Radiant Comics

I’m a tool person. I like to have a lot of tools to choose from and I like to try new ones. I’m okay with “The right tool for the right job” but one of my rules to live by is “Work with what you’ve got.” That means that I try not to put things off because I don’t have some tool that I’ve convinced myself is the right one. Sometimes I have to just get started on a project because putting it off gets nothing done.

I mention this because this past weekend I finally got started making some videos showing off the art I have made over a lifetime. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve wanted to do this but I never had any really good ideas for how to get it done. Figuring out how to show off static paintings and drawings on moving video isn’t an easy thing. In the end I haven’t really figured it out. Instead I just started.

Speaking of tools I have a bunch of cameras. I have the DJI video camera that I shoot my Walk and Talk videos with, I have a pocket zoom camera for street photos, I have a bigger super zoom camera for street photos, I have my phone, and I have an iPad. I couldn’t even decide which camera to use to shoot these art videos. That’s been going on for months and months. Finally I decided to stick with what I know.

I make a comic book haul video every week. I’ve been making them for over ten years. They’re very simple. I put my iPad on a tripod, attach my Yeti microphone, stand in from of the iPad camera, talk, and show some comics. There is no editing involved. That’s where I decided to start when making these art videos. It took me a long time to decide to work with what I already know.

I did do some microphone tests before I started. I already knew that when using the Yeti mic if I drift away from it (it’s stationary) or hold a piece of art between the mic and my mouth the sound can fade a bit. That happens sometimes in my comic haul videos. I wanted to avoid this. Plus I was planning on shooting some footage holding the camera right over the art so I wanted the sound to be consistent.

When I bought my DJI video camera I also bought some lapel microphones. I haven’t used them much since I find the camera’s mic works just fine when I’m walking and shooting sweet video with it. I’m holding the camera in front of my face so the mic picks up what I say very nicely. But I’ve seen other people use lapel mics and they get some nice and consistent sound out of them. So I gave my lapel mics a test.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people hold these small lapel mics right in front of their face when they record. I did the same and got good sound that way. But that meant that I only had one hand to hold the camera in the hand held shots. Even with the tripod that meant I only had one hand to hold the art. It was not a solution that worked.

Since lapel microphones have a clip on them to clip to a lapel I decided to do that and clip it to the collar of the shirt I was wearing. The sound ended up being a little too muffled for my taste. I expected this because the lapel mic I had was a cheap one. They came in a set of two for $12 (though they go for $25 today) and didn’t sound great compared to the much larger $100 Yeti mic that I’ve been using since 2014.

I decided to stick with the Yeti and try and keep a consistent distance from it and not put the art between me and it. After all that time of trying to figure out what to do and with which camera and microphone I ended up doing it exactly how I always have done my comic book hauls videos.

There is one big difference though. Editing. I never edit my comic book haul videos because I don’t want to. I want to make them as easy as possible on myself so that I’ll do them and I like the honest unedited way they come out. I think that captures my excitement of showing off the new comics I buy each week. If I stumble over my words a bit that’s okay.

I want these art videos to be a bit more about presentation. They are a bit more about the art I am showing and less about me showing it. I’ve got to try and make the videos interesting enough to look at and that means editing. I’m not a huge fan of video editing because it takes a lot of time but I might try out some of these new automatic features in video editing programs.

So I set up my iPad camera and Yeti mic as I always did and did some shooting. I had already decided to show off five pieces of art per show so I pulled out five things. I recorded an introduction and then me talking about each piece individually. I didn’t write any scripts since I’m used to talking spontaneously. I gave myself a few tries with each piece and more than that for the intro.

After than I pulled the iPad off the tripod and shot handheld from over the top of the art as it sat on my drawing table. I also put the mic on my desk the same distance away from me as when I was standing. I thought it went well enough that I took out three more pieces of art and recored me showing off them. That gave me some more choices.

Now it’s all down to the editing. I have no idea how that’s going to go. I’m not sure if I want to edit on my iPad to give myself a little more flexibility with where and when I edit or to edit on my desktop because it’ll probably be faster. It might end up being both for different things. I want the five piece art show but I can also use shorter one piece videos for various social media.

All this shooting only took me about three hours on Sunday so that’s not bad all things considered. It’s going to take me a bit to get the video edited so I’ll let you know how that goes. At least I got started. With what I have.

Just a few moments ago I was at my scanner with my latest “Inkbook” scanning in the pages. It’s book twenty seven. I’ve filled one book a year so I started making these Inkbooks way back in the year 2000. That barely seems like a real year anymore. There are one hundred pages in the book and so far I’ve drawn on and scanned in the first twenty two pages.

Back in the year 2000 when I first started filling up these Inkbooks with small ink drawings I didn’t scan the pages in as a matter of course. I use these Inkbooks to draw small thumbnail drawings which is where I get my ideas from. So when I want to work on an art piece I can look through one of the books, pick out one of the small drawings, and blow it up onto a bigger piece of paper to make into something.

That first year with the first book I’d find a thumbnail drawing that I liked and go over to the scanner to scan it in. I learned pretty quickly that this was an inefficient method. On occasion it would be too much of a bother to scan a drawing in and it would slow me down. After I realized that I would scan the pages in as I went. At least I’d scan them in every month or two as just before I was scanning in a two and a half month’s worth of drawings.

I bring this up because sometimes I wonder if there is anyone out there who has made more scans than I have? Twenty six books times one hundred pages is 2,600 scans and that is just from my Inkbooks. The tip of the iceberg.

In the late 1990s when I worked in the Production Bullpen at Marvel Comics scanning in artwork was part of the job. I could make a hundred scans a week doing that job. I have no idea how many thousands of scans I made when I was there. But that part of the job is nonexistent now as almost all of the artists scan in their own work and send it in to all the comic book companies.

I mention that it’s not part of the job anymore because I figure if there is someone out there who has made more scans than me it has to be part of their job. Maybe someone who scans in photographs and negatives. Except I think that running a scanner is probably an entry level job. The harder part is what comes after the scan. Probably an employee runs the scanner for a couple of years and then gets promoted or moves on. It’s not the most stimulating of jobs. It’s a thankless task.

Back in the early 2000s I gave myself the task of scanning in all of my photo negatives. I bought my first slide scanner and went to work on them. At first I thought I could scan them all in during quiet moments when I didn’t have much going on. After a year of doing that and only scanning in one album out of fifteen I gave up that idea, cleared my schedule, and scanned for two weeks straight. I was scanning ten to twelve hours a day. It was a lot of work and ended up being around 5,000 scans. That was a tough two weeks.

Over the last ten years I’ve been scanning in all of the family photos my mother has taken. I’m not even sure how many scans that has been but I usually take two or three days a year to scan stuff in. That’s been going on for ten years so I’m guessing that I’m at least up to 5,000 scans for that stuff too.

Of course there is also my everyday art. Every piece I make I scan in. I scan in working drawings, sketches, and finished pieces. I scan those as I go along so I usually making a few scans a week. I have about 7,200 scans in my main scan folder. That’s another huge chunk.

Then there are individual projects that get their own scan folder. I made my first Art Card (a baseball card size piece of original art) back in 2006 and since then I have made around 3,200 art cards. Each one of them has its own scan.

Just a few weeks ago I wrote about scanning in the production negatives to “Spooky Spooktown” number 63. That’s just four scans but then I scanning in some Superman 3M proofs for a friend just last week too. That was eight more scans. I’ve made so many scans I have no way of tracking it except for the stuff that is in big chunks on my hard drive.

I also teach all of my students how to use the scanner. I usually make only ten or so scans with them but I’ve showed at least twenty groups of students how to scan. That’s another two hundred scans on the tally.

I used to scan in the covers of comic books that I sold on eBay. A couple of hundred scans.

I’ve scanned in all of the original art that I’ve bought over the years. A hundred scans.

I’ve scanned in a friend’s art collection too. A hundred scans.

I used to scan in another friend’s comic book art. He had no scanner of his own so when he finished a job he’d bring it over and I’d scan it in for him. That must have been a thousand scans if not double that.

I’ve scanned in photos for friends. I don’t even know how many over the years but it must be up near 500.

None of this really means anything. No one cares how many scans that anyone has made. I don’t even know if anyone but me has even given it a thought. It’s just something that crosses my mind every now and then. Especially when I’m scanning. There is a lot of waiting in scanning so there is plenty of time for thinking.

There may be people out there who have made more scans than I have but I sure don’t know any of them.

Texture #04

One of the things I enjoy doing is making textures. There are lots of ways to make textures digitally but I like using ink on paper to make my textures and then I scan them in to use them digitally. Straight digital color can be a little bit bland so it’s nice to be able to add some texture to the color. A lot of other people believe the same thing and you can see lots of textures in digital works these days and going back twenty years. If you are an artist and have spent any time online you’d see ads from people who want to sell you the textures they’ve made. It looks like a pretty good business by the amounts of adds I receive.

Over the last few years I’ve filled three sketchbooks with textures plus one with textured brush strokes. They’re five by seven inch books. Of the three texture books one has 32 pages and the other two have 42 pages. I’ve filled all three up, front and back, with ink textures that I drew. That is a lot of pages of textures.

The first book I made on the twenty third and twenty fourth of August back in 2023. The second I made on the twenty seventh and twenty eighth of April back in 2024. The third is from December 31, 2024 to January 2, 2025. So it has been over a year since I made any texture books.

I hadn’t even planned on making any more textures. Two hundred and thirty two pages of textures seems like enough. Except that on Thursday of this week I, all of a sudden, got it into my head to make some new textures. Though this time I wanted to do them a little bit different. I decided to up the size.

As I mentioned before the size of the sketchbook that I worked with for the other ones was five by seven inches. For this one I wanted to go up to nine by twelve inches. Or at least that’s the size I settled on. I have been using Strathmore Multi-Media sketchbooks for these and nine by twelve was the only other size they had of those. I work at that size for drawing all the time so it would do.

Texture #08

The main thing that I use to make these textures are brushes. I was using four different ones today. But then I also try to go out of the box and see what other things I have around that can make textures. I’m willing to try out anything but not everything is up to the task.

The first brush I used was a big bamboo Japanese calligraphy brush. I didn’t bring it to a smooth point as if I was making calligraphy but instead smashed the point down so that the brush spread out and became many points. Whenever I moved the brush across the page it left behind a bunch of ink trails. It’s those trails that I used to make the textures. I also had a smaller bamboo brush that I used.

I also used this half inch wide round bristle brush. Being that it was made of stiff bristle it was less versatile. I couldn’t mash in into any shapes because the bristle was stiff, straight, and staying that was. With a light touch I could lay down some thin parallel lines but a heavier touch lead to a solid black ink mark. I had to keep the touch light.

The fourth brush that I used I think I liked the best. I also think that I didn’t use it in any of the other three books. A fan brush. That’s a flat brush that’s shaped like a small hand fan that you wave at yourself to keep cool. It’s probably about an inch and a half wide. Since fan brushes don’t have a ton of bristles to them nor much of an ink reservoir I was hesitant to use it. But it ended up working great.

What was so good about the fan brush was that it consistently laid down a lot of parallel lines. It was much more ordered than the smashed down bamboo brush. I’m all for creating textures with a little bit of chaos but a bit of order worked well too.

Texture #12

One of the ways of making textures that I like best is to make them with splatter. There are a bunch of ways to do this but the one I like best is to dip a brush in ink and then tap the handle (with your hand or another brush) to splatter little drops on ink onto the paper. It takes a bit of time and is messy but I like the results.

Speaking of messy I had to take extra measures when making textures. I put brown paper all over my drawing table to keep the ink from splattering all over it. I used some brown paper that came as stuffing in a package. I also stuck an eleven by seventeen piece of paper under the piece I was working on in the sketchbook. That way the other pages in the sketchbook won’t get ink on them. That ink can really fly around when making textures.

One of the other things I used was a small piece of plastic foam. It was also part of packaging. It was used to stiffen up an iPad case during shipping. I cut out somewhere around a three by four inch piece of it and brushed ink onto one side of it. Then I dabbed the foam onto the paper. I found it worked best when I put a loop of tape on the back of the foam to put my finger through.

I also used a piece of crumpled stiff plastic paper. I think it was part of a wrapper of something. I found it out in the garage and it was just a piece of litter that I found in the yard and meant to throw away. I brushed ink onto one side of it and dabbed at the paper. It did a good job.

I even tried a cotton ball for a page. It did okay.

One last thing I used was the edge of a stiff baseball card size piece of paper. I inked up the edge and drew shapes with it. That worked okay too.

So far I’ve filled up 35 pages with textures. Since the book is nine by twelve inches it takes a bit longer to make the textures but I’m having fun working at that size. With the small size I move the brush with my wrist but at this larger size there is a lot more shoulder movement. I can’t wait to see what other textures I can come up with.

Every week I make a video and post it on YouTube showing off the comic books that I bought that week. Also on that video I show off a piece of art that I’ve made. Usually it’s one of my “Dreams of Things” covers that I’m showing off. I put them on my easel that’s behind me when I make the video and when I’m done showing off the comics I turn around, pick the cover off of the easel, and then show it to the camera. As a consequence the last cover I showed off is still on my easel and I thought I’d look at it and write about it now.

The cover is “Dreams of Things” #313 and I completed it on January 5, 2026. That’s about a month and a half ago as I write this. First of all this image looks vaguely familiar to me. I pulled it out of one of my Inkbooks (my books of thumbnail drawings) and I may have used it for something before. Or maybe when looking through one of my Inkbooks for something to draw it caught my eye but I didn’t end up using it for something. Either way this is a weird feeling for me because I usually know it when I’m reworking a picture that I’ve used before. I do that sometimes but I’m usually sure about it. This time I’m not.

This is a drawing that I colored with my new set of Pantone ink markers. I’ve really been enjoying using them. At first I struggled with them because they are different to use compared to the Copic/Artfinity/Blick alcohol based markers that I’ve been using for a decade. I had to come up with some new approaches and techniques in order to get the most out of them. I also had to buy some more Pitt Pen ink based markers to go along with them. The two brands of markers work well together.

Though I don’t have fresh memories of making this one I do remember doing the background first. It’s full of elongated swirls and reminds me a bit of wind and a bit of waves. I like the blues and the pigmented marker ink gives a sharper edge to it than the alcohol dye based ink in my other markers. I like the look of the background a lot. I think it brings the whole piece together.

The most noticeable thing about this picture is that it appears to be sideways. We have the logo and trade dress up top showing us what side is right side up but the face/head is sideways. That makes this piece a little disorienting. Sort of like a dream where you don’t know which way is up or down.

I believe that the second color I laid down was the orange on the right side. When the drawing is turned on its side then the curvy ink lines could either be clouds or water but the orange color doesn’t help us decide. I’m pretty sure that’s why I picked it. This drawing is especially disorienting and I went with it.

The face and what appears to be shoulders on the main character are a cacophony of color. We’ve got green, yellow, orange, purple, red, blue, and brown. That’s a lot of different colors in a small space.

The brown is our neutral and most of the reds and blues are toned down. Either the yellow or the orange circle of the mouth are our brightest brights. Every other color is balanced in a way so that none of them really stand out. The purple might be demanding the most attention but only by a little bit.

I like the quizzical nature of the face itself. Each eye is made up of just two circles without even any color in them. The side eye it’s giving with the three lines underneath each eye (maybe the surprise lines and maybe eyelashes) speaks to me. I understand his need to know what that wind blowing out of his ear is. I’m not sure what it is and neither is he.

As I film my comic book haul and show these off on camera I record on my iPad. This gives me the opportunity to look at the cover on the screen and see it in a different way. When showing this one off I ended up flipping it around to see it with all four sides as the top. It was fun to rotate it around and watch it change.

One of the changes as I moved the drawing into the horizontal position is that the tilted grey triangles really became shark fins to me. I drew them colored them to be shark fins but with the cover right side up I don’t notice them very much. But with the drawing turned on its side they came alive. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like that so it was cool.

This drawing has some nice textures in it too. I like to draw textures when I use markers but I’m using them even more with these water based Pantone pigment markers. The alcohol markers I use blend together well but these water based ones don’t. So I end up using more textures. The textures in the purple pull the piece together well. The clouds have three distinct lines of colors of orange which makes its own texture and the pattern in the sky counts as a texture too. It works well together for me.

One last bit of texture I’ve been adding in to these Pantone marker drawings is, after I finish with the color, to go back in and add some small tick marks with a black marker or dip pen. I find if I add this in while I’m inking the markers can sometimes smear the little marks. Not always and it’s mostly the light yellows that do it but I like to avoid smearing if possible. So I put them in at the end. It works as a finishing touch too. What needs to be done? Just this little bit more here.

This might be one of my favorites of these. I hope you like it too.

As I’ve written about many times on this blog the mundane things in life interest me. Sure there are big events in life that can define us but life is mostly made up of small decisions that add up over time and influence our behavior from day to day. In the spirit of that I did a mundane thing this week that changed a small part of my behavior. I turned my art markers horizontal.

First off all, most markers have basically the same design. Inside the plastic barrel of a marker is a sponge and that sponge is saturated with ink. The tip of the marker is also a sponge (though usually a harder sponge) so the tip draws ink from the reservoir that is the inside the barrel sponge. When the interior sponge runs out of ink you either have to refill the sponge or throw out the marker.

Most “Art Markers,” such as Copic markers, Blick markers, Artfinity markers, or ShinHan markers are alcohol based markers with dyes used to color the ink. Dye is not as lightfast as pigments are but they blend well into the alcohol. This helps the color be consistent over time as the dye doesn’t separate from the alcohol and settle.

One of the challenges of working with markers is how to store them. Sometimes, if you buy a set of markers, there will be an instruction to store them in the horizontal position. I believe that was written on a set of ShinHan markers that I used to have. But I have also visited websites that said it didn’t matter if they were stored horizontally or vertically. I think that’s Copic’s position.

Years ago I bought a set of Copics and they came in a case that was clearly meant to be stored in the vertical position. I’m not sure if that’s what they recommended but that was the way it was designed to sit best. I kept it that way until this week.

I also bought a similar case for the rest of my Copic markers. Plus I bought two other stands for my Blick and Artfinity markers. I call them stands because they were obviously designed to stand up vertically. So the left side tray on my drawing table had five marker cases on it holding about three hundred markers all standing vertically. That’s the way things have been for the last decade. Then at the end of 2025 I bought a set of 99 Pantone markers.

Pantone markers art not dye alcohol based markers. They are pigment water based markers. Pigments are way more lightfast than dyes but I think that the pigments are larger particles than dyes and therefore can separate from the water a little bit more than the dyes from the alcohol. Even if this is not the case and there is another reason for it the Pantone markers specifically say to store them vertically. Plus the cases are built to be stored vertically.

After I got these Pantone markers I had to rearrange the whole right side of my drawing table and its side tray. I set up the markers so that they were stored horizontally and were easy to get to. I even got some smaller Pitt Penn pigment markers, put them in a vertical stand, and turned that stand horizontally. It’s off to the side on a shelf but I figured that I may as well store all the pigment based markers horizontally.

The Copic markers, as well as the Pantone ones, have caps on either end of the marker covering up two different tips. There is a chisel tip and a brush tip. I never use the chisel tip and always use the brush tip. The thing that I’ve noticed when storing them vertically is that, since I store them brush tip down, the chisel tip often dries out after it’s been sitting there for years. This hasn’t bothered me much since I never use that side but I did notice it.

I write this all down because, as I said, this week I decided to turn all of the markers on the left side of my desk horizontal. It took a little bit of doing to get it done.

The cases were not meant to be turned on their sides and stacked that way so I had to put a backstop on them. A had a small inch tall rim on the left side of the side tray but now I needed something taller. I used a six in tall piece of cardboard (from the back of a pad of drawing paper) and stapled that to the wood of the rim. I also had to re-glue the wooden piece that I used for the rim. This all kept the marker cases from sliding off the side of the side tray.

This backslide was also important because I also had to put a small piece of molding under the marker case to get it to tip up slightly. When the marker case was flush with the top of the table I couldn’t get the bottom row of markers out easily. When it was tipped up slightly they were easier to grab.

The backslide is functional but a little bland. It’s just a piece of brown cardboard. I might have to think up a prettier solution in the future but for now it’ll do.

For the last two months I’ve mainly been using my pigment based markers. My dye based ones have mostly just sat there. After I turned them all horizontal I decided to use the dye based ones for my latest “Dreams of Things” cover. Everything went fine. I have to turn my head a little differently when choosing a color and I had to be a little more careful as I pulled a marker form it’s case but nothing was really harder about it. I just wasn’t used to it yet after having them stored vertically for a decade.

Sometime or another I’m going to have to test the chisel tips of these markers now that they’re horizontal. If they were dried out before then they might have to be replaced if I want them to work. But since I don’t used them I probably won’t bother going to the expense of replacing them. Replacing them would be a mundane thing so maybe someday when I’m bored and restless. We’ll see.