Radiant Comics

I finished making a print this week. I’ve finished a few in the last couple of weeks and they are the first ones I’ve done in a while. I stopped making them mainly because I was a bit tired of coloring them on the computer. For the past couple of years I’ve been mainly working with paint or marker and I really do prefer those real life mediums. But when making a print coloring on the computer is a real advantage. Mainly because it’s easier to control how the final print will look. If I paint something, scan it, and then print it out it’s a struggle to duplicate what I’ve painted. Colors change when switching between mediums. With computer coloring I’m using only colors that I know are going to print well because I’ve used them before. Takes the guessing out of matching color.

One of the things I have to say about computer coloring is that it’s not faster than painting by hand. I’d say it’s faster to learn on the computer since it’s easier to fix your mistakes but if you already know how to paint or use markers then it’s not faster to use them virtually. I always think it should be faster but it never is. It might even be slower for me because I can try more stuff. With real paint if I try something I have to think it through first and then after I start I have to change my mind immediately if it’s not working or stick with it to the end and make it work. With virtual tools I can go down many paths and if a path doesn’t work I can reset everything with the push of a button. Often that means I walk down paths on a whim and that takes time.

With this print, “Nine Nine Nine”, I had the drawing finished already. According to the date on the inked piece I made it back on May 14, 2014. It and a lot of other black and white ink pieces have been sitting around a while uncolored. The first thing I have to do is to decide if I want to color it in Photoshop or Illustrator. One is bitmapped coloring and the other is vector. I like vector for its easy use of shape and its resolution independence but I like bitmap for its easy use of textures. I could have gone either way with this one but chose bitmap and Photoshop.

I decided I wanted to try something new with the piece so I broke out my 12” Wacom Cintiq. I just checked and I bought the Cintiq (a computer screen you can draw on with a special pen) over six years ago. I call it new because I’ve barely ever used it. I have a regular 12”x12” Wacom tablet (it’s not a screen but a pressure sensitive tablet I use with a special pen) that I use all the time and usually that works fine for me. But I really want to try new things with the Cintiq. I never could quite set it up to my satisfaction so I took a couple of hours and really figure out what I wanted to have it set up. It took a while but I finally got it. And then it just slowed me down. Turns out I still have a hard time drawing on the thing. I put it away and went back to my other tablet.

There is some prep work on a file to get it ready for coloring. It’s short and not very interesting so I’ll ship to the first part of doing the actually coloring and that is deciding on the basic colors. I have a palette of colors that I know will print well to choose from and that helps when starting out. I began with the main background colors first and then move to the main foreground ones. That means I went with the blues and greens behind her first, There are four blues with the lightest one being in the middle of the print. It suggest the sky more than the blues at the top do. When I’m not using illustrative color I’ll often use colors that suggest things rather than literally show them. Thus part of the print becomes a substitute for the sky without actually being a sky. There are only two greens and the ones at the bottom suggest a fence and therefor the ground but there is nothing literal about the green behind her neck. That green does seem to turn and move sort of like a screw. Repeated diagonals can do that.

The next color I picked was the pink of her shirt. It was then prudent to make her skin tone pinkish. Often I don’t let reality get in the way of making some outrageous blue, purple, or whatever skin to but for this one a pinkish peach seemed to work fine. I went with the neutral brown forearm sleeves next and then it took me a surprisingly long time to pick just the right two reds for the rest of her dress. It looks effortless now but those two colors took a lot of trial and error. I dropped the neutral grey in behind her and her hair became yellow and orange and her eyes blue almost by default. Often that last color or two are easy because not much else will work.

Then comes the part that takes the longest. The textures, the shading, and the patterns. I decided on just a little shading. Some modeled shading in her face and some cut color in her dress and hair. This is where I have to fight off why I call “The DaVinci Effect”. That’s what I call the urge that every artist has to be like DaVinci. I want every bit of shading to be realistic and perfect. Clearly that’s not called for here and is completely impossible for me to do but still the urge is there. So at first I did a horrible job of it chasing an impossible goal and then scaled back and figure out what I wanted to do. I kept the shading subtle, minimal, and let the color do the talking.

I’ve been making textures in Photoshop lately for the express purpose of using them in prints. So I had a few laying around to choose from and they went pretty fast. But the dots and stripes in her dress took more time. At first I tried using Photoshop’s pattern tool but I didn’t like anything I did with it. So I changed over to making patterns in Illustrator and cutting and pasting them into a Photoshop layer. This worked well. I’m much better at making vector patterns than bitmapped ones.

The yellow brush stokes on the edges of her form were inspired by my trying to use the Cintiq. I couldn’t make the lines I wanted with the Cintiq but it reminded me of an old way I used to make lines but stroking paths with the pencil tool. I did that and I was good to go.

The shading on the lips was the very last thing I did.They’re still pretty flat looking but that have just a hint of roundness. That hint took a while to get right. Most things do. But in the end a hint was all I needed.

The actor Leonard Nimoy died this week. It was all over the news, of course, and many photos of him as Spock from Star Trek appeared all over my social media feeds. That was his most famous and beloved roll so that’s to be expected but I still like him best in his roll as the narrator of the classic 1970s TV show “In Search Of…”. So far I haven’t seen many references to that show but I did see one list of top ten episodes. I did not agree with that list at all and it seemed to me to be written by someone with only a passing knowledge of “In Search Of…”. So I thought I’d put together my own list.

As a child in the 1970s “In Search Of…” taught me many things. But first and foremost the voiceover they had at the beginning that said “This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture” was a real eye-opener. As a ten year old I couldn’t quite figure out what that meant. I’m still not sure exactly when I figured it out but the lesson I came away with was that it was up to me to figure out which parts of the story were bullshit. I know I had an ah-ha moment with that but I don’t remember exactly when. I was a youngster though and I have “In Search Of…” to thank for my rather finely tuned bullshit detector.

I didn’t quite make a top ten list because I don’t care much for top ten lists but I did pick out a bunch of them that are favorites. I broke them down into three categories. Historical – Mysteries that have a strong background in fact but we don’t know the answers. Speculation – Most of these are pretty unproven if not totally made up. Still there is a grain of truth in there somewhere. Bat-shit Crazy – Where do they come up with this stuff? In most cases “In Search Of…” was the first place I ever saw anything about these mysteries. As a kid I read a lot of history and biography books that were written for children but this was a whole different take on “History”.

Historical

In Search Of – s1e17 – The Easter Island Massacre – This one was cool. Giant sculptures and a civilization that fell. Sure they didn’t know a lot about the whys and wherefores but the statues were real and so were the people. I have a great interest in statues and art from ancient civilizations and it’s influenced my own art work and I bet it all started here.

In Search Of – s2e21 – Butch Cassidy – I’m pretty sure I knew about the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid movie before I ever saw this so it was really cool to think that a historical figure escaped his known death and went on to life out his life in obscurity. There is not a lot of excitement in this one besides that thought. Still that was enough as this was probably the first time I was confronted by that idea. Not every story we’re taught is true. Of course this one might not be true too. Turn on that B.S. Detector.

In Search Of – s3e07 – Siberian Fireball – Wow, a real life event that could have altered history if it happened in a slightly different place. A comet, meteor, asteroid, or whatever hits the Earth but far enough away from civilization that a scientist doesn’t even get there for fifteen years. What are the odds? Great and intriguing stuff.

In Search Of – s4e11 – D.B. Cooper – A true life crime story that happened within only a handful of years of the making of this episode. Mysteries were still happening even as we were in the modern age.

In Search Of – s4e06 – The Lost Colony of Roanoke – Lost people from a time when people shouldn’t have been able to get that lost. We learned about all sorts of colonists in social studies class but never these ones.

Speculation

In Search Of – s1e10 – Atlantis – To this day I’m fascinated with Atlantis. No evidence for it but an old story but it leads to stories of all sorts of other civilizations that were lost and then found. I like those real stories too.

In Search Of – s2e13 – Anastasia – Take a historical figure or incident and build a whole myth around it. I knew the Russian princess didn’t live while the rest of the family died but that didn’t stop a lot of people from wanting it to be true. Taught me that a lot of people just plain want to believe.

In Search Of – s3e05 – Jack the Ripper – Historical true life crime. Except there isn’t a lot known about Saucy Jack. Still it doesn’t stop people from speculating. Since seeing this show I’ve see half a dozen shows that made good cases for half a dozen different suspects. Not much there but scary because it was real.

In Search Of – s3e16 – The Money Pit Mystery – Seems so real but is probably completely made up. This one taught me about the old “Tower of Speculation”. I mean it was tall tale after tall tale. Where is the real story in the story?

Bat-shit Crazy
In Search Of – s1e01 – Other Voices – I never would have guessed this was the first episode ever. It’s all about if plants can really talk and communicate with us. Before episode guides were easily available I would have swore this was a late episode when they were running out of ideas.

In Search Of – s2e02 – The Man Who Would Not Die – Ahhh… The Count of St. Germain. Did he have super powers? Is he really immortal? This show introduced me to the 1970s phenomenon of people “Channeling” dead people. Cracks me up to this day.

In Search Of – s2e01 – The Lost Dutchman Mine – Tell people that there is gold in them thar’ hills and they’ll be people digging in those hills forever. The History Channel even has a new reality show about this.

In Search Of – s6e03 – Ghosts in Photography – An all-time favorite. To this day I wish I could get one of this old Polaroid Land cameras where you peel off the back of the picture. I’d be hanging out in graveyards and taking photos just like the guys in this episode. It looks like fun.

If you want a TV show that logically explores unknown mysteries and such then check out “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World” but if you want the soothing tones of Leonard Nimoy delivering such lines as “The Count of St. Germain… where was he actually from? Portugal? Egypt? … Atlantis?” then you need “In Search Of…”.

It’s been a long cold winter so far. In fact it’s been so cold that I’ve missed more cycling days this winter than the last three winters combined. Having a cold in early January when it was still warm enough out to ride didn’t help either. Normally I go for a bike ride five days a week. In the winter I may miss a day or two here or there because of a snow storm but I usually get back to things pretty quickly. I might average only four days of biking in the winter but I don’t imagine it’s much less than that. But in the last 62 days of this winter I’ve only managed to get out and ride 23 times! That’s about two and a half times a week. That’s nuts. That’s more time off than on. That’s what an extra cold winter and a cold will do to you.

Let me put in perspective what an extra cold winter is. I’ll go cycling if it’s above 20ºF outside. That’s pretty cold in itself but I can still get a ride in. My face mask has to stay pulled up the whole time so I can’t wear my safety glasses and my fingertips will get cold but I can get a ride done even at 20ºF on a cloudy day. But anything below that and the price starts to get too high. I’ve gone out on 17ºF mornings on occasions where I juts can’t wait anymore and want to go for a ride and it’s a tough haul. Once it gets below that 20 degree mark my legs don’t want to work like they normally do. It’s better to wait for a warmer day.

I like to cycle in the mornings too. That means it’s going to be colder out than in the afternoon but in a normal winter that usually means it’ll be above 20ºF by nine AM when I like to ride. Not this winter. This winter there have been plenty of days when the temperature didn’t make it above 20ºF all day. The Siberian Express they call it. The last couple of weeks I got a few rides in but even then I had to go in the afternoon. Rides are tougher in the afternoon as I’ve been working all day and am more tired plus there is more traffic on the roads in the afternoon. I don’t like tougher. I can remember in years past watching the thermometer in the morning and hoping the temperature would get about freezing by the time my ride came around. Like 20ºF is a dividing line so is 32ºF. Above freezing is a different and a little bit easier ride then below freezing. But this year freezing is a distant and often unreachable goal.

It wasn’t even until the 24th of January that we got our first real snow of the winter. We got a good eight inches that day. That’s on the high end of a normal snow storm for these parts. Normally over the winter we get some snow and then some melting and then snow again. That’s the pattern. This year we got snow, then a deep freeze, more snow, and then more deep freeze. We’re lucky that a blizzard just missed us here in Southern NY. We only got four inches of snow that day while a lot of Long Island and New England got feet of the stuff. But Our total snowfall has been around twenty inches with not much melting in between storms. I haven’t seen the grass since before that January 25th snow. That’s not usual.

And let me tell you about the winds. Some days they’ve been fierce. With normal snowfall and melting the snow gets heavy and doesn’t blow around much if it’s been there for days. Not this year. This year had been so cold and windy that, at times, it has looked like a sand storm outside my house. I’ve had to clear my front walk days after a snow storm because the wind blew snow all over the place. Wind like that make a bike ride untenable. Even in warm weather. I went riding in a lot of wind one summer day and nearly got blown over half a dozen times. If it’s gusting up to thirty miles an hour I say don’t go for a bike ride.

My bike needs some work too. The gearing isn’t right. It’s clicking and slipping on me a little bit. I don’t change gears often as I cycle but it won’t always stay comfortably in one gear these days. As I pedal I can feel the bike wanting to change gears on its own. It usually doesn’t but it sure feels like it wants to. It goes click-click-click and I have to shift up, down, and back into the gear I want. Since my bike is covered at the moment in road grime, sand, and general winter filth I can see why it doesn’t want to work at top efficiency. But I gotta tell you the very idea of working on my bike in 20ºF weather makes my hands cold. I’m gonna have to put up with it for a while.

One more winter related thing that has nothing to do with biking. Across the street from my window is a parking lot with a few trees lining it. Fifteen feet or so up in one of the trees, stuck in a branch, is one to those thin yellow plastic shopping bags. Y’know, “Paper or plastic?” and you pick plastic. That’s the one. It’s been there since early December. All this writing I’ve been doing about wind, cold, and snow and that plastic bag has been through all of it and is somehow still up in that tree. I’m not sure how. We’ve had multiple storms with sustained thirty mile an hour winds that make you think the world is going to end but that bag made it through them. Its a little scary. No wonder people want them outlawed. They don’t go away easily.

This week I pulled out some eighteen month old drawings to work on. And I don’t mean small starter drawings from my ink books that go back years and years but drawings that I had finished way back in August 2013 but then abandoned. The original idea for these drawings was the message dress. I guess it’s similar in concept to my “Message Tee” comic (and that may be the problem) but instead of messages on drawings I was going to have messages on dresses. But the messages weren’t just going to be like type on a T-shirt. They were going to be drawn in sort of a 1960s style psychedelic poster with the words flowing all around the shape of the dress.

Here are the four small initial drawings.

I worked up four drawings back in that summer. Oddly enough I made the initial drawings on trading card size paper (2.5×3.5 inches). I do that on occasion but not very often. I blew up the small drawings onto 6×9 inch paper and drew them at that size. After drawing them again I blew them up on 11×14 inch paper and inked them. Then what happened? Nothing. There they sat untouched. I just didn’t like them very much and moved on to other things. But they stuck in my mind because I still liked the idea a bit.

I pulled out the drawings this week and looked at them. I still didn’t like them. There was something missing in them. They had no life. I also didn’t like my inking. I can remember that I tried to keep the drawings simple. I wanted basic lines and shapes to fill in with whatever message I had to say in type. The colors and the words were going to make up the most interesting part of the drawing. But that doesn’t mean I should start with a boring drawing. A boring drawing is always a problem. And keeping things simple isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s actually easier to make something complex with a lot of lines than simple with only a few. With complex you can easily be off with five percent of your lines and it won’t be noticeable. They’ll blend in with all the rest. With simple if even one line is off there is nowhere for it to hide. And my bad lines were out in the open.

Here is the version one pencils.

I decided that if I was going to work on Message Dress again I would have to go back to the beginning. I still liked the initial 2.5×3.5 inch drawings so I pulled them out again. I also decided that it was a mistake to only draw them at 6×9 inches. I think I did that in order to keep the shapes simple but it ended up making them inaccurate. This time I decided to break out the 9×12 inch paper for the pencil drawings so that I had a little more room. I think that extra room helped. At least I ended up liking the new drawings much more than the old ones.

Here is the version one inks.

After that I went with a bigger size for the inks too. I’m not even positive why I went with the 11×14 size originally. I almost never do finished pieces at that size. I went with my usual 11×17 inch size and made the drawings sixteen inches tall on that paper. I also took the time to redraw the faces at the larger size. I think the faces were a real weakness in the earlier drawings. Since I was trying to keep things simple and not make the drawings about the faces I didn’t give them the attention they deserved. The original faces were a bit too clumsy and awkward for me. I took more time with these ones and though I don’t think they turned out as perfectly as I might have wanted them too they are much better.

Now, of course, I have to finish them. I still have no messages to put on my dresses. Unlike before I like the drawings but I still haven’t finished them. I was planning on coloring them on the computer but I really haven’t done a ton of computer coloring much lately. It’s not a process I enjoy much these days. Oddly enough though I did finish one computer colored print this week. I kind of forced myself to. I was working on a large drawing using my Monster a Day dry brush style and I really wanted to finish it as a computer colored print. I must say that it took forever. I wanted to try some new coloring techniques but in the end decided to keep things simple. And simple took a lot of time. I couldn’t believe how long. And how many printouts it took.

Here is the version two pencils.

When making a piece that’s destined to be a print on paper I can’t just rely on what the screen shows me. That’s because almost everything looks good on screen. Al the colors are bright, vibrant, and usually behave themselves pretty well. Those same colors on a print have a totally different act. So just when I think I have things finished I print out an 8×10 proof of the art (not its full 10×15 size) an inevitably don’t like something. I think it took me at least six proof before I got it right. The whole process was about five hours long. And that was for some simple non-illustrative color. Psychedelic 60s poster art color will probably take longer. Especially since I’m not quite sure how to pull it off. I don’t think I’ve ever done that type of color before.

So there you have it. I pulled some old work out of a drawer, improved on it, but still didn’t finish it. I consider myself a finisher so it’s a little disappointing that I still haven’t figured this out yet but I’m happy that I’m a bit closer. Now I think I’m going to have to figure out a few things to work on that don’t include computer coloring. I’m still pretty sick of it.

Here is the version two inks.

I finally did it and pulled the trigger on buying a new camera this week. A camera to replace my Canon Powershot SX30IS that I bought back in 2010. That one is a super-zoom model (35x zoom) that I bought to take street photos. It certainly wasn’t a dream camera and I originally bought it as a compromise since there really wasn’t one I liked for a decent price (I payed $470 for the SX30). But in the end I genuinely enjoyed shooing with the camera and its shortcomings didn’t bother me much at all. I am pretty good at finding the strength of a piece of equipment and playing to that rather than worrying about its weakness.

So this past December I looked around for a new camera to replace that one. Not that there was anything wrong with the old one but four years is a long time in the camera world these days and there were bound to be some features out there I could use. Actually I’m always looking at cameras on-line and have a wish list of camera stuff at Amazon. I rarely buy anything off it but I can keep track of stuff there.

I ended up wanting to get the latest model of the Canon that I already had. That’s the Powershot SX60. At $500 it was even more expensive than the SX30 when I bought it but it had a bigger zoom (60x), some wi-fi capabilities (plus an app), and an input jack for a external microphone. Though I had been saving up some money for it back in December I didn’t want to spend the cash. Especially since I don’t take street photos until the weather gets warm. So I waited. And then the price on the camera actually went up by fifty bucks! So I waited another month.

The price never came back down but I found a camera kit for the same $550 price that came with a 32 gig memory card, various lens cleaning stuff, a case, and one or two other little things that I’ll probably never use. I decided to get it now because I wanted to shoot some video with it. I would have bought the SX50 model instead because it’s cheaper and the lesser zoom wouldn’t bother me but it had no external microphone jack. If shooting video last year has taught me anything it’s that good sound is essential. I picked up a $25 camera mounted microphone to go with it.

After I received the camera I gave it a test and got no sound with the external microphone. That’s when I discovered that the mic needs a battery to make it work. How did I not know that? I didn’t look. That’s how. I also discovered that the camera shoots higher resolution video (1280×1020 60fps) than my old 2008 computer can actually play (gotta save up for a new one of those too). Higher resolution that YouTube will post too. So I ended up turning down the resolution.

I had come up with the idea for a walkthrough of how I made one of my large drawings a little while ago. I couldn’t quite do it with my old camera so I waited until I got the new one. I was planning on showing the drawing and then showing all the steps and tools it took to make the drawing. I have a lot of different French curves and templates that I could show and I though that would be interesting. Not to mention the different sized drawing it took to get to the big size.

The first time I shot it things went pretty well. Yes, I say the first time because remember that external microphone I mentioned? As well as having a battery in it you need to remember to turn in on. I forgot and since the light that shows you it’s on in on the back of that mic/camera and I was in front of it I didn’t notice it was off. I filmed the whole thing, took the camera off the tripod, popped the memory card in the computer, copied the video, played the video, heard nothing, and said, “Oh, no”. I’d have to start over again.

The good thing about doing it twice was that I knew what I was doing the second time around. Instead of flying by the seat of my pants I knew what shoots I needed. And I could shoot them out of order. The first time around I had to keep moving the camera ant tripod around between my easel and my desk. Not a huge deal but I had to reset and reframe everything a couple of times. The second time around I wrote down what all the different sections would be, there were seven sections, and then shot the easel ones first and the desk ones second.

The $25 dollar mic did a good job. The problem I have with built in microphones it that they pick up a lot of ambient room noise. External microphones are more focused on a person’s voice. I have no experience miking things but I think the sound with the external mic is passable. It’s at least as good as I’m going to get it. The only thing I had to fiddle with in iMove was the sound levels. For the easel shots I was in front of the mic and for the desk shots I was beside it. I had to turn down the volume on the desk shots. They were just a little too loud.

When the warm weather comes around I’ll head down to Manhattan and really put the camera through its paces. I’ve read that it’s tough to focus at its full 60x magnification and I expect it to be but I’ve also read that same thing about every super-zoom camera over the years. The knock on my 35x zoom was the same but I worked with it just fine. I expect the same of the new one.

One last thing that is really really annoying about this camera is the battery. They made it ever so slightly bigger than the SX30 battery so I can’t use my old batteries and will have to buy new ones. And a Canon made battery is about $50. I think I’m going to have to go with a knock off battery. I just can’t reward Canon for such bad battery behavior.