Radiant Comics

Let me tell you about my work habits. My work habits when I’m making art on my own that is. When I’m working a job for someone else my work habits are the same as everyone else’s. You pay me to come in and do the job so that’s what I do. When I’m on my own and have to set my own hours and motivate myself to gets things done it’s all different. But I am good at motivating myself to make art so I’ve got that in my corner.

I’m a morning person so I get up early. If I’m in my home studio for the day I’m usually at the drawing board and ready to go at 8AM. I usually like to know what I’m doing for the day (drawing, painting, digital work, or whatever) the day before I do it. As I end one day I often decide what I’m going to do the next day. It doesn’t always work out that way since some mornings I don’t feel like starting anything big. That’s why I usually have small things around that I can work on at any time. If I can’t motivate myself to get anything big done then I go small. It helps to have patience with yourself.

I have exercise built into my routine too. Five days a week I stop work at 9AM to go for a bike ride. That takes about 40 minutes and I’m back at it around 10AM. I like to ride early when I have some energy. I’ve tried riding in the afternoon and it was so much harder. Besides me having less energy in the afternoon I would waste energy during the day thinking about how I’d have to get a ride later. 9AM comes so quickly that I have no time to think about it.

I also do some push-ups and deep knee bends a few times a week. Usually around 4PM but sometimes when I’m on a roll and don’t want to stop I’ll do them later. Between 6-9PM. I’m less scheduled with these exercises than with my bike rides.

I stop for lunch at noon and for diner at five. I can spend anywhere from half an hour to an hour for my meal breaks. It all depends if I want to get back to it or not. At a such break at a paying job no one ever wants to get back to it. But working on my own stuff is different. I’m more motivated to get back to work,

Being a morning person I often get tired in the afternoon. Starting sometime from 2-3PM I can run out of energy for a while. I find it best to take it slow in the afternoon and not push myself too much. I take more breaks in the afternoon but eventually I’ll get a second wind.

I’m generally a fast paced person and since I exercise I have pretty good stamina. But I’m 30 years past 25 and don’t have the stamina I had in my 20s. I was never a “Burn the midnight oil” kind of artist but back in the day I wouldn’t stop work until 9PM. I could go all day working on something. From 8AM until 9PM. Thirteen solid hours.

Now I have to pace myself differently. I’m still a fast paced person but a bit slower. I have to take more breaks that I used to. I almost never work until 9PM anymore. I stop at 8PM and even then from about 6-8PM I take it slow and just get little things done. I’m okay with leaving something until tomorrow.

Back in my 20s (and maybe into my 30s) I used to work myself too much at times. I’d forget to take breaks and time off. I’d be working for money X days a week and working for myself the rest of time. I sometimes wouldn’t have a day of for weeks. I’d work 12 hours a day every weekend and everyday I wasn’t in an office. I wanted to get my own stuff done and wouldn’t notice that I was wearing down.

One day after a few weeks of working a lot I’d get up in the morning and wouldn’t be able to do anything. I’d be so tired that getting up out of my chair was difficult. I’m good at being self-motivated so I’m often psyching myself up and thinking “Let’s get going” to myself. But on these days it was more like “Holy cow, I can’t move!” I’d maybe get one or two small things done throughout the day but mostly I’d sit and rest. I haven’t had one of those days in years but I did last Friday.

I still work a lot of days in a row but I pace myself differently. I don’t push it like I did in my youth. I used to push myself to get something done that same day if I could. Now I wait until tomorrow. I know getting it done today won’t do anything but make me tired.

It was last Thursday (March the 10th, 2022) that I got on a roll. It was a roll like I haven’t had in years. Everything was just going right. I was getting stuff done and the things I was doing were all flowing like water. There was no struggle. It was all as smooth as silk. So I didn’t want to stop and ended up working until 9PM. I usually don’t pay attention to “Being on a roll” as I know that persistence it better than inspiration but that day I was feeling good and didn’t want to stop. At 9PM I put everything down and was very satisfied.

I thought I’d pick it up in the morning but on Friday morning I couldn’t get out of my chair. I was tired. Too tired. I certainly didn’t feel like I was wearing down on Thursday but on Friday I was worn out. I could get nothing done. I ended up realizing that is was a lost day and that took me by surprise. I couldn’t remember that last time I was that exhausted and it really snuck up on me.

I got a couple of small things done that day but mostly I didn’t try. As self-motivated as I am if my body says no then I’m going to listen to it. I’m okay with pacing myself and taking it a little slower. I’m not 25 anymore.

I haven’t watched an episode of “Friends” in about six weeks. Not since the last time I wrote a walkthrough so now I’m writing about back-to-back episodes. I think this may be the first time that has happened. Anyway this is episode three of season six. It’s titled “The One with Ross’s Denial.”

I’m going to check my calendar to see what I was doing the week of October 7, 1999 when this first aired. It looks like I was home sick that week. But that’s weird. I was at Marvel on Monday and Thursday but home sick on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Then on that Saturday I was at a friend’s wedding. I don’t remember being sick at that wedding. I wonder what was going on with me? I’ve never been sick very often and if I am I’m usually out for a few days and then better. I must have relapsed.

Let’s start the show. The gang is at what is now Monica and Chandlers’ apartment. It’s no longer “The boys’ place” and “The girls’ place” in the show. A solid Joey holding his breath joke starts us off. Rachel hasn’t quite moved out. Phoebe mentions for the first time ever that she has a roommate named Denise. No one else has ever heard of her. It becomes the episode’s running joke. Naked Thursdays! Hah! Here comes the theme song.

Now we’re at the coffee place. Ross still hasn’t told Rachel that they’re still married. Phoebe tells Ross that he’s still in love with Rachel. Hence the episode’s title. Ross is in denial in a couple of ways about Rachael. A big tell was that Ross smelled Rachel’s hair when he hugged her. There is your proof! Phoebe and Ross are both good in this scene.

Back to Chandler and Monica’s place and Joey walks in and out with a quick joke. Monica has big ideas about what to do with their new spare room after Rachel moves out. Chandler has other ideas. There is our “Humor through conflict” plot for the episode. Fancy guest room versus game room. Not the funniest of plot lines.

Chandler walks across the hall to visit Joey. Joey is advertising for a new roommate. Of course he wants a hot female roommate. Scene ends. That was quick.

We’re off to the coffee shop with Phoebe and Rachel. I bet Phoebe is going to tell Rachel that she’s still married to Ross. Nope, I’m remembering wrong. This scene is about Rachel trying to find a place to live. Ross comes in with a solution. A friend has a sublet. Rachel leaves and now we get Phoebe talking to Ross again. She sees his love for Rachel but Ross denies it. He does not re-love her! Then the sublet is gone so Ross invites Rachel to live with him. Rachel says yes but Phoebe is flabbergasted. Jokes ensue. A solid scene.

Here comes Chandler and Monica to make up after their spare room fight. I think they should make it a dinosaur room for Ross! They make up and try to compromise but then they put off the conflict. Of course that leads to a new problem. Chandler wants to bring his lounge chair over to the living room. Monica hates that thing.Chandler storms off again.

Now Joey is interviewing an attractive young woman. Could she be his new roommate? No, because she says she’s not really a party girl. On to the next potential roommate! Chandler declares to Joey that he can call off the roommate search because Chandler is not moving out. Joey begs to differ.

Now Rachel is at Ross’s and she’s moving in. Disaster beckons. Rachel informs Ross about the big fight and how Chandler is not moving out. Ross will fix this! He gathers Chandler and Monica together and referees their childish bickering. Ross being the voice of reason as he is clearly freaking out over Rachel is funny.

Now it’s time for a quick “Gunther loves Rachel scene” in the coffee ship. I always enjoy these scenes. Rachel is oblivious to his affections. Ross tells Rachel the good news that the moving in together is back on. For all of them. Some funny Ross and Rachel stuff ensues. I like crazy on the edge Ross. He’s the most amusing Ross. “Mental” Gellar rules!

Next Phoebe is singing at the coffee shop. A song about finding a stray public hair. Inappropriate Phoebe songs are always welcome. Ross and Rachel are on the coffee couch. Will we have a revelation? Nope. Rachel runs out to make a copy of Ross’s apartment key. Now Joey is giving Ross advice. Don’t let her move in id Joey’s advice. It will lead to no good! Then Joey invites Rachel to move in with him. It is right across the hall. She declines. Still no Rachel and Ross resolution!Now the credits and the post credit joke.

The woman who applied to live in Joey’s apartment is back. Joey has a test for her. A little bit of word association. She almost gets it but the answer to “Doggy” is not “Kitten.” Joey shows her and the rest of us out the door.

Now it’s time to see what was cut out of the show for syndication, HD, and streaming (from “The One With the Uncut Friends Scripts” website). They cut out a quick bit during Ross and Phoebe’s first scene. No big loss. They cut another Phoebe joke as she and Rachel read Joey’s ad. That was a better one. A joke at the expense of the sublet guy is cut. One of Phoebe’s “Denise” lines was cut. Freaking out Phoebe is funny! And that was it. Not too much was cut from this one.

Now I’m going to look up what I rated this one a decade ago when I rated each and every episode. Right now I’d give it a three out of five stars. I’s say it was an average episode. Not great nor a clunker. Sure enough I gave it three stars back in 2013 too. Sometimes I feel differently all these years later but most of the time I don’t. The highlight of this episode was Ross and Phoebe and their interactions. The Monica and Chandler fight was not very interesting and only served to move the Ross plot along. Rachel wasn’t given much to do this episode either. But it was still solid. I’ll take that over a clunker.

I just finished coloring one of my “Dreams of Things” covers. Number 131. I mention it not only because I often write about my art on this blog, that is the point of this blog after all, but because it was a weird one. Yes, all my “Dreams of Things” covers are weird but this one was a different sort of weird.

I like to draw faces. In general I like to make images but one specific type image I like to make over and over. Faces. Not just everyday faces but weird ones, alien ones, and faces with all sorts of marks and designs on them. Not that I haven’t always drawn faces as part of my art but it was probably somewhere around the year 2000 when I started to specifically draw my design heavy faces. I’ve been working on them ever since.

Way back in the mid-1980s when I was in art school one of my teachers made the observation that the people in my paintings were staring at us (the viewer) harder than we were staring at them. I found that interesting. I’m not sure if I could have made that observation on my own.

I still do like to draw faces that are looking at the world with unblinking intensity but now I’m aware of it. Part of the reason I like to draw faces is that through the face the drawing or painting becomes a person. They may not be real but everyone recognizes that there is a person of some sort looking out at them.

That’s what makes “Dreams of Things” number 131 different form the others. There are no faces in it. Sure there are two eyes but that’s not the same. The eyes are looking at us like some sort of all seeing eye. A god creature stares out us but it’s not a creature we can relate to. It’s a mystery not a person.

This one also has a different sense of color that most of my other ones. It’s very warm but not hot. There are a lot of browns and red based browns going on. Plus a lot of the horizontals are not true horizontals. At least in the color part of the drawing. The horizontal is established in the ink drawing with the fence behind the main figure but all the lines above it are curved. It’s a weird space.

I started the color in this drawing with the reddish sky in the background of the top. It’s a three color technique and I also drag the side of a brush marker across the page to get a rough line. The line kind of follows the edge of the back wall but it’s not symmetrical. It keeps things off kilter. I think off kilter became an unconscious theme of the piece.

The next part I tackled was the wood grain of the top on the left and right. I put down the dark color first and made the lines go in different directions with each new board. I then alternated between a reddish and a yellowish color. That gives the wood a little more visual interest.

I kept the brown theme for the color of the wall with the eye atop it. The brown is a little darker and a little redder than the sky behind it. It also has the same type of horizontal lines in it and they don’t quite match ups with the sky lines. Those two sets of lines are what’s responsible for the off kilter feeling of this piece.

I think this is when I decided to make the rays that are around the top eye orange. I had already decided that the water was going to be a blue green so I knew that the orange rays would probably be the strongest color in the piece. They really add to the “Sun god is watching you” feeling of the top eye. I made the eye and what surrounds it green to give it a lot of contrast with the orange. Green fits in with the earthy tones of the brown around it.

One of the things they teach in painting class is that you should always paint your background before you paint the main figure. That is actually good advice bit it’s often hard to follow. Usually the main figure is the most interesting thing in the painting and therefore is the most interesting thing to paint. That background is often boring. In this one I managed to follow that advice and got all of the background colored before I started on the main figure. I made the fence grey, the water blue/green, and the bottom wood brown. All that was left was the bottom figure.

I’m not sure why but I wanted to keep that bottom figure dark. Or at least middle toned. I wasn’t looking for it to be bright. Since I hadn’t used red, yellow, and blue (the primary colors) in the drawing yet I decided those were the ones I wanted to use. But I didn’t want them in equal amounts. I decided to mainly use blue with accents of yellow and red. That would keep the figure from getting too bright.

I keep calling that thing on the bottom a figure but it’s not really a human body. It kind of looks like a human body with both arms raised as if it’s flexing its biceps but that’s a stretch. Without the eye and those claw-like hand things it might not resemble a figure at all. It depends on our mind’s unconscious ability to find human forms in all sorts of stuff.

I think I got the right amount of yellow and red in the figure, It definitely reads overall as a blue thing but the yellow and red make it stand out form the background and come alive. The yellow outside the eye also makes it stand out. It’s the part that moves forward in space the most.

The last thing I added are the vertical color lines on the wall behind the figure. I wanted a little more texture in back and something to break up the relentless horizontals. Those lines made the space even weirder. They stand up in an unnatural strange way.

Weird, strange, and odd are words than can describe most of my “Dreams of Things” covers. That I made an especially weird one is an especially weird thing. Weird.

Thumbnail drawings. That’s my subject for today. Thumbnails are the small drawings an artist makes in order to get ideas down on paper. I guess they’re called thumbnail drawings because of their small size. They’re small like the fingernail on your thumb. They’re not alway literally that small but sometimes they are. They sound easy to do in concept but in reality they’re harder to do than you think. That’s also possibly because no one in art school really teaches you how to do them. You’re just shown some thumbnails and then told to do some of your own.

Unless you have to show them to a client thumbnails are mostly for the artists themselves. If you have to show them to a client then odds are they won’t really be thumbnails. You’d have to develop them more so a client could easily understand them. You might still call them thumbnails but they’d be more like layout sketches. Layout sketches happen when you’ve nailed down the idea and now are sketching it out. Thumbnail sketches happen before you’re nailed down the idea.

I’ve seen thumbnail sketches that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. This is okay as long as the artist who drew them could. It’s okay for the thumbnails to be bad drawings that look awful as long as the artist who made them understands the idea they represent. That’s not always easy when you’re young and just starting out. I was terrible at thumbnails for a long time. Years and years. I didn’t know how to get that basic information on the page.

One of the reasons I was so bad at thumbnails is that I was trying to make them nice drawings. There I was with barely an idea, a two inch tall drawing, a pencil, and an eraser and I was trying to make a masterpiece. Since it was a drawing and I was spending a lot of time learning to draw I treated the thumbnail like any other drawing. I’d come up with an idea and spend half an hour trying to make the thumbnail of that idea look good and end up frustrated that I couldn’t make it look good. But then wasn’t not the time for making it look good. I should have spent that half an hour coming up with six ideas.

It turns out that my enemy durning the thumbnail process was my eraser. I was drawing in pencil and every time there was some part of the drawing I didn’t like I’d erase it and try again. The idea was already down on paper but I was insisting the idea was also a good tiny drawing. I’d spend more time trying to make that tiny drawing look good than on the idea. Not a good balance of time when the idea is to come up with ideas.

The key for me learning how to do thumbnails was to put away the pencil and take out a pen. When I switched over to drawing my thumbnails in ink it removed the eraser from the equation. Not being able to go backwards with a drawing took getting used to but eventually it was okay. With a pen I’d start to get an idea down on paper and if the drawing went bad it usually went bad quickly and I’d start a new one. These are little drawings, a few inches by a few inches, so staring over is no big deal. Especially since I only spent a few minutes on it to begin with. No half an hour thumbnails to frustrate me.

I also had to learn to draw using simple shapes. This circle here is a head, this triangle here is a body, and this square is a wall. There is no need to try and capture the complexity of the human form at this stage. That’s for later. The drawing also doesn’t have to impress anybody. It takes a while to be able to learn that. It’s common for young artists to apologize for their thumbnails. I can see why. They don’t want to be judged by them. I didn’t want to be judged by the bad drawing in my thumbnails. I learned not to care because thumbnails aren’t about the drawing. But young me didn’t know that.

Learning how to do thumbnails eventually lead me to making my Inkbook drawings. I fill up a hundred page 5.5×8.5 inch sketchbook a year with my ink drawings. I draw six to nine thumbnail drawings a page in it. That is a lot of little drawings. I’ve been doing that for 22 years. Anytime I’m in need of an idea I can pull one of those sketchbooks off the shelf and look through it for something I can turn into a big drawing. It’s a system that works well for me. It was all because I learned to quickly get ideas down in ink.

When I make those little thumbnail drawings in my inkbook I’m working from nothing. I’m coming up with visual ideas that can be turned into anything but unlike a regular thumbnail I have no assignment to begin with. I just jam out visuals with no preconceived notions. I like doing that. Often when I get a notion I can find something that fits it in one of my inkbooks.

Last week I mentioned that I started doing some illustrations based on the novel the Great Gatsby. I’ve had to come up with ideas based on the book and that’s a whole new thing for me. I had to do thumbnails differently than in my inkbook. I decided not to do them in ink but I also didn’t want to do them in pencil either. So I decided to do them with a 6B Wolff’s carbon pencil. It’s still a pencil but it is so dark that erasing it is a fool’s errand. Even though it’s a pencil it takes the eraser out of the equation.

I even got a new sketchbook for my Gatsby project. It’s 5×7 inches and I can fit four thumbnails on a page. With the carbon pencil I can draw light lines and then darken them as I work on the idea. It’s been working for me. At least half the thumbnails are terrible but that’s okay. With thumbnails anything over .250 is a pretty good batting average.

When it comes to making art I like to keep things in order. It’s really hard to make art so keeping stuff organized can really help me get things done. One of the things I do, and have been doing for decades, is to scan in all of my art. From sketches to finished work I scan it all. That way I can find things on my computer. In real life the art is tucked away but it’s easy to find digitally.

One of the things I’ve been scanning in regularly for over 20 years are my inkbooks. Those are the sketchbooks that I draw in with ink. They’re small little thumbnail drawings that I do to get down ideas. On a single page I make anywhere from seven to nine small drawings with a Sign Pen. I use ink so that I don’t get hung up on trying to make the drawing “Good.” Thumbnails are for getting down ideas and not making pretty drawings.

One of the projects I’ve started here in 2022 is an illustrated edition of “The Great Gatsby.” The book entered the public domain in 2021 so people have been doing graphic novel adaptations and illustrated editions of it. I’ve been really into the book recently so I want to make my own illustrated version of it. I think my version is just going to be digital and never see print but that’s okay with me.

The main problem I’ve had so far with the project is that I have no idea what I want to do. Though I am an artist I’m not a particularly good illustrator. It’s an illustrator’s job is to take a scene of a book and interpret it into visuals. Almost always the interpretation is literal. In “Gatsby” there is a huge party scene that illustrators usually draw as a party scene. Makes sense. They draw people in a big house drinking and partying.

I have a hard time drawing so literally. I can do it but I don’t enjoy it and usually my attempts at such literalism end up mediocre. I prefer to draw images that people haven’t seen before. I like to walk the edges of my mind and see what I can pull from there. It makes for weird drawings that aren’t usually literal. Weird drawings are my strength. That’s not usually what illustration is.

I started the Gatsby Project by making some thumbnail drawings in a new sketchbook. They were mostly literal. I came up with some ideas that were as boring as I expected them to be plus some character designs. Those are the designs in which I’m trying to figure out what each character looks like. I wasn’t very successful with either so I decided to go off course and come up with some less literal designs.

Of course there has to be a certain level of literalism to any illustration but I decided to work on some thumbnails that weren’t scenes from the book but ideas. Ideas like Daisy in flowing clothing or a summer dress. Ideas like a party. Another idea I had was to do a drawing of each character in my “Drawings on Comics” style. Why not? I’m doing this for myself so I don’t have to follow anyone’s rules.

The first drawing I came up with was a straight forward drawing of Daisy in a summer dress. It was okay but boring. I left it un-inked and unfinished. Then I decided to go further afield and make a drawing more like the ones I was making with my color ink technique. It was a drawing of Daisy again but more stylized. Her body as flowing shapes. Still not great but it was a step forward. I made a black ink drawing out of it as well as a color ink drawing. I’m trying all sorts of stuff.

So far I’ve filled up fifteen pages of the sketchbook but still only have a handle on Daisy. I’ve been trying to nail down Gatsby but I don’t think I have it. Besides the characters I’ve been thinking of the party scene a lot.

There are certain things that illustrators who work with “The Great Gatsby” just can’t resist. The giant pair of spectacles that overlook the ash heap on the train line, the green light on Daisy’s dock, and the party scene. I wanted to avoid the glasses and the green light but I knew I wanted to do something for the party. I didn’t know what though. Back in the 1990s I made some gouache paintings of dancing people and thought of them but I didn’t think they were the right direction.

Here is where organization and scanning stuff in comes into play. Unrelated to the Gatsby project I decided to draw some new “Dreams of Things” covers. When I do those I usually pull one of my Inkbooks off the shelf and look through it to find some ideas I want to work on. This time I wanted to go back in time a bit so I picked my book from back in 2005. I thumbed through it and found a couple of drawings I liked but then I hit upon a drawing that was a full page.

I had forgotten that I used to do drawings like this. Most Inkbook pages I divide into small boxes to draw in but sometimes I would just fill up the page with lots of interlocking drawings. I saw this page from back in 2005 and it looked perfect for a Gatsby party drawing. It had lots of faces and figures in it all intertwined and full of fun. I wasn’t even looking for an idea for the Gatsby party scene but here was a thumbnail that was perfect for it.

I made four 6×9 inch drawings for my covers and set up the party drawing at 11×17. The 6×9 inch drawings took and couple of hours each but the 11×17 party drawing took eight hours. It’s a lot more complicated than the covers. Then it took another eight hours to ink the drawing. Now I have to color it.

In the end I think the party drawing is coming along well. I never would have been able to make it without my Inkbooks and organization. It’s amazing to me that some drawing from 2005 was the answer for me in 2022. That’s why I have to keep things organized.