Radiant Comics

What’s on my mind this week? How about my favorite TV shows where nothing ever happens. I’ve written about some of these shows before but thought I’d give them another look to see if anything has changed. This is a genre full of reality “Documentary” shows. When I’m by myself and working on my art I often like to put something on to keep me company. It can’t be something that compels me to watch it or I won’t get any work done. So usually it’s something I can mostly listen too. I’m a fan of history and a fan of documentaries so I put on a lot of those. But there seems to be fewer and fewer actual documentaries on and more and more of those supernatural or mystery documentary style reality shows. They’re not really documenting anything but whatever the hosts are doing in the show. I also call them “Good shows to nap to” and I have napped to them because I can fall asleep and not miss anything.

First on the list is “Finding Bigfoot”. They’re on season six with this show and they still haven’t found Bigfoot. That’ll tell you right there that there is nothing going on. Well not really nothing. The four hosts go out into the woods in various parts of the world and scream and howl in an attempt to find Bigfoot. There are three Bigfoot believers and one sceptic. I gotta figure that’s about the ration you’d need to go hunting for Bigfoot because any more skeptics on the team and they probably wouldn’t even bother. I laugh at the show all the time when they tell us all about “Typical Bigfoot behavior”. They can’t even find one but they know all about its behavior. Cracks me up every time. At least “Finding Bigfoot” is fairly entertaining. They’re mostly out in the woods having a good time.

Next up is “Curse of Oak Island”. This one is in its second season and I think it has ten or so episodes a season. Oak Island is home of “The Money Pit”. That’s a place where supposedly someone at some time in the past buried a secret treasure. It’s the Arc of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the Crown Jewels of Scotland, Shakespeare’s secret manuscripts, or your basic pirate’s treasure. It could be anything. The problem is the no one has ever found treasure on Oak Island. The whole thing is probably just a myth but that hasn’t stopped people from digging there. Lots of people over the last hundred years have dug there to no avail. So much of the island has been dug up that no one is even sure where the original spot the treasure was supposed to be is. This show is all about the current people who are digging on the island. So far after twenty episodes or so they have found no treasure. They have found a couple of small things like an old Spanish coin of the wrong age (there have been people on the island for hundreds of years) and some old wood but it had lead them no where. I think they’d have more fun looking for Bigfoot.

“America Unearthed” in another of my background shows. This one can occasionally have some actual interesting history in it though. It stars a forensic geologist who travels around the USA looking for bits of history that have gone unreported. Y’know, the Knights Templar and such came to the US and know one really knows about it but they left evidence behind. They’re on season three with this one with about ten shows a season. Sometimes the show is interesting and sometimes ridiculous. It’s more evidence based than the first two shows but sometimes it goes out into speculation-ville and never comes back.

I’ve tried out a couple of new background TV shows recently and they’ve been a little lacking. The first is “Finding Giants”. It’s in it’s first season and is all about a couple of brothers who have decided to hunt down the legends of giants and prove they are real. Yes, they believe that a race of really big humans existed in the US and there is evidence of them. They track down a bunch of old newspaper articles and go to the places they were written about. That is a really thin premise. There is not much going on in this show at all so it’s mostly the same thing over and over. Hey, let’s track down this lead. Wait we found nothing. Oh well.

There was another show that I had on in the background for a bunch of episodes but it was too insipid for my taste. I can’t even remember its name since I don’t have any of the episodes hanging around. It was “Hidden History” or some such. There are a lot of shows with similar names so who knows which one it was. But it was one of those kinds that deals with three or four different mystery stories in an hour. At least the shows I mentioned have to construct some kind of story for their hour but this one just hits the highlights of “The Shroud of Turin”, “The Holy Grail”, or some other mystery. It’s the fluffiest of the fluff shows and even as background made me turn it off.

One of the type of shows that I don’t like and never have on in the background are those ghost hunting shows. They always turned me off and I only recently was able to suss out why. I blame it on bad storytelling. There are two different type of ghost hunting shows. Type one has a person sitting there and telling you their ghost story that is reenacted by the show. Problem is that usually the person is just an average person and not a good storyteller. So they’re telling you a boring story and then showing it to you. Yawn. The other type is ghost hunters going into some old building late at night and filming dust particles. At least with “Finding Bigfoot” you get nice locations. But with ghost hunting the locations are all the same. Dark rooms.

So there are some of this years background shows for you. Oh yeah, and I’m still watching a ton of YouTube comic book haul videos. Those are always good.

I’ve written before about my reading habits but it seems I’ve developed a new one that’s been working for me. At least where it comes to the many collected editions of comic books that I have on my shelves. For a few years there, about 2008-2011, I was mainly buying collected editions rather than monthly comics. There weren’t enough monthly comics that I was interested in. But then I started searching out more monthlies and Image Comics in particular started publishing a lot more comics I was interested in. So for the last three years it’s been mostly single issues for me. That’s good because I like single issues.

As much as I like a well made hard cover book of comics I prefer reading my comics monthly. I’m not much of a binge consumer of anything. I don’t sit down and watch many episodes of TV shows or movies in a row. I prefer one episode a night if I have a lot of one particular show to watch. Binging gets boring for me. I can’t sit still that long. I also like the wait between episodes and I enjoy variety. So I prefer having a stack of ten different comics to read rather than ten issues of one comic.

I’ve got my monthly comics reading habit down pat now. I’ve got it to the point where I read all my new comics twice. I’ve found the key to that is to leave them out and available for a few weeks rather than file them away. So I buy them, put them on the end table next to my reading chair, read one, and then put the read copy on top of my inkjet printer. That way the already read copies are still in front of me. I can easily glance at them, thumb through them, or give them a second read before filing them away. Being on top of my printer they’re also kind of in the way which encourages me to read them again in a timely manner. It’s a weird little habit but it works. I get more enjoyment out of my comics reading them twice. Plus a lot of modern comics read really fast so it’s not much trouble to read them again. But that leaves my collected editions out of the loop.

As I wrote before I don’t buy a ton of collected editions anymore but I still get some of them. I have a wish list of stuff on Amazon that my family buys off of at Christmas and my birthday so I get them for presents. Plus I often see good deals online and pick up a book or two here and there or want to try out something new from my local comic shop. The problem is that I wasn’t always reading them after I got them.

Back when I was mostly buying collections my reading habits were simple. Pick out a collection to read and then keep it out until I read it. Repeat. The problem I ran into with that is many of the collections I bought really weren’t meant to be binge read. And I don’t like binge reading anyway. A lot of the collections I bought were of old genre comics. I got a lot of the Atlas Era Marvel Masterworks books for example. I like them a lot and find them interesting but they are mostly made up of eight page stories from the 1950s. It’s tough to read thirty or forty such stories on the same subject in a row. They just weren’t made to be read like that. So I just sort of stopped reading them. I was still buying some of them but they languished as I read my now healthy supply of monthly comics.

Cut to this Christmas. I got a few new collections as presents plus the last week of the year is a slow one for new comics. I read all my monthly comics and even read them all twice and cleared them off the top of my printer. So I grabbed one of my new collected editions and gave it a read. As I wrote before I’m not a binge reader so I only read one issue of “Glory: The Complete Saga” and then put it down. Later on I found myself wanting to read a comic but not “Glory” so I ended up reading nothing. After all “Glory” was the one that was out to be read.

After a couple of times of that I decided I needed a new reading habit. I had already read another book I had received for Christmas called “Shoplifter” but that was a graphic novel and not a collection. And it was short so that was not a problem. But I also had a pile of collections sitting on a footstool nearby. My Christmas books plus a few things I purchased recently and left out to read. Turns out I never read them and they just got more stuff stacked on them.

Next time I wanted something to read I grabbed a “Serenity” collected edition, which had been sitting around for a month, and read an issue from that. After that I grabbed a collection of Richard Corben “Creepy” stories which had been sitting around for two years. After that “Winterworld” which I bought a few weeks ago.

I stack all these collected editions in a new place. On my drafting chair. I have to find a better place but for now the chair is okay. It’s in my line of sight and I don’t sit on it a ton since I stand and work. I can easily grab a book off it to read. I finished up “Glory” and “Serenity” pretty quickly and have since added “Starstruck” and “Starman: Omnibus Volume 6” to the pile. Those are both books that have been on my shelf unread since 2011. That’s a crazy amount of time to not read a book but they are both huge volumes with three and five hundred pages in them and I was never in the mood to read ten issues of “Starman” in a row. Now I don’t have to.

With this new habit I’m enjoying reading my collected editions again. I’m especially liking the Richard Corben “Creepy” stories because this is more how they were meant to be read. Since there was usually one Corben drawn short story every monthly issue or so of “Creepy” they weren’t supposed to be read ten stories in a sitting. A sameness crept into them when I tried reading them that way and it was tough to pay attention to the details of any one story. Now that I’ve been reading them a story or two at a time and then moving on to something different I appreciate the Corben stories much more. They get my full concentration. I like when I can make my habits work for me and not against me.

Sometimes I get tired of the process. That’s my epiphany of the week but I’m pretty sure I’ve confronted the thought before. I just forget it as I get un-tired of the process or discover a new one. I also switch between a few different artistic mediums to keep from getting tired of one process or another but that doesn’t always work. Specifically I’m writing about my painting process today.

My usual painting process it make small ink drawings in my sketchbook, pick out one of these drawing, turn the small drawing into a more finished working drawing, make a color sketch of the drawing, transfer the drawing to canvas, and follow the color sketch to make the painting. I’ve made lots and lots of painting that way. I’ve got it down. But I haven’t made many in the last half a year or so. I’ve been working on other things.

About a month ago I even bought some new 18×24 in canvases. I only had one blank one left so I bought another half dozen to give myself something to jump start my process. I started a new painting and made it all the way through my process to the part where I transfer the drawing onto the canvas. Then I stopped. And the painting has sat there unfinished ever since then. I lost interest in it and didn’t know why.

Another size that I paint at is 8×10 inches. I started doing that about ten years ago just so I could work with a wider variety of images. Though they are smaller I can get more paintings done in the same amount of time as a large one. The process is the same for the small ones except for one thing. I usually do four small ones at the same time. It’s faster that way. I can se aside the one I was just working on to let it dry as I work on another. And of course I have to do four times the sketches and four times the color drawings.

I think it was the beginning of 2014 that I bought about two dozen 8×10 blank canvases. I’ve probably only used about four of them since then. I was never in the mood to work on any paintings of that type. I wanted to do some this week or work on the 18×24 one that I had in process but I couldn’t. I even made six new drawings for some new 8×10 canvases and though I liked the drawings I had no interest in making paintings out of them. Why? I’m not sure except that I think I’ve grown tired of the process.

This week I got an 8×10 painting done. All because I changed the process. I skipped most of it. I decided to not work from any previous sketches or drawings and draw something new right on the canvas. I used to draw straight on the canvas back in my student days. They were larger canvases back then. About four feet by three feet. I would usually have a figure in the painting that was drawn from either a live model or me in the mirror and then I would add in a whole bunch of other strange little elements. After the drawing was done the painting would begin.

Drawing on canvas isn’t an easy thing. Canvas is a rough surface. It’s actually canvas with gesso on it. Gesso is a white paint that seals the surface of the canvas. You can put layer after layer of gesso on canvas and then sand it down until it’s smooth but usually that’s only done by artists looking for a smooth portrait technique. For the rest of us the roughness of the canvas makes for a good surface for holding the paint. But that also makes for a tough surface to draw on.

Most of the time I draw with a soft pencil. I have a light touch and a hard pencil will make me bear down too much and gouge the paper. A soft pencil leaves a darker line that is also harder to erase. On canvas that line is really tough to erase. So I use my soft pencil and try not to get the lines too dark but that’s not easy. The rough canvas eats at the pencil like sandpaper. The graphite can really build up. Using an eraser can just spread the graphite around rather than erasing it.

I can remember one fellow classmate back in my college days particularly admiring my drawings on canvas because it’s a type of drawing that you never get to see. Because I was figuring out the drawing as I was going alone there was a lot of erasing to be done (students us the eraser a lot) and since nothing was erased very well it left a lot of ghosts in the drawing. It was like a little time machine. You could see the way I changed an arm or a leg three different times. You could track the way I moved one element or another around until I found the right spot. And then a couple of things might be in the correct place on the first try. I hadn’t thought about that before my fellow student pointed it out to me. He even suggested making a series of drawings on canvas but I never got around to it. I was learning to finish things after all.

So that’s what I did with the new 8×10 inch painting. I said to heck with my process, pulled a blank canvas off my shelf, and just drew straight on it. About an hour later I had the image of a half masked face that I could work with. I broke out my acrylics, some of which were in bad shape from neglect, and painted. No color sketches either. I played it by eye. It took me all day to finish the painting which isn’t so bad since I usually get four paintings done in three to four days. This morning as I was stumbling around trying to figure out what to do with an hour of free time I pulled another 8×10 canvas out and drew on it. I’ve got a drawing ready to go on it now and can’t wait to get back to it. That’s a much better process.

One final odd thing about process. The canvases I buy come shrink wrapped in plastic. The first one I grabbed was already unwrapped and there was some yellow paint or ink that I had put on it sometime before. I have no memory of it. I’m guessing that sometime this year I was trying to change my process and see how a thin layer of yellow in a gradient would look. Obviously I didn’t like it and put it back on the shelf. I’m glad this latest change in process worked better for me.

I figure it was time again to pull a random painting off my shelf and have a look at it. This one one of my eight by ten inch acrylic on canvas paintings. I don’t think I’ve made one of these in a while. I have a bunch of blank canvases that size so I’ll have to get some more done in the new year. Meanwhile this one has the date on it of October 3, 2006. Being that it was done that long ago I don’t remember it specifically. After I do these I scan them in, put the originals in a large envelope to keep the dust off it, and then put them on a shelf. I seem to remember this as a scan more than I remember the actual physical painting. That’s too bad because the physical painting is much more interesting than a scan of it.

The first thing I notice about this painting is how crisp, dark, and sharp the black line is on it. Maybe that’s because I’ve used a violet line in my larger acrylic paintings of recent years but the black line really jumped out at me. I think this painting is very much about the black line. Often my paintings are about shape and color and the line takes a back seat. But here it doesn’t. I think that has to do with the sweeping nature of the lines and how they squeeze the shape and color. Take the orange hair across the top of the person’s head for example. That orange is one of the two brightest colors in the painting (yellow being the other) and should stand out and move forward in space. But it doesn’t because the thin shape of it is corralled and knocked back by the strong black line. The black line is the positive shape that the colors sit behind. The black line was obviously the last thing painted as it is so strong.

The colors is this painting look a bit different than I normally use. I don’t usually use brown as a dominant color but here I do. It’s a deep and strong brown too. I think I use lighter browns more often. The depth the brown is really helped by the brightness of the orange around it. The brown picks up a little of the reflected light of the orange and that makes the brown a bit more lively than it would be otherwise. I really like the way the orange seems to flow like air around the solid anchor of the deep brown. This is also helped by the shape of the orange going from thin and referencing a hair band into some flowing waves that reference hair blowing in the wind. The three blocks of orange on the top of the painting connect the top to the bottom visually even if there is no subject in common. They also make a vertical gesture of color up the right side making that the side the painting is weighted to.

When I make these paintings I tend to mix a bunch of a color and then store that color in a plastic cubby. Or sometimes I use the color straight from the tube of paint. But straight or mixed my color palate tends to change over time. I either run out of the particular color that I mixed or get some new tubes of new colors. I’m not really picky about the paints I buy. I buy different brands and always want to try out new colors. So a certain shade of blue ends up in a bunch of my paintings for a while and then disappears to be replaced by s different blue. I say that because I like that purple I used but don’t remember what it is. It’s better than a lot of the purples I’ve used. I find purples to be the most problematic of all the colors. It can tend toward red or tend toward blue so much that it’s tough to find a purple that says what I want it to. This one seems to be a nice one. It looks like it has a bit of white in it and therefor tends towards violet but it’s staying out of the lilac zone. I generally like lilac but it would be way too light to work in this painting.

I like the purple here because it created it’s own no-man’s land. If I had made it a lighter purple or even a blue it would scream out as “Sky”. It would push back in space and change the whole dynamic of the painting. Instead it sits in the mid-ground. It measures out at about a fifty percent grey and sits right in the middle of all the colors. The green and the red want to be darker than it an push the purple forward but black line and the purple won’t let it.

I also managed to use red and green together and not evoke Christmas. That’s because they’re not the dominant colors. The orange, brown, and purple own this painting and the red and green are just along for the ride. They make things livelier and move the eye around but they’re not the main show. The black like keeps the red and the green in their places and away from Christmas. The long swooping line that define the red and green on the top left allow for the black line to dominate better than if they were straight lines.

One last thing that I notice on this painting only after I notice all the other stuff it the small dots and dancing green lines. I often use such touches in my paintings but in this one they are more understated than in most of my paintings. They exist in their own gentle space. They are all single color dots that work in subtle color harmony with the other colors. The bright green swoops near the hair stand out the boldest of them but are paired with the bold orange of the hair and so seem a bit more calm than they might otherwise. As a matter of fact I find most of the color dots calming. I often use them the wake things up but here they sit back and mellow.

So there you go. An eight year old painting that I haven’t pulled off my shelf since I made it. Time does slip by.