Radiant Comics

It struck me this week that I should write about a single page in my ink-book. That’s what I call my sketchbook since I don’t really sketch in it but draw in ink spontaneously. I draw without initially having an idea of what I’m gonna draw and just start putting lines down and then I make things out of those lines. Well, first I draw a little box and then I draw inside the box. But this isn’t so much about how I made the page but what I see when I look at it as it relates to how I might uses the drawings.

This page is number forty from this year’s ink-book. I drew it on 5/15/2013. There are nine boxes on this page. Sometimes I draw seven boxes, sometimes eight, sometimes nine. I’ve drawn fewer boxes than that on a page too but these days it seems to be one of those three numbers.

Box 1 – This is one of my basic portrait type drawings. A face and upper body of a person. He’s got some crazy stringy hair and is wearing a decorated outfit. This is the type of drawing I’d pick out and turn into a 5×7 inch marker or gouache drawing. I like to do small decorative portrait like stuff at that size. I could also go a little bit bigger and make it into a painting along the lines of an old religious icon painting.

Box 2 – A weird and vague figure drawing. This one is mostly using the human figure as a design element within a geometric structure. I like using geometric shapes in my art and that is what this one is all about. It exists in a very shallow and modernist space. Though I like this little drawing I’d have to do a lot of work to turn it into something finished.

Box 3 – This one almost exists in a landscape but not quite. I’ve made some drawings similar to this theme. A small figure paired with a monumental figure in a landscape. It’s a weird little niche of mine that I like to use every now and then but this particular little drawing doesn’t do it for me. The large figure is a bit obscure and confusing and the landscape is almost not there. Once again this is one that would take a lot of work. But they are only small sketches to begin with.

Box 4 – This is another fairly common theme of mine. A close up on a cropped face with a second figure behind. The face is fairly standard but that figure is pretty darned whimsical. I’m not quite sure what it is. Are those four arms or a cape? And his head is glowing or some such. This drawing intrigues me. That might be enough to make me try and turn it into something. I’d have to add more height to it though.

Box 5 – Weird little creature and a fancy background. I like the designs in this one and think I could turn it into a finished piece easier than most. That his arms and legs are hidden under some sort of cloak makes for a tighter design. That could be good or bad but with all the crazy stuff going on in the background I think it’s good.

Box 6 – One of my weird faces. I like drawing crazy faces. I use them for drawings, paintings, and prints. I could easily make this one into something. Sometimes I draw faces and make them into large finished ink drawings that may or may not be used in another piece. I can never have enough weird face drawings.

Box 7 – This one is more of a half figure than a portrait. It’s okay. Mildly interesting. I like the face with the spikes coming out of the chin and the horns around the head. I could work with that collar and chest piece too but the shirt and arms have nothing going on in them. They’re blanks that I’d have to start from scratch with. Overall the top half is good and the bottom half is, eh.

Box 8 – This one is reminiscent of box two except now with a full figure and a little more of a landscape background. The pointy-footed posed doesn’t do much for me so I’d have to find a way to make it work. Or maybe it’s the hips that I don’t like. It’s hard to tell. And the design elements aren’t as strong as in boxes two and five. This might be the weakest one on the page. I’m guessing it’s destined to never be made into anything but you never know.

Box 9 – The final one is really weird. I didn’t notice until I gave it a second look that it’s a giant head/mask on top of a woman’s waist and hips. In glancing at it I didn’t like it but now it’s growing on me. There might be an idea there. I’m not sure exactly what and I think she’ll need some arms but maybe this will at least spark something.

So that’s my process. This page is from book fourteen. I fill up one of these 5.5 x 8.5 times a hundred page sketchbooks a year with drawings. When the calendar turns to January I’ll be starting a new one. It takes from an hour to a hour and a half to draw one of these pages. So that means I get about eight pages a month drawn. That takes a bit of doing. Sometimes they come easy and sometimes not but in the end I have to do them either way. That way when I want to find something to draw I can grab one of my sketchbooks off my shelf and look through them for something that catches my eye. Just like I looked at this page. It’s weird too because sometimes I realize I must have had a really good day in the past because I’ll use three or four drawings from a single page while the pages around it have yielded nothing. Easy or hard it’s a method that works well for me.

I’m tired of writing about my art this week since that has been my year long task. Now I’m going to take a moment to write about some video games. I have no real reason for writing about them except that’s the subject that crossed my mind as I’ve been playing a few of them lately. These days I tend to play all of my video games on the iPad. I’ve owned enough videos game systems over the decades that I’d need at least two hands to count them all but since I bought my iPad 2 that has been what I primarily play on. I still have my X-Box hooked up and running but I mostly use that to watch TV with. It’s networked to my Mac and so I can play video files that on on my computer through my X-Box which is hooked up to my TV. Now I play games on the iPad while I watch TV via my X-Box.

My number one game for at least the last year has been one called “Subway Surfer”. It’s a game that falls into the “Endless Runner” category where you control a character that is constantly running. There is no stopping just jumping and dodging. I played a whole lot of different types of endless runners before settling on “Subway Surfer” as my favorite of them. “Temple Run” was the first of them and I played that one for a good long while. The main difference between the two games is that with “Temple Run” you tilt the iPad left and right to make the character turn while in “Subway Surfer” you swipe with your finger left or right to make your character turn. At first I enjoyed the tilting of the iPad but it soon got tedious. I prefer the swiping of my thumb these days. It’s a smaller and easier to make and control movement.

I must have played at least half a dozen different endless runners over the last year but none of them was better than “Subway Surfer”. One of the main reasons that I like it is that is stops speeding up after a certain point. With a lot of arcade style video games they have the same basic gameplay except they speed it up round by round until the game becomes impossible to play. “Subway Surfer” does speed up but not to the point of impossibility. I usually play the game for about ten minutes at a time but if I really wanted to I could go on and on with a single game. I played for half an hour straight late last week just because it was relaxing me. Games that speed up to the point of impossibility don’t relax me.

A game that I’ve been playing the last couple of weeks is a puzzle game called “Harmony”. It’s a fun little game where you move squares of different colors around the screen to try and get them to line up in a certain amount of moves. Though I like the game I find its attempts at making money rather crass. First off it’s a pay game. It only costs 99¢ which isn’t much but I still don’t expect pay games to want me to spend even more money. Especially since they want you to pay money for undoes and to skip levels. They want 99¢ for ten undoes and $5 to make the button to skip levels work. That’s crazy. Right now if I’m trying to figure out the puzzle and I make a mistake I have to start over. If I want the convenience of an undo I have to pay for them individually. I like the game but that’s insane. I’ll just start over thank you.

I’ve played a couple of other games this year that I’ve liked but were, to me, ultimately flawed. “One was Riptide GP2”, a racing game, and the other was “Block Fortress”, a tower defense strategy game. I liked both of them but ultimately there was a game mechanic I didn’t like. It’s a common game mechanic and it’s called “Leveling Up”. That’s when when play a game and as you go along you gain experience points and money and use that stuff to get bigger, stronger, and faster. That sounds okay but usually plays out in a boring way. At first you start out and you’re not strong enough. Then you manage to win a few hard fought races or battles, gain some points, and start to be competitive. After that the game is easy until you move up to the next level of competition. Then you’re starting out again not strong enough. Lather, rinse, repeat until bored. Like I said I enjoyed both of those games until I got bored having to compete in too many races that were too easy so I could gain points or races too hard until I leveled up.

A lot of “Endless Runners” are not games that you finish. You run for the sake of running. But not all of them are like that. I played one called “Rock Runners” that was fun. It’s basically a side-scroller except you can’t stop your character. He keeps on running. You run and jump and avoid obstacles and clear levels. That’s how it’s like a typical side-scroller. You run through a whole level and that level is cleared and over. I had enough fun with this one that I played it until the end. I cleared all the level there were to clear. Fun game.

One final game of note is another “Endless Runner” called “Ski Safari”. Like “Rock Runners” it’s a side scroller except there are no levels to clear. You just keep going as long as you can. Except that unlike “Subway Surfer” where you can play forever as long as you don’t screw up in “Ski Safari” all of your little mistakes add up after a while and a giant avalanche comes from behind and gets you. It’s not quite the “Speeds up until it’s not humanly possible to play” model but close. It’s not humanly possible to play it as perfectly as you would need to in order to continue. But still it’s a fun game. There are a lot of different boards, settings, characters, and power-ups to keep things interesting and I still dig this one out when I get tired of the zen of subway surfing.

I have to mention one other game that I spent a dollar on. It was a game where you guide a ball down a winding track by tilting the iPad from side to side. The game is called “Impossible” and for me it was just that. I could make two or three turns before the ball would fall off the track. I was really bad at it and don’t play it much. I guess I should have payed attention to the name.

As I was thinking of pieces to write about for this week I remembered a series of words and images I did a while ago. According to the dates on the computer files I have of them I made these back in July of 1997. Those look like the dates I finished them so I guess I was working on this series of drawing all through the first half of 1997. There are sixty four drawing in the series all together. They’re from my “Mail Art” series. I think I had only just heard of the concept of “Mail Art” back in those days. That’s basically when you make a piece of art and mail it to someone. I read about a lot of people who were into it and the marks that got on the piece of art in transit all become part of the art so they said. I kind of though it would be cool to mail pictures to friends.

In looking back at these images I’m remembering what paper they were drawn on. Marvel Comics scrap bristol. These were days I was working in the production bullpen at Marvel. One of the things comic book companies do is have special drawing paper printed up with blue line guides on them to give the artists to work on. This way the artists drew things the correct size. The paper is called bristol board and the paper company would print three sheets of 11×17 inch paper on one sheet of 22×28 inch paper. After the three sheets were cut apart that would leave a single sheet of 5×11 inch bristol left over. Those scraps got shipped to the Marvel offices with the 11×17 inch paper. Since there was no official use for the scrap paper and yet it was still good drawing paper everyone in the office would get some and make drawings on them. I must have used a thousand sheets of that scrap bristol over the years. Anyway that is the paper that I drew these pictures on. Two to a sheet.

The original drawings are small: about 3.5×4 inches. With the words added on they become about 5×4 inches. I have no idea why I chose this size. It’s an odd almost square size. If I were making them today I think I would make them 4×6 or some other standard size. 1997 Jared may have had an explanation but I don’t. These are also the early days of Photoshop for me. I had probably been working in it for about two years at this point and I don’t see too many novice coloring habits in them but I can see some.

I was also using my early Surrealist automatic drawing method to make these drawings. I would draw the box first which would define the boundaries of the composition, close my eyes, scribble on the paper with a pencil, and then open my eyes and see what I could find and draw in those scribbles. It’s a way of making images that would be hard to make with the conscious mind.

The first two I’m going to look at are Mail Art numbers 20 and 19. I must have scanned them in together since they were on the same sheet of paper and never separated them when I colored them. Once again I don’t know why I did this but why separate them now? Number 20 is a nude woman in front of a rock. Who doesn’t like a nude? She is the main interest in this drawing but the rock has some nice bold brush work in it to beef things up. There is some Photoshop “Add Noise” texture in the rock to give the piece a little more visual interest. Those parallel lines in the back are not computer generated but made with my Haff hatching machine. It’s like a little t-square arm that you press a lever on and the arm moves down that exact amount. So if you set it for three millimeters and press the lever the arm moves down exactly three millimeters. That makes it easy to make parallel line patterns. Number 19 is a man riding a monster steed. It’s kind of creepy looking. The background is one of my sky/fence/grass motifs and its boringness makes the main figures a little more strange. That thing’s teeth match the color of its tail. Weird.

The second sheet of drawings holds numbers 33 and 34. Number 33 is a baseball player. I haven’t drawn many baseball players in my day but here is one. A pitcher pitching. It’s pretty straight forward except for the strange grip he has on the ball. That seems to be the hidden centerpiece of the drawing. Everything else looks fairly mundane to me except for its leaving me with the question, “What kind of weird pitch is he about to throw?”. The colors are light and basic with a little bit of airbrushing thrown in. It’s all sunny day calm except that grip on the ball. Number 34 is a dog flying a kite.For some reason that seems more normal to me than the pitcher. The drawing of the dog doesn’t have a ton of detail in it but the Add Noise texture makes up for that. The background is also bland but I like the black sky. All in all this one seems like a typical weird drawing of mine.

The final sheet we’ll look at contains numbers 45 and 46. This is a latter one and I can see my latter vector coloring style starting to emerge in number 45. A woman’s head with some kind of necklace around her neck. It’s colored not with any gradations but by creating shapes out of three different values of color. It looks fairly clumsily done to my eye because I went on to use this technique a lot more and got better at what shapes I created from my colors. Still it has its charms. And a pattern in the background. Number 46 continues this pattern theme as I put some stripes on the car and in the background. This kind of unites the two areas but not really. Leaving the windshield a solid color is the key to getting the right amour of separation. And it’s a man driving a funny car. That is not a car I could ever draw without the Surrealist method.

I haven’t looked at these in a while. My website has a section on them when, years later, I made them into individual pieces and typed out the words but I like these original versions best.

I think it’s that time of year again when I look back on what Fall TV I’ve been watching. I tend to watch two hours of TV a night. That’s without commercials so I’m talking about two hour shows and one half an hour show. Or some combination of that. I know people who watch a lot more than that but to me it seems like two hours a night is a lot. There a bunch of new seasons of old shows that I continue to watch and I don’t have much to say about them except they’re solid. I tend to like quirky detective and police shows so Castle, Bones, The Mentalist, Grimm, and Supernatural are on that list. I also like fast paced and a little out there sit-coms so It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Eastbound and Down, Web Therapy, The Simpsons, and Modern family are on that list. The one reality show I watch is Comic Book Men. Occasionally I also watch old 1970s detective shows. The Rockford Files is my favorite but I’ve also watched Cannon and Banacek lately. Friends and Cheers are my go-to nostalgia sit-coms when I need a pick-me-up. So what is new?

Back in the Game – All of the new sitcoms from last year that I liked got cancelled so I tried a bunch of new sitcoms this year. This is one of them and it’s already been cancelled. It’s an okay show and that’s about as much praise as I can lavish on it. It’s nothing great or revolutionary but James Caan is good in it as the crotchety old father/grandfather. I’m not surprised it got cancelled but I’m sorry to see Caan go. Who doesn’t like to laugh at a crazy violent grandfather?

The Blacklist – I’m a little behind on this one have seen only the first four episodes but I like what I see so far. It’s another variation on the quirky detective genre except this time one half of the detective team in a guy (James Spader) who is a criminal mastermind. For as a yet unexplained reason he turned himself in to the FBI and offered to help them fight crime. He insisted on teaming up with a new female agent for a, once again, unexplained reason. I think this one is doing pretty well in the ratings and it’s a decent show. It’s dark and the criminals they go after are the super-bad ones. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of it so far.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine – This one took a few episodes before I started to like it. It’s a half hour comedy about a precinct of police in Brooklyn NY and has an ensemble cast that stars Andy Samberg who I know only from some of the Saturday Night Live digital shorts that he made. Terry Crews is also in it who is a guy I always find funny. After about ten episodes the cast of characters is starting to gel a bit and it’s much funnier than when it started. There are about eight characters and now that I think about it it’s a bit like Barney Miller. Except they leave the station more often and have more women in the cast. I hope this one grows and lasts.

The Crazy Ones – Sarah Michelle Gellar and Robin Williams star in this show as a father and daughter team of ad executives. It’s better than I thought it would be. I find that Robin Williams can be annoying but here he tends more towards charming in this so that’s a win. Plus the cast of about four other character besides the main two are pretty strong. So far the plots have been fairly unmemorable but there are still laughs to be found. Lot’s of product placement a name dropping as they work in an ad agency and are always mentioning the product campaigns they are working on. We’ll see how it does.

The Michael J Fox Show – I’ve read that some people have a hard time watching this show because of Fox’s Parkinson’s disease. That hasn’t bothered me at all because they just made it part of the show, joke about it, and move on. That and Fox is the best part about the show. He’s as likable as ever. It’s a family comedy but the problem is that most of the family is dull. The little brother, the sister, and the mother/wife are all generic. They don’t have much to do. I like the oldest son. He’s a college age kid who quit college and now has to live at home with his parents. He’s ambitious though and is looking to make his way in the world. Fox also has a sister in the show who lives downstairs and fills the role of the quirky neighbor. She’s pretty generic too. Overall the show is just good enough to watch for a little longer to see if it goes anywhere. But it might get cancelled before that ever happens.

Inside Amy Schumer – A comedy sketch show starring Amy Schumer of course. Like most sketch shows it’s uneven but I found enough funny in it to watch all ten episodes. She’s got lots of stuff in there about sex and relationships and some woman-on-the-street interviews about sex that are funny. I’ll be back for more if there is a next season.

Agents of SHIELD – I’ve heard a lot of complaints and disappointment about this show but it’s okay. I never expected greatness from it so it hasn’t disappointed me and it has steadily gotten better episode by episode. I understand people’s complaints though because it’s a fairly generic show with a cast of young and pretty people. Typical television that there is not a whole lot of character to. But I like a lot of the dialogue if not the plots so I’ll stick with it a little while longer.

Sleepy Hollow – I’ve heard good things about this one. Mainly that it’s a fun show. So far I’ve only seen the first two episodes but I’ll check out some more. There are supernatural monsters, Ichabod Crane (time traveler from the Revolutionary War), and a police officer. I like its straightforward nature. By that I mean there is no “Lost” type “What is really going on here?” mystery that so many shows have copied. We got good guys and monsters trying to take over the world. Sure we don’t know everything about the evil plot and monsters but we know that they’re monsters and therefore will naturally plot evil. No complicated (and boring) mystery within a mystery stuff.

So there is the new stuff I’ve been watching. How much of it will last? Who knows? It already looks bad for the sit-coms.

“Sunrays” – the title to this piece is obvious because it’s painted right on the painting. Usually I name my paintings with whatever random word or phrase comes to mind as I’m trying to think names up but here I used a word in the painting itself. It’s another one of my eighteen by twenty four inch acrylic on canvas paintings. As I look at it I find it to be a hard painting to write about because it seems simple and straight-forward to me. It’s all about the word and the image.

I find that this is an image I especially respond to. Or maybe it’s an image that I find peaceful and that’s a change for me. Often my images are challenging the viewer but not here. This one is a cute little bird coming out of half an egg. There is no hard gaze from a human face here. And being that it’s not a person and not a face the image is a little unusual for me. I think it’s also an image that I’ve used before. I can’t quite remember but I think I made a small five by seven gouache painting using this chick and egg. I don’t think it was too similar to this one though. I found it to be a fun image and wanted to do something more with it. Sometimes that’s the way it is with small works finding their way into bigger ones.

Overall this painting has a bit of a theatrical presentation. I don’t remember thinking that as I was making it (it’s from May 23, 2012) but as I look at it now the “Sunrays” type looks like it’s on the front of a stage and that the egg is sitting on the top of the stage. Further emphasizing the stage motif are the purple vertical lines on the top of the painting that start to resemble a curtain. The green and blue behind the egg form a painted backdrop as on a stage. I’d say the painting is about the presentation of the bird.

This painting is a good example of my use of type and images together. It’s hard to explain why I like the two together so much but they create a space in my mind that’s different than anything else I can think of. It’s a mystery to me why it works for me but it does. I can’t even describe why some words work and others don’t. I don’t remember what other words I tried with this image but “Sunrays” does the job for me there. There is nothing literal about it so it makes my brain try and find connections. I like searching for connections.

The type itself is simple single weight lettering. In other paintings I’ve actually painted words in some sort of professional typeface but here I didn’t. I went with block printing of the letters. I did fill up the space as much as I could with the positive forms of the letters. The “S” and the beginning and the “S” at the end are both a little different than the other letters and give the word some character. It’s also dark blue on orange so there is a lot of contrast between the letters and the background. The orange of the background tries to move forward in my eye but gets beaten back by the letters, There is also some light purple on some of the letter edges to give the letters a slight bit of depth and sparkle.

It could be that one of the things I like about this painting is how calm and ordered it is. Most of my paintings have a lot more chaos going on in them than this one does. The egg and the chick sit nicely in the center of the painting in front of the painting’s deepest space. The red of the egg makes the space even deeper as it pushes against the green backdrop. Often red and green, being complimentary colors, will fight each other for the eye’s attention but here so much separation is created between them that they sit quietly together. The peaceful blue of the sky also sits back in space nicely partly because we expect it to. A blue sky in the background meets our expectations and therefore behaves as it should. The yellow of the chick’s head stands out well in the field of blue. The purple up top is dense and heavy but balances out the strong orange on the bottom.

All the little lines, brush strokes, and tick marks I put on this painting add to the harmony of it. I often use such marks to create action as the eye moves across a painting from point to point but here the lines follow the contours of the objects in the painting. The curved lines along the sides of the egg emphasize its shape and widen and stabilize the egg. The lines and marks on the left and right act like columns and give strength to the sides of the image while keeping the eye from wandering off. Even the lines and yellow marks on top of the chick’s head calm things down and keeps my eye from flying away. It’s a bit of a bull’s eye painting and that’s not usual for me.

“Sunrays”. I keep coming back to that word when I look at this. What does it mean? I know it means the rays of the sun and that gives me a warm feeling but why is it there? I know it’s odd for the artist who put it there to ask such a question but still I do. Words and images together can create feelings of mystery. It’s the simplicity of “Sunrays” that I like too. It’s an easy to understand word. I’ve used less simple words before and even random ones but simple definitely works here for me. This is also the only time I’ve used a word in a painting in a while.