I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics.
Check them all out here:
What goes into my art bag? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself this week because I bought a new art bag. It’s really just a regular bag but I want to stock it with art supplies and such for when I’m commuting. Maybe I’ll carry it other times but I usually don’t carry a bag.
My old bag is an actual art bag. It’s a Just-Stow-It art bag and it’s served me well. It’s a big bag too. It was made to fit 14×17 inch pads of paper. Some days it’s a little too big. It’s also falling apart a bit. The nylon near where the shoulder straps attach is tearing. I already sewed them but they might need some reenforcing with canvas. They’re going to tear off eventually if I do nothing.
I packed and unpacked that bag every day when I commuted. In went my iPad, my sketchbook, maybe a book to read, my camera, food for the day, drawing utensils, thumb drive, phone, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting. That was a little too much packing and unpacking. I’m trying to eliminate some of it by having dedicated art bag stuff.
I think the easiest thing to do is use duplicates of my common tools. For instance I would put two sign pens and a mechanical pencil into my bag every day. And then take them out. I’ve got enough pens and pencils to keep some in the bag. I’ll use a smaller art supply bag and keep that in my new art bag. I’ve already got a couple of smaller bags to keep in my new bag so I have some choices. I’ll have to drop my sketchbook in and then take it out but that’s not hard. I’ve got spare erasers and art card paper to go in there too.
My art supply bags are also my photo bags too. When I go into the city to shoot my street photos I bring one of my art bags. I’m only shooting with a single camera with no extra lenses so I don’t need an official photo bag stuffed with photo equipment like I used to carry. I stick my Canon SX60 in the bottom of the bag. It’s clunky and bulky down there but as soon as I get into the city it’s always in my hand. I carried it every time I commuted in this past fall so I could shoot photos on my way to work. I also have a smaller pocket camera but that one is not a suitable for street photos. That one is a Canon Powershot S95. It’s nine years old now and I think I want to replace it with a pocket one with a larger zoom.
There are a lot of pockets in my new art bag and I’m looking to fill them up. With light stuff preferably. I’ve already stuck a couple of photo things in there that can stay there. One is a small tripod. I have a few small tripods and this one is an octopus tripod. I never use it because I always choose my slightly larger and heavier small tripod when I need one but I don’t carry that one with me. I figure I’ll use the octopus one if I have it with me.
The second photo thing I stuck in there is a handle/tripod mount for a smartphone. It just plastic that clamps around a phone and has a tripod mount on the bottom. It comes with a plastic handle to stick in the mount of you can attach it to a tripod. I figure I have a better chance of using it if I have it with me in my bag rather than if it’s sitting at home.
I’ve also been looking for tools to stick in my art bag too. Sometimes I get portable tools but I never use them because I’ve got full sized tools to use around the house. The first thing I stuck in was a small flashlight that I just got for Christmas. I put it on my wish list because there were a few times I was walking back to the unlit parking lot by the train station where I really could have used a flashlight. I stuck that one in the outside pocket meant for a phone. I want to be able to get to it quickly and I’m too wary of thieves to keep my phone in that easily accessible pocket.
In that same pocket I also stuck a small Swiss Army type knife. It’s a cheap giveaway knockoff with someone’s website on the side but it’s light and was getting no use sitting on a shelf. I also stuck a small bicycle multi-tool in that pocket. I’ve got a fancy bike multi-tool in a pouch on my bike so the unfancy one was getting no use. It’s got some screwdrivers and Allen wrenches on it so maybe it’ll come in handy. The knows when I’ll need an Allen wrench when I’m out.
I have a pretty nice Leatherman multi-tool but I actually use that one around the studio. Since I’m looking for stuff I can stick in the bag and not take out that one doesn’t make the cut. I don’t want to have to go into my bag every time I want to use it. So that one will still sit on its usual shelf.
My new art bag is a canvas bag so I’m going to have to get some waterproofing spray for it. Last November as I was walking to the Penn Station in NYC I got caught in the rain. It was a downpour I was out in for twenty minutes. I was carrying my big black nylon art bag which is as waterproof as it gets but still this downpour was too much for it. Nothing got soaked in the bag but my sketchbook that was in the outside pocket got a little bit wet. The book was only about one percent ruined but If I was caught in that rain with my non-waterproof canvas bag it would have been a disaster. I don’t want that to happen.
One thing I haven’t worked out yet is what sketchbooks or notebooks to keep in the bag if any. Usually it’s my inkbook sketchbook that I work in when commuting. This one I’ll move in and out of the bag but should I keep another there all the time. I’ve got plenty of unused sketchbooks but I’m not sure which one to keep in the bag if any. I’ll have to see.
For the next few days I’ll be looking around for more stuff to put in my new art bag. I don’t want to weigh it down too much but I also want to be prepared. You’ve always go to be prepared for art.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got nine new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’m a color guy. I love color. I love painting in color and I love making color art on the computer. I’ve been studying and working with color for the last 30 years so that I could master it. I also work in black and white. That’s mostly in my drawings and with ink drawings specifically. I don’t think I’ve painted in black and white very much. Nor have I done much black and white photography before. That is until this week. Now I’m doing some black and white photography and trying to figure out what is the point of it is.
I first did black and white photography when I was in college. I had my first and only photo class in the Spring of 1985. The point of black and white photography was easy back then. It was the type of photography that you could do on your own in your own (or the school’s) darkroom. It was just a camera, an enlarger, a negative can, and a few trays full of chemical. Not the easiest thing in the world but doable. It was much easier than trying to make color photos. Multiply all those chemical baths by three or four with color photos.
I liked working in the darkroom. It was fun to be able to enlarge and crop a photo anyway I wanted to. It was also a thrill to see the image come to life on a piece of paper before my eyes. I only had that one semester of photography but I continued to work in the darkroom for the following two semesters that I was there. After that I never worked in a darkroom again. I continued to take photos but they were color photos that I had processed at a regular drop off photo place. They were mostly snapshots of friends and events. On occasion I would shoot black and white film but that was kind of a gimmick. I shot color film 99% of the time.
When I hit the age of digital photography I adopted the technology early. I got my first digital camera in the year 2000 and by then I had been working regularly in Photoshop for about six years. I had a scanner and a printer too so even before the age of digital photography I could scan in my photos and print them out. So I continued to work in color. Why not? I didn’t need a darkroom.
I’ve had a few inkjet printers over the years but my current one is a Canon iP870. One of the reasons I bought it is because I could buy cheap ink for it. For a decade or more I used Epson printers and only genuine Epson ink. My Epson printer had eight ink cartridges and one of them was always running low. The “Low Ink” light was never off. To add insult to injury it cost about $90 to buy an eight pack of ink. That’s just one cartridge of each color. I used to ration out my printing for years. Then I couldn’t take it any more and bought the Canon.
My Canon printer has six ink cartridges. Red, yellow, blue, grey, black, and a second black. For a six pack of the genuine Canon inks it would cost me about $80. Instead I get off-brand which has three of each ink cartridges for $25. That’s a $215 difference.
As a result of cheap ink I print a lot more photos and such. But it turns out I use a lot more color ink than black ink. Recently I was printing out a lot of photos and had to order another $25 pack of ink. So I now have a fresh stock of color ink plus the black ink from the last two ink packages I bought. That’s nine cartridges of the two types of black. There is no end in sight of the extra black either. That’s what made me decide to do some black and white photography.
I take all my photos in color but it’s no big deal to turn them into black and white. Though that’s a technical assessment and not a creative one. I can actually turn them to black and white in any number of ways with any number of results so which should be my way?
That brings me to the question of “What is the point of black and white photography?” I’m not sure if I have been able to answer that question for myself just yet. I’ve made about eight photos at this point and I don’t think I’m closer to an answer. The photos look alright but I’m still not sure if they should exist in black and white. Wouldn’t color be better? I don’t know but I think so.
It’s my street photos that I’ve been using to make these black and white photos out of. I made the first one in Photoshop on my computer but then switched over to my iPad and an app called Snapseed. I like doing most of the work on the iPad and then switching over to Photoshop to put on some finishing touches an print it out. I’m very cognizant of my grey tones and I seem to be trying to make a black and white photo as rich and interesting as a color photo. I’m not sure if that’s the way I want to go but I’m also not sure if there is any other way. I’m so used to color.
A funny thing is that I have no problem seeing the point of other people’s black and white photos. I even collect photography and I have black and white prints and books of black and white prints. I never ask myself “What’s the point of black and white photography?” when it’s someone else’s work. So why am I so baffled by that question when it’s my own photos?
I even bought myself one of those inexpensive Itoya 8.5×11 portfolio cases just so I could flip through the black and white photos as I look at them. All my color photos are in individual sleeves stacked in boxes. I can take them out and thumb through them one by one. That’s generally how I like to look at photos. But with these back and white ones I wanted to look at them as a whole. Each one is part of a bigger thing. A search for why those photos exist. “Just to use up some ink” is a catalyst for them existing but not the answer to my question. I’m still looking for that answer.
One funny thing about this whole affair is that I decided to keep track of how much ink I was using to print these black and white photos. Sometimes printers use the color cartridges to print in black and white and I was trying to avoid that. I don’t think my printer was using color in that way but I discovered it wasn’t using much black ink either. It was using up a lot of the grey cartridge. I ended up having to buy four new grey cartridges on their own. Now I’m thinking of printing some mini comics with black and white with no grey in in at all. Will see if that ever exists.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got ten new comics.
Check them all out here:
It’s important to get things done. That’s my lesson for today. It was really emphasized to me this week when I caught a cold (or maybe a sinus infection) because for a week I got nothing done. It’s much easier to power through a 9 to 5 job when I’m sick. Other people around the office can pick up the slack. But getting any of my own stuff done is nearly impossible. It’s not easy being self motivated on a normal day but on a sick day it’s tough as nails. Those comic strips I had to finish could wait. I wanted to sit and rest.
After getting nothing done for a week I was feeling better and was ready to get something done. It was just in time too because I had posted my last “Drifting and Dreaming” comic strip of 2019 and I had none ready for 2020. But I did have the raw materials ready for about twenty new strips from work I did on my commute into NYC.
From September to December I was commuting into the city two days a week. It’s a long commute that takes two hours from door to door and it’s made even longer by the train schedule not matching up with my work schedule. As a result I’ve learned to work on stuff while waiting for the train.
For my “Drifting and Dreaming” strip I need to make three of my art cards. I make two cartoon art cards and one regular art card. The cartoon art cards are the ones where I draw a face and have that character saying something in a word balloon above his or her head. That means I have to write them and draw them. Usually I draw them first and then write them but I changed the order around this time because of my commute.
I had to catch a 10:50 AM train into the city from a station that was a 20 minute drive away. I don’t want to be late so I always left at 10:20 AM. That gave me ten minutes at the train station so I’d bring my cards and spend that ten minutes writing things for my characters to say. After catching the train I’d spend as long as it took to write the remaining cards so by the time I got to Secaucus Junction to catch my connecting train into Penn Station I was ready to draw.
I could have caught a train into NYC right away but that meant I would be into work early. Rather than do that I chose to sit in Secaucus and draw for half an hour. It’s a pretty nice station. It’s bright and airy. I’d grab a bench and pull out my cartoon art cards. I could pencil ten heads in that half an hour but it took some doing. I had to concentrate and work fast. It was no picnic but I got it done.
The next day when I was back home I would take the cards written and drawn in pencil and ink in the lettering and ink the pencils. After that I would take my markers out and color them and then scan them in. After four weeks of that I had forty cards done. It was a lot of work but it was important to get it done. No one else would do it for me.
That’s not the end of making these comic strips. At that point they’re just cards and have to be made into strips. That’s done on the computer. I have to write the “Middle Story” for each of the strips which is the short two sentence story that runs underneath the cards. It’s not the longest story in the world but it doesn’t write itself. I have a master document with ten blank strips in it. One morning I took it upon myself to get it done and so I wrote ten “Middle Stories” and was ready to go. I copied pasted the now digital art cards into the strip template. Two cartoon art cards and one visual art card. Then I save it as a finished strip.
As I was finishing those strips I was also getting something else done. I was scanning in the negatives of old family photos taken by my mother. I’d put two 120 negatives in to the holder, put the holder into the scanner, and then use the scanning software to scan them it. It takes about ten minutes per scan so in that time I when I’d work on the comic strips.
Scanning isn’t hard at all but it’s tedious. It’s the same movements over and over again. First off I have the handle the negatives with gloves on. So I’d slip on a cotton glove, pull a negative from a sleeve, look at it to see which way was up, down, back, and front, put the first negative in the holder, do it again for the second negative, take the gloves off, put the holder into the scanner, call up the scanner software, preview the negatives, hit a couple of settings, start the scan. Then I’d go back to working on “Drifting and Dreaming.”
I finished ten of the comics over the course of the morning so in the afternoon I switched to scanning and making my altered art Magic the Gathering cards. For those I had to use frisket to mask out the card borders and expose on the art I was going to replace, use acetone (nail polish remover) to strip the ink from the art area of the card, prepare the ground with varnish, medium, and inkjet medium, print a new image on the card, put spray varnish over the new art, remove the frisket, scan the card in to post on eBay. I’ve got lots of multi-step process going on.
I kept this up for two days. I got twenty comic strips finished, made twelve altered art Magic the Gathering cards, and scanned in about sixty medium format negatives. That’s not too bad. I got stuff done. But it was equally important that I got a lot of stuff done before hand so that I could get this stuff done. That ain’t easy.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got six new comics.
Check them all out here:
I am trying something new today. I’m going to watch a episode of “Friends” on my commute and write about it as I watch. Right now I’m sitting in Secaucus Junction train station and I have a while to wait for a train. I’ve spent plenty of time drawing in my ink book at this train station but I’ve never tried writing. We’ll see if that’s doable or not.
I’m going to be watching one of episodes from Netflix. I’ve already downloaded it when I was back home so I don’t need to be connected to anything to watch it. The episode is from season two and it’s episode three. “The One Where Heckles Dies.” I know from looking at my 2012 ratings that I gave it five out of five stars. That’s a rare rating for me especially in these early seasons. It’s the very first episode of the series that I gave five stars to so I’m looking forward to it.
We start out with a good ensemble scene with the six friends. They set up the first plot of the show (there are usually three plot lines per episode in any given sitcom) as they tell us that Chandler broke up with a woman over what could be viewed as a triviality. It obviously wasn’t trivial to him. Joey is on Chandler’s side which leads us into a solid “Joey is not that smart” joke. I’ve heard complaints over the years that some of the humor in “Friends” hasn’t aged well because we’re not supposed to make fun of groups of people anymore but I’ve never heard anyone say that making fun of dumb people is wrong. I think that’s because no one likes to include themselves in that group.
The theme song sounds good on headphones.
The next scene continues the Chandler bit until Mr. Heckles shows up to complain that the friends are walking too loud. I remember watching this show first run and being surprised that they killed off Heckles (we didn’t know the names of the episodes back then). He was a solid character and sitcoms just didn’t kill off characters very often. They still don’t. Now they’ve all doing Janice impressions. I always liked Janice. She may have had an annoying voice but she was fun. Joey’s impression brings down the house.
Mr. Heckles sudden death in the middle of an upstairs/downstairs foot stomping fight with the women still cracks me up. Now we head down to Mr Heckle’s apartment as they bring him out on a gurney. A very funny transition. Comedy and death are like chocolate and peanut butter. They go together in tasty way but you can upset your stomach if you eat too much of it.
Back up to the friends’ place and Phoebe is being her weird self and sensing Mr. Heckles. That’s when she’s at her funniest. Then she hits Ross right where she knows to get him. Phoebe says she doesn’t believe in evolution thus setting up the second plot of the show.
They’re at the living room coffee table a lot this episode. Just an observation.
Here comes Mr. Heckles attorney to let them know that he left all his stuff to Monica and Rachel (the noisy girls upstairs). They’re a bit surprised but are up for some inheritance. In the next scene they’re in Mr. Heckles messy apartment. All the stuff he left them is worthless but they go through it anyway. We get a call back to a scene that was cut out of an earlier episode as Joey stands in front of an old time TV magnifier that magnifies his crotch. I still love that gag.
Ross won’t let the Phoebe not believing in evolution thing go. He earnestly wants to convince her. She plays him perfectly.
Chandler finds Heckles “Big book of grievances” and we’re back to the Chandler ending up old and alone plot. Rachel wants some tacky lamps that Monica will never go for (setting up plot number three). We’ve got a conflict coming up. And now it’s Heckles high school yearbook. This’ll wind Chandler up. Heckles was voted class clown and so was Chandler. The coincidences continue until Chandler is having a meltdown.
New scene still in Heckles’ apartment and Chandler is inconsolable and he’s spent the whole night there. He’s been finding ways he and Heckles have behaved alike. Including breaking up with women for slight reasons. Heckles kept notes about it. I love the “Pronounces it suposably” joke with Joey later trying to figure out if that’s correct or not. This whole Joey and Chandler scene is top shelf. All good stuff from start to finish.
Short and dramatic scene with Chandler on the phone. How will this pay off? It’s Janice!
Now we’re in Central Perk for the first time this episode. No one can believe he wants to start things up with her again. Nice suits on the boys. And Janice walks in. Pregnant. She’s also married but has a good sense of humor so she just had to show up when Chandler called. I like this bit a lot. Janice is very funny and likable in it.
Now we’re back to the girls’ apartment and Rachel has her lamp. Monica really doesn’t like it. And here comes Ross one more time to try and convince Phoebe that evolution is real. She gets the better of him in a very funny way. Monica breaks the lamp! In comes Chandler all upset and with a “Crazy snake man” plan. They are hitting all three plots in this one scene. The girls are doing their best to buoy Chandler up.
Final scene in Heckle’s place. Monica wants Rachel to have another crazy lamp as a peace offering. And now Monica is in front of the TV magnifier. I never get tired of laughing at that gag. That’s why I’m okay with it appearing twice in another episode’s extended edition. Chandler gives a final poignant tip of the hat to Mr. Heckles.
The end credit scene is Chandler trying to and failing to act differently. And we’re out.
I just checked with the Uncut Friends Episodes webpage to see what was missing from theses Netflix cuts and there was a few lines in the beginning that were no big deal but also cut was a lot of the scene at the end where the girls were trying to buoy Chandler up. They were telling him some of the crazy reasons guys broke up when them and there was some funny stuff in there. I’m going to have to go watch that scene in my standard DVD copies.
For a final thought it was tough writing in the train station. It took a lot more concentration than I thought it would. It’s easier to draw in a train station. I don’t know if I’ll try to write there again
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got six new comics.
Check them all out here:
Computer stuff. That’s what I’ve been doing lately. I run two old computers and they take some care to keep going. My MacPro Tower is from 2008 and my MacBook Air is from 2011. Being that, as I write this, it’s a month away from the year turning over to 2020 those computers are ancient by computer standards. But they’re what I’ve got and so I keep them going. They’re both still up and running so that’s a good thing.
The MacBook Air has a problem. It has a flaw that has been reported in a lot of Apple’s laptops from about 2010 to 2017. A bad video cable. That’s the cable that connects the computer screen to the rest of the computer. Sometimes when I turn the computer on the picture is all distorted. I then have to put my hands on the top left and bottom right corners of the screen and flex the screen slightly. That makes the video cable work again.
Since the computer is old it isn’t under warranty or Apple Care anymore. So I’ll have to fix it myself. I even bought a new video cable and have it ready to go except the repair isn’t an easy one. According to the internet it’s rated as one of the harder repairs. A lot of things have to be taken apart and even the screen bevel has to be pried off. I’ve been putting off the repair for fear that I might break the machine.
In telling this story to a friend he said he might have a slightly newer laptop for me. He gave me a 2012 MacBook Pro. I brought that one home and gave it a go. First I had to use Apple Migration Assistant to transfer over all the settings, apps, and files from my MacBook Air. I had no male to male USB cable so I tried to do the migration over my home network. I know that can be slow but I didn’t have a lot of stuff to transfer and I was willing to leave the machines on all night.
I started up the Migration Assistant and let it go. A couple hours later the progress bar barely budged. I knew something was wrong. I ordered the cable which would arrive in a couple of days and shut down the file transfer. When I went to restart the MacBook Pro it wouldn’t start. After fiddling with it for a while I found out it had a bad API partition. Whatever that is. My only recourse was to reinstall the system. So I did. The reinstall went smoothly.
When Saturday came and so did my cable I tried Apple Migration Assistant again. It worked perfectly and my new 2012 computer was ready for action. Almost. You see I use my laptop mostly for writing. Not only did my writing program, Scrivener, not work with the new Catalina operating system but neither did Illustrator CS6 which I write my comic strip in. I’ll have to pay $30 to upgrade Scrivener (which I still haven’t quite done yet) but Illustrator is another matter.
I’ve been using my old version of Illustrator for years now. I don’t have the money fo a monthly subscription and the old one suits me just fine. Plus my old 2008 tower won’t even run the latest version of Illustrator. But I have been doing some teaching at a college recently and that means I have an Adobe ID that’s allowed to access their suite of programs. It also means that I can install Adobe programs on my new/old 2012 laptop that is running the latest Mac OS. After a few installation tries I got the apps installed.
The weird thing about the 2012 MacBook Pro is that it seems slower than my 2011 MacBook Air. On paper the Pro has the advantage in all the stats. Except one. The Air has a solid state SSD hard drive and the Pro has a regular optical drive. That solid state HD makes the Air seem faster because it accesses the HD faster. Now I want to replace the HD on the Pro. More money so maybe in the future. The MacBook Pro isn’t quite ready to replace my MacBook Air just yet. But soon.
With my 2008 Tower I wanted to replace the main hard drive with a newer and larger one. It has a 3TB hard drive in it and it has over 2TB worth of stuff on it. It’s starting to get full and that slows things down. I bought an 8 TB external drive and cracked it out of its case when I got it. For some reason bare internal drives are more expensive than the same drive in an external case.
I put the drive into one of the bays in the tower and reformatted it for a Mac. After that I installed the OS and started up Apple Migration Assistant. This time I had over 2 TB of info to transfer so it was going to take a while. I started it on Saturday nigh at about 4PM and figured it would take it overnight to finish. I underestimated. It took until 4PM on Sunday to finish copying.
After it finished installing I went to boot the computer up from the new drive. It wouldn’t boot. It defaulted back to the old drive even if I chose the new one specifically. I had to pull all the drives from their bays and only leave the new one in there. It finally booted up.
After upgrading it took another couple of hours to get things going. The Migration Assistant transferred everything over so that my new HD and OS looked just like my old one but for some reason it still didn’t copy every single setting over. I don’t know why but I had to start a bunch of things up and sign in with passwords. Not everything but just some things. Then everything crashed and I couldn’t get the computer started.
Don’t ask me why it crashed. I have no idea why. All I know is that it took me a half an hour to get it started again. I tried everything I knew from safe booting to running disc utility. It took multiple attempts but finally restarted. I got everything up and running again. There are still a few quirks that I’m working out but the new hard drive and system are solid. Let’s see how long they stay that way.