Radiant Comics

Nostalgia is a funny thing. It’s supposed to be a longing for the past when things are remembered as better for you but sometimes it can be weirder than that. First of all over this summer (2022) I found myself being nostalgic for last summer (2021). It’s a little too soon for barely a year old nostalgia. Plus the reason for the nostalgia was painting. I got five large paintings done over the summer of 2021 and that was the first time I painted that much in years. During the summer of 2022 I got lots of art done but no large paintings. Somehow that made me feel nostalgic for the days when I got paintings done. Weird.

The other strange thing I’m feeling nostalgic for is from a time before I was born. I wasn’t even alive so how can I feel nostalgic for that time? It started when I joined a Facebook group about Andy Warhol. I must have joined it a year ago. I’ve never been a huge fan of Warhol’s work but I enjoyed the group because of the photos of Andy. He seemed to always be having a good time.

Andy Warhol was very much into being a famous artist and it shows in the photos in this group. He goes to all sorts of parties and meets all sorts of famous people. He makes being a famous artist seem like a lot of fun and I appreciate that. I can’t think of any other artist, even ones who’s art I like better than Warhol’s, who looks like they’re having as much fun as Andy.

As time went by and I was paying attention to the Warhol Facebook group one member joined who liked to post photos and stuff about a Warhol “It Girl” from the early 1960s named Edie Sedgwick. She died in 1971 at the age of 28. This member really liked Sedgwick and posted a lot of stuff so that made me aware of a book called “Edie: American Girl” by Jean Stein and George Plimpton. I took the book out on Hoopla, the library app, and gave it a read.

The book was done in a format that was unusual. It was a series of interviews with people about the life and times of Edie. There were a few paragraphs from one person and then another and another. As time periods would change people would come and go. It was an interesting format full of personal stories. The first half of the book was about the Sedgwicks and their family background and the second half was about Edie’s adult life.

Edie’s adult life in the early 1960s had a lot to do with Andy Warhol and it was wild. I had never read about this particular period of time in the art world before. What I knew about Pop Art I learned in my art history classes in the 1980s and it never was my favorite time period. Now it might be.

The early 1960s in the New York City art scene with Andy Warhol was all about parties, staying up late, being seen, making weird movies, taking drugs (lots of speed to stay up all night and get stuff done), sex, plus some rock and roll. Not a lifestyle I’ve ever lead but the people in the book sure seemed to be having fun. Except maybe the ones who died young. There were a lot of those.

After the Edie Sedgwick book I found one written by Andy Warhol himself. It is called “Popism” and if memory serves it was written in about 1980 and it was about his time in the 1960s. I found the writing style to be a little detached and there was a lot of name dropping in it but I liked the book nonetheless. It was a fun look back in time from a person who was there and he was not so far removed from the time he was writing about.

As I now think about the writing and my describing it as “Detached” that may be because I had more nostalgia for the time period than Warhol did. That’s a strange idea to contemplate.

The next thing to trigger my sense of nostalgia was a comic book. I’m in a Facebook group called “The Silver Age of Comic Books” and the Silver Age encompasses the 1960s. Someone posted a Marvel comic book from 1967. It was “Millie the Model Annual #7” drawn by Stan Goldberg.

What made this comic stand out to me was that it was referencing the Pop Art of the time. Millie was in a poster shop which had psychedelic posters of popular actors, musicians, and artists. There is also a cool visual pun going on with Millie blending into the art. She is Pop Art herself! The person who posted this cover on Facebook also posted where the references came from. That was very cool too.

Besides making me nostalgic for the Pop Art days of the 1960s the Millie the Model cover was also a very good comic book cover. It is well designed, well drawn, and well colored. As a huge fan of comic book covers this is a good example of the art form. I knew I wanted to get a copy of the comic for myself and also so I could scan it in, blow it up, and make a large print of the cover. I like to do such things on occasion.

I got onto eBay, looked around for a copy, and eventually spent $26 on a decent one. Since I was going to scan it I wanted a copy that wouldn’t bee too much work to clean up. The prices on the issue varied from $10 up to $200. The expensive ones were in no way worth it to me so I settled on the $26 one. A week later it came in the mail.

The copy I got looks good and I spent a few hours cleaning up the scan I made of it before I printed it out. I’m still not done with it because I had to pause to get more printer paper but it’s 90% there. It makes me wish I was there too. Ahhh… Nostalgia!

Those are the two weird nostalgia urges I’ve been feeling lately. I’m feeling wistful for just a year ago when I got a bunch of paintings done plus I’m feeling like it sure would be fun to visit a time before I was born. I’ve got no interest in speed but it sure would be cool to be a young famous NYC artist in 1963.

I’m on social media. That’s not exactly news since a whole lot of people are there these days but I have a mildly amusing story about it today. On most social media you have to pick a name to go by. Since I’m an artist who wants people to know who I am I generally go by my own name. I use “jaredosborn” in as many places as possible but I’m not always the first one there with that name so sometimes I go with “artbyosborn.” As an artist that makes sense and is easy for people to find.

Instagram has been the best for me. It’s not great but at least I have 900 people who follow me there. Only my YouTube channel has more subscribers at about 2000 (I’m jaredosborn there). I don’t get a ton of likes for any given post on Instagram but with the new Reels feature it says that a bunch of people (5000) have seen my videos. I’m not sure how real that number is but it’s a bigger number than anyplace else.

I’m relatively new to TikTok. I signed up for it years ago but didn’t find it very interesting or useful. That combined with the reports that the app collected tons of information on its users made me stop using it. I didn’t even miss it.

Years had passed since I abandoned TikTok and Apple put new privacy filters in place that let us tell apps that they weren’t allowed to collect info on us. That got me a little more interested in TikTok again so I reinstalled the app. Then I didn’t do much with it. It just sat there.

Sometime over the years TikTok must have upped the length of time that videos were allowed to use. I think it’s around three minutes now. At the beginning of the summer 0f 2022 I tried out TikTok again and discovered there were a lot of people making interesting videos that taught me stuff. I got back on again to watch them.

At this point I don’t even remember what my user name was a TikTok at the beginning of summer. I wasn’t posting much there and just watching so my user name was unimportant to me. But then I decided to post some stuff there so I thought that I’d better sync up my user name with the rest of my social media. JaredOsborn was already taken so I decided to go with Art By Osborn. Except artbyosborn was also taken.

It was really odd that artbyosborn was taken since that was usually the one I could get. I clicked on the artbyosborn user and he had zero videos. There was no activity on his channel. I suspected that I may have signed up under that user name a long time ago and had forgotten about it.

I decided to look in an old book where I used to write down passwords but couldn’t find anything there. Then I used the “Reset password” feature to try and find out if the account was mine. I used about half a dozed email addresses that I use but none of them were recognized by TikTok. That put an end to my investigations.

Despite me being an Apple user for about thirty years I didn’t have an iPhone until a year ago. I don’t even use the phone a whole lot. For working I use my desktop, for writing and some web surfing I use my laptop, and for going on social media and goofing around in general I use my iPad. My phone is for when I’m out and need to stay in touch.

This week the fall semester started and I have to commute into NYC and do some teaching. This means I need to bring some gear with me. I have an “Art go bag” with a bunch of art supplies in it so I can do a little bit of drawing on my commute. It also holds my camera for taking street photos, my food, my water, and my phone.

As I was double checking my bag the morning of my commute I saw that I didn’t have TikTok on my phone. It was no big deal. I had noticed that before and not done anything about it because I don’t watch TikTok on my phone. But I decided since it was a new semester and that meant some new habits that I may as well put it on my phone.

After installing TikTok it asked me how I wanted to sign in. I could sign in with an email address, an Apple ID, a Facebook name, or a Twitter name. For most things I use an email address but not always. Sometimes I sign in with an Apple ID because that means I can use my fingerprint instead of a password. That’s convenient.

Not knowing how I originally signed up for TikTok I decided to go with my Apple ID. After all I just had to use my fingerprint that way. It worked but guess what? I signed in and saw that I was indeed “artbyosborn.” I must have originally set up TikTok with my Apple ID because here was the “No Posts” identity that I found when looking for “artbyosborn” on my iPad.

The first thing that I did was go to the section where I could change my user name and changed it to “artbyosbornold.” That way I could use the the TikTok identity that I’ve been using this year with no idea that I already had one. I moved a little bit fast though. Since I was doing this just a little while before I had to head out for my commute I couldn’t set up my second identity to use the name. There was a bit of a lag.

I had to head out for the train without claiming the “artbyosborn” name for my second identity. I knew the odds of anyone else claiming the name wasn’t really very high but still I was like, “C’mon, I can’t believe this.” It wasn’t until the end of the day when I was waiting in the Secaucus Junction train station that I got a chance to claim the name. It was still there of course.

So now things are synced up. On both Instagram and TikTok I’m “artbyosborn.” Stop on by and say hello.

Dancing Man

I’m feeling nostalgic this morning so I decided to pull out an old painting and write about it. I’ve written a few pieces on my 8×10 inch acrylic on canvas paintings from the first decade of the 2000s but this time I decided to look at one of my gouache on paper paintings from the 1990s. It’s called “Dancing Man.” A literal title. I didn’t always date everything in the 1990s but this one I did. It’s from January 1, 1999. I guess by then I had finally learned to write a date on my work.

I first started learning to paint with gouache in the early to mid 1990s. Gouache is an opaque watercolor. That opaque part is key for me and what makes me like gouache better than regular watercolor. I like being able to go from solid color to transparent color. Regular watercolor is just transparent color.

Looking at this 7.5×11 inch painting (it’s on 300 pound watercolor paper) there is a main figure, some buildings, a bit of a landscape, and some kind of dinosaur in the background. The view is from below and the horizon line is tilted so the whole painting is on the diagonal. I find it an interesting image.

In looking at this piece I can tell that I was using a surrealist automatic drawing method but not quite in the same way I do today. Back when I started using that method I would draw scribbles on a piece of paper and then draw what I could find in those scribbles. It’s sort of like finding faces in clouds. This is how Surrealists got their dream like images and how I get mine. Except now the scribbles are mostly in my head.

It looks like for this one I painted on the paper with watercolor before I ever drew anything. All that blended together watercolor that makes up the background was painted first. The blue and yellow in the sky and the blue and red on the bottom were put down and left to dry and then I went in and painted on top with opaque gouache. That’s why I like the solid opacity of gouache.

I can also see that instead of scribbling on the paper with a pencil I drew lines in the wet water color with the stick end of a brush. See all those dark lines in the background sky? Those were made with the handle of the brush. Rub the wet watercolor paint with a pointed stick and it will darken the paint. It gives a nice sense of action to the sky.

I’m guessing that I drew the rest of the piece from the design I saw in those lines in the watercolor. That’s how I worked in those days. The main figure certainly seems so because the dancing man is in a position that I don’t think my conscious mind would come up with. He is up in the air and twisted in a strange way. But that’s the whole point of surrealist automatic drawing. To come up with images that the conscious mind wouldn’t think of.

The dinosaur is another thing that I don’t think my conscious mind would think of. The shape of the watercolor blob probably sparked the image of a dinosaur to me. I think he represents danger lurking in the background. The man is dancing recklessly and danger is watching him from the cover of some shrubs, waiting. Maybe the danger will make itself know, maybe it won’t, but the danger is present nonetheless. It adds some spice to the picture.

After the basic image comes the graphic design quality of the painting. Gouache is often branded as “Designer’s Gouache” because before computers and desktop publishing graphic designers would often use gouache to make their designs if paint was needed. Gouache dries flat, even, and opaque so you can make nice patterns of color with it.

The dancing man really pops out at the viewer because of the red and black pattern in his clothes. Lots of black and red stripes that are pleasing to the eye. The patterns continue with the bricks and shapes in the buildings as well as the color brush strokes on the left and bottom of the painting. Gouache is really good for making patterns.

The yellow and red brush strokes on the bottom and left look fairly simple to my eye in 2022. I’m not 100% sure if that was a choice (I think it was) only because most of my gouache paintings (and plenty of my acrylic on canvas ones) have complex series of brush strokes like this. Instead of being just the single color they’d be made up of three or four colors. I’m not sure if this one was the beginning of developing that style or I just toned it down for this painting. I’d have to look at it in the context of other stuff done at the same time. I think it was a deliberate toning down.

The rest of the painting is all about technique, especially those buildings. Some parts of the building are opaque and some are semi-transparent. That’s what I consider technique. What do I want to show through? What do I want to be solid? What do I want to keep as watercolor wash? Those were all the technique questions that I had to decide.

I made the middle part of the biggest building opaque and solid. There are shapes of yellow, orange, and a little green that are the same opacity as our dancing man. The bottom and left side brush strokes are also this solid opacity and it puts all those elements on the same level and floats them in front of the thinner watercolor. The bricks are semi-transparent and that makes them one level behind the opaque parts.

Watercolor background, semi-transparent bricks, and a solid dancing man. These are the basic three levels of transparency in this piece that define the space. They all work together to make an interesting space. I like this piece. I like the figure dancing through the space.

I used dancing people as the subject of many piece of art but this might be my favorite one. Sometimes the subconscious really knows what it’s doing.

I haven’t written about a comic book cover in a long time so I thought I would today. If you’ve been watching my comic book haul videos then you know about my comic book covers of the week. Those are the two comic books that I pull out from my collection and sit on top of my printer for the week. That’s my little museum. I walk by them and look at them all week. It’s a way for me to see and interact with comic books that are buried in my collection.

This week one of those comic books, I usually have a mainstream comic and an indie comic out, is Superman Family number 218 from May 1982. I’m not sure where or when I got this comic. I was a Marvel Comics’ kid and didn’t buy many DC comics but I had started buying some around the time of New Teen Titans #1 in 1980. I could have bought this one off the stands except that I still have it in its original comic bag and that bag has a $2 price tag on it. That means it probably came from my local comic shop at the time. But why would I buy it as a back issue? I have no idea why.

The first thing I notice is that this is a really well designed cover. There are a lot of elements to it and they all seem to be in the right place. The trade dress is complicated with the DC logo, price bullet, Superman Family logo, list of characters, “All New” blurb, second list of characters (?), floating heads, dollar comic logo, and some cover copy. That’s way more than most comics have on their covers. The top third of the cover is jammed with stuff but it all works.

In the early 1970s Marvel Comics put out a whole bunch of covers where the art was in a box under the logo. It was a graphic design thing. In the early 1990s I asked John Romita why they did that. He told me that it was to celebrate the tenth anniversary of something. He couldn’t remember if it was the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man. We settled on calling it the tenth anniversary of “Marvel” in general. I always liked those “Covers in a box” but other fans didn’t.

This comic book uses that same type of cover in a box design. I can’t remember but that may be why I bought this issue. I’ve always collected covers from that Marvel tenth anniversary period so maybe I saw this one in my LCS’s back issue bin and bought it because it reminded me of those. This is one of those comics I didn’t even remember that I had in my collection let alone why I bought it.

The cover artists are Ross Andru and Frank Giacoia. Their signatures are on the bottom of the cover so it’s easy to identify. By this time the two of them were veterans of many comic books so they really knew what they were doing. The drawing and inking is all solid and on point.

The first think I notice about this cover is the perspective. We’re looking down at the ground in a one point perspective and the horizon line is even tilted at an angle. That’s some unusual stuff. It gives the viewer a sense of being high in the air. Even though the background is in an extreme perspective the figures aren’t. Their perspective is much more slight which lets the viewer get involved with the characters more. We are right there with them. The figures are on a flatter plane which emphasizes the height.

This cover is a good example of the artists playing with perspective to get maximum impact for the cover. A drawing doesn’t have to look like a 3D model with everything in the “Correct” perspective. Sometimes “Correct” is hard to work with and fails the eye test. It doesn’t always look right.

Another graphic design element that I like is that the art breaks out of the box it’s in on all four sides. This adds to the complexity of the drawing’s space. We have the two wings breaking out on top, one is even over the logo, hair breaking the left side, feet and a cape on the bottom, and the burst on the right.

These breaks tend to emphasize that we are looking at a flat drawing on a page while the deep perspective fools us into thinking we’re looking into a space. These elements together give the eye a lot to look at and ponder. The top logo and trade dress do a similar thing. The white background gives a sense of empty space that the flat trade dress sits on. I really like the sense of space on this whole cover.

The figures are also terrific. Supergirl, being at the center of the composition, has the most perspective to her. Her cape and back foot are falling down the perspective hole. The two bird men holding her also have a bit of perspective to them but their bulky upper halves dominate. These three fit right into the space.

The villain in purple’s name is Hecate. I find her figure the most interesting. She seems to be static and in motion at the same time. I think this has to do with the way her figure is drawn plus its place in the composition. She’s on a diagonal across the bottom left corner and the UPC box so that alone seems to put her in motion.

Now look at how she is drawn. Look at her left hip. From the perspective and the way it’s drawn that leg should follow the perspective down and disappear from view behind her body. But as the eye follows her right leg down we suddenly see both of her feet. Her left leg isn’t hidden behind her body after all.

For me this makes me feel like her body is in motion and is “Sliding” across the bottom of the cover. My perception of the figure changes as her foot comes into my view. I have no idea if this is on purpose or not but either way it works for me.

Also as her feet break the box it flattens out the design. There is a constant tension in this cover between the flatness of the design elements and the space of the picture perspective. I find that tension lively and enjoyable.

So there you go. That’s a look at a cover I didn’t even know was in my collection. It’s a good one.

It was a tumultuous bike ride this morning. No injuries so it wasn’t the worst ride ever but there were problems. Back before I rode my bike all winter long (over a decade now) I used to have to take a month in the spring and build up my stamina. I had five routes. One being the easiest and five being the one I eventually rode all summer long.
Now I ride route four in the cold months and route five in the warm ones. The names don’t make sense anymore since there are no longer routes one through three. So I decided to rename them. Now I take “The Ride of the Nine Hills” and “The Ride of the Seven Hills.” It’s much more poetic.

Today I was on “The Ride of the Nine Hills” and I was just coming off the biggest hill and turning onto Route 9W South. There is a tricky spot ten or twenty yards from that turn. Most of the section of 9W that I ride has a wide shoulder so I can ride on the shoulder and that makes things safer. But there is a part of the shoulder right after the turn that has a break in it. There is a crack and the south side of the crack is about two inches higher than the north side. It’s like hitting a little two inch cliff. That cliff can pop a tire.

Normally I swing out onto the road a foot or two and avoid the crack all together. Easy enough. But today as I was heading towards the crack (it’s on a downhill by the way) there was a big truck bearing down on me. An eighteen wheeler. That was not the time to swing a foot or two out into the road so I decided to turn further into the shoulder and try to avoid the crack. If I hit it at just the right diagonal angle and then swing back I can miss it.

My front tire went trough just fine but I flinched as the truck went by me and at that moment my back tire swung too early and hit the crack. Sure enough it popped. I was completely annoyed.

But I carry with me a spare tube and have a portable air pump strapped to my bike for just such an occasion. I pulled over onto a lawn at the bottom of the hill and proceeded to change the tube. Everything went well until I tried to put air in the tire. As I attached the head of the pump to the stem of the tire and started to pump air the head went flying off. That happens sometimes as it takes a lot of air pressure to fill a bike tire. No big deal I thought.

As I went to put the head of the pump back on I noticed something wasn’t right. Where there should be a connector there was a hollow. I looked around at the ground and found two plastic pieces that had fallen out of the pump. How did that happen?

I couldn’t figure out what went wrong. I could put the two pieces back but when I went to pump air they flew off pretty quickly. What I didn’t know until I eventually got home and looked it up is that there is a metal piece that screws onto the head and keeps those other two pieces in place. Mine had unscrewed and fallen off. When and where that happened is a mystery. It could have been a minute before or a month ago. I only uses that pump in emergencies like this one.

It took me three or four tries but I got some air in the tire. My left hand had to take the place of the metal piece as I held the head of the tire onto the tube stem. It wasn’t easy. The air pressure of a road bike tire is about 90PSI. I probably only got about 40-50PSI in there but still it took a lot to hold the pump head in place as I pumped with my right hand and held the other end of the pump against my thigh.

As an aside a couple of fellow bike riders asked if I was okay as they rode by. They problem was that they asked as they flew by. I didn’t even see them coming. It would have been easier if I could borrow a pump from them but I didn’t even have a chance to ask. It was a strange situation.

Meanwhile after I got enough air in the tire I went on with my ride and headed home. I was mostly thinking about what broke on my pump and how that could happen. Then, as I was a mile or so from home, I made a turn onto Central Highway and I got another flat tire! This time it was a pinprick flat (as I discovered when patching the tire at home) so I didn’t hear anything pop. I was flabbergasted. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten two flats on one ride.

I decided to just walk the bike home from there. It wasn’t much of a decision because I only carry one spare tube with me on my rides and pumping up the tire to see if it would hold any air seemed a futile gesture. It’s August 12 as I write this and we’ve been having a heat wave in recent weeks but today it was a pleasant 77ºF out. So at least I had nice weather for my walk.

I was going to go onto Amazon and leave a bad review for about my broken pump but oddly I couldn’t find it among my past orders. I must have put the pump on my wishlist and someone got it for me for a birthday or Christmas. I kept digging for info on the pump and that’s when I discovered that there was a piece that fell off mine. I couldn’t buy just that piece so I ended up getting a whole new pump for $35. I bought the same one because all the others I could find weren’t nearly as good. When the new one arrives I’m really going to have to keep track of that piece.