was easy to hook up. There is just a USB cord and a power cord. It also comes with basic Plustek scanning software and advanced scanning software called SilverFast. I was aware of SilverFast since it’s been around for a long time but I haven’t used it a lot.

My scanner came with a card that had my Silverfast serial number on it. I installed the SilverFast software which prompted me to go on the web, set up a SilverFast account, and verify my account. I did that. Guess what. There was no place to enter the serial number. Instead I needed an activation code. In fact the card I had was for Silverfast Ai Studio 9 and the website said that Silverfast no longer comes with a serial number. Then what was the serial number they gave me? All I could do was run the software in demo mode and email them. So I did. They haven’t got back to me yet.

I really wanted to give SilverFast a try but I’m not going to waste my time making scans with “Demo Mode” written across them. I went back to my go-to scanner software for the last 20 years. VueScan. I recommend VueScan highly. It drives just about every scanner out there and it’s easy to use and updated frequently. I want SilverFast to work since I paid for it but I don’t see it being better than VueScan.

The new scanner has about over twice the DPI of the old scanner. I think the old one was around 3000 DPI and the new one is 7200 DPI. When comparing scans of the same negative side by side there isn’t a lot of difference in quality. There is something with scanners called “Dynamic Range.” That’s a number from one to four that reflects how much detail a scanner can get out of a negative. The dynamic range of both scanners seems to be about the same. I can just blow the negative up bigger with the new scanner.

The new scanner doesn’t have a motor in it. Instead of the scanner itself drawing the film holder into the body of the scanner the film holder goes across the body of the scanner. And with no motor I have to push the film holder to the next negative. So it’s preview, scan, push, preview, scan, and so on. I find it strange that it doesn’t do it automatically. Of course the upside it that it can never put the negative in the wrong place like my old Minolta now does.

The best thing about my new scanner is the infrared cleaning. The scanner uses the infrared spectrum to clean any dust and scratches off the scan. It works well too. Last week I wrote about cleaning up scans but they’ll be far less of that with the new scanner.

The scanner is also a lot faster than my old one. It says it’s 38% faster than the 8200 model but compared to my twelve year old scanner it’s 500% faster. A scan takes one minute instead of five. The old one has some infrared cleaning on it too but it was not as good and really slow. It took seven minutes a scan with the cleaning on.

Update: Moments after writing this I decided to look even closer at the SilverFast card they sent me (it’s written in 13 languages). It turns out that there is a link written on the card that I had to go to in order to activate the software. The link that came with the software I installed brought me to the wrong place. If you just go to their website you will never find the link that’s on this card. Talk about making it hard to find! But at least Silverfast is working now.

I spent my Saturday this week cleaning up a couple of photo scans in Photoshop. Really one was a photo scan and the other was a negative scan. It amounts to about the same thing except I used two different scanners to get them onto the computer.

My Minolta film scanner is old. Somewhere around the year 2002 old. I write this in 2022 so that puts it at around twenty years old. Thanks to the scanner software VueScan I can still use it but it doesn’t work quite right all the time. The scanner uses a holder that I can put a strip of four or five negatives or slides in. The scanner then moves the holder to the appropriate spot to scan. Or it’s supposed to.

These days when I scan a strip of film it gets the first two in the correct spot but over or undershoots the last two or three. I have no idea why. I don’t know if it’s a software or a hardware problem. I tried an older version of Vuescan and it made no difference. I think it’s a hardware problem. I opened up the case on the scanner and blew the dust out (there was hardly any in there) but that made no difference.

Eventually I got on with scanning. Since I only had one negative to scan it came out fine. The scanner doesn’t overshoot the first one. The negative was one I bought off of eBay. Occasionally I look there and see what old fine art nude negatives are there for sale. I paid around ten dollars for this one. It’s a nude woman in some sort of net with flashing colors around her. It caught my eye and I thought I could make something out of it.

The second photo I was working on came in the mail form an old coworker. We worked together at Marvel Comics back in the 1990s. He had a nice group photo of a bunch of us who worked there. The photo was from September 1990. I asked him to send it to me so I could scan it in and he did. The version of it that he posted was a photo taken of the 4×6 inch photo with his phone. I knew a scan of it would be nicer.

The photo I scanned on one of my flatbed scanners. The Canoscan 8800F. This one scans negatives too but not as well as the dedicated film scanner. It also has a very high optical resolution which is really good for scanning photos. At first I scanned it at 1200 DPI but then I thought the better of it and scanned it at 2400 DPI too. That’s really overkill since 2400 DPI means that I could print the photo at 24×36 inch poster size and I’m not going to do that. But I have to return the photo when I’m done with it so why not make sure I have more DPI than I need? I’ve got the hard drive space for it.

Since the 2400 DPI scan was overkill I decided to clean up the 1200 DPI scan. By clean up I mean digitally remove all the dust and dirt that had accumulated on the 4×6 inch photo over the years. You can’t even see the dust and dirt on the photo with the naked eye but the blown up scan on the monitor makes it obvious.

There is scanner software that comes with new scanners that cleans up a lot of the dust specs but I don’t have that software. I’m not even sure how well it works. I used such software in the past and it only worked fair to middling. So I had to use the Photoshop spot healing brush. Tap on a digital dust speck and the tool makes it disappear and blend in. That has to be done speck by speck. There are usually hundreds of specks. So that’s how I cleaned the photo up.

After cleaning I went about figuring out how to make the photo scan look nicer. This meant duplicating the photo as other layers and using color correction tools, exposure tools, and layer styles on all those other layers. Then I blended them together. I even did an internet search to see if there were any new ideas out there on how to do this. I found at least one good idea I didn’t know about.

After almost getting the photo to where I wanted it I had an epiphany. Why was I working on the 1200 DPI version when I has a 2400 DPI version to work on? Sure 2400 DPI was overkill but if I ever needed that overkill I’d have to clean it up all over again. It’s easy to downsample something to get rid or resolution and hard to upsample and gain resolution (pointless even). So I decided to start over with the 2400 DPI version. I blame the lack of foresight on a sinus headache I had that day.

It took another hour or two to clean up the higher res version but eventually I got that one done too and finished it off. It came out nice and I posted it on Facebook. It was well received.

After doing that one I decided to clean up the negative I got from eBay. That one took even longer to clean. Negatives usually have more dust and scratches on them that printed photos do. This one had a lot. It was underexposed with pinholes of light all over the scan. It took some patience and persistence to clean up.

It also got me looking online at some new film scanners. Twenty years ago when I bought my dedicated film scanner there were three or four of them on the market by the big photo companies. Minolta made mine plus Nikon had one and there was a least one more that I can’t remember now. I think they’ve gotten out of the film scanner business because I only saw one new scanner made by a company called Plustek. It cost $550.

At least that was the only good one I saw. There are cheap $100 and under film scanners but those are made for people who just want to cheaply digitize old family photos. They’re not quite the artist quality that I want.

The Plustek one is the way to go for me but I don’t think I’ll be buying it anytime soon. It’s not like I have a pile of negatives to scan at the moment so I can wait. My Epson flatbed scanner can scan in film in a pinch anyway. I just don’t want to lose my ability to make high quality scans of film. It’s a good resource to have.

Some tasks I like to do because they’ve a bit mindless. They usually have a right way to do them too. Take washing the dishes for example. The whole point of the task is to get the dishes clean. If the dishes aren’t clean in the end then you’ve failed. Black and white. Right and wrong.

When doing creative thing there is often no right or wrong. What makes one painting correct while another one is incorrect? That’s a question everyone who is making a painting asks themselves. Am I doing this right? Are my choices the correct choices? Should I do it differently? I am constantly asking myself such questions as I do creative stuff. I like the challenge of it but sometimes I also like to shelve that challenge and wash some dishes.

Last week I wrote about “1960s Nostalgia” and mentioned buying a “Millie the Model” comic book that I bought, scanned in, cleaned up, and made a print out of. I mention that again because cleaning up the scan is one of those tasks I occasionally like to do to relax my mind.

When cleaning up a scan the whole point is to restore the look of the comic to its original state. There can be creases in it, the printed lines can break up, and dirt in general build up on the cover of an old comic book. I clean it up in Photoshop using the clone tool, healing brush, and the content aware fill tool. It’s all about making selections as so much of Photoshop is. A selection is using one of Photoshop’s many selection tool to pick just one part of the picture that you want to change. To select it.

I use one of the tools to select the area, use another tool to restore that area, and then move on to the next selection. There is nothing creative about it. It’s all about picking the correct cleanup tool and if that doesn’t work then I pick another one. It just takes time but not a lot of thought. I find that relaxing at times.

The “Millie the Model” comic was fairly easy to clean up. It only took a couple of hours since the comic was in pretty good shape. Another 1960s Pop Art comic that I bought the same week as Mille is an Archie comic called “Laugh.” It is issue number 205. This one isn’t in nearly as good shape as the Millie one so I had decided not to scan it in and clean it up. That was until I got bored on this Sunday night.

After the Giants’ game on Sunday afternoon I started trying to figure out why my film scanner wasn’t working correctly. That’s a tough thing to figure, I took a couple of hours to do it but wasn’t successful. It’s still acting up and I have no idea why. It will take about $500 to replace it and I really don’t want to do that. The film scanner is not really a burning necessity either but it still annoyed me. So I decided to scan in “Laugh” to try and not think about it.

I have two flatbed scanner besides my film scanner so I used the one that can scan at 1200 DPI and scanned in the comic book cover. I like to scan at that high a resolution for this task in case I want to print it out at a large size.

It’s an easy scan and an easy set up so I got to cleaning the cover right away. This one is tough. 1960s comic books are printed with fairly big screens. Those are the small dots of color that are used in printing to make all the colors on the page. The same dots that Roy Lichtenstein made famous in his Pop Art paintings. Not messing up the dot patterns are essential to cleaning up these covers.

The “Clone” tool is one of Photoshops best tools as it directly copies from one area to another but if the dot pattern isn’t cloned in a perfectly lined up way its very noticeable as a mistake.

The “Healing” brush looks at the pixels around where you want to fix and estimates what should go there. Sometimes it’s right and sometimes it’s wrong.

The “Content Aware” fill tool is often the best one to use as it looks at a wide area of art to try and figure out how to properly fix something. I found it works really well with the screens but if the screen is too close to an area of black then that can cause problems.

It takes a mix of these three tools to get the job done and sometimes I have to run through all three of them. But it’s still a right or wrong proposition. There is not a lot creative about it. I use the tool and it either works or doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work then I move on to another solution. I find the right answer and it’s always obvious if I did or didn’t. That can be relaxing.

I worked for for about an hour on the “Laugh” cover before I couldn’t take any more. It’s actually pretty detail oriented and tedious work so I can’t do it for a long time. Especially since I spent a lot of this Sunday working on other creative stuff. I inked a “Dreams of Things” cover, drew two inkbook pages, and made a three pen drawing. That’s quite a bit of stuff before I got around to digitally cleaning that cover.

One more thing I want to mention before I finish this is a second task I like to occasionally do to relax. I like to typeset. I think I wrote a blog about that once (I’ll have to look it up) but typesetting is just getting large about of type ready to be printed; the words in a book for example. It’s not that I’m typing the book, that already done, but I’m styling the type. Put in some bolds and italics, set up the fonts, remove all the weird junk spaces that appear in type, set the styles for the paragraphs, and whatever else needs to be done to make the words of the books look good.

There is creative stuff involved in typesetting but once that is done then all that has to be applied to the type. That’s the part that’s like putting together a puzzle. People find puzzles relaxing don’t they? At least that’s what I learned from Ross on “Friends.”