Radiant Comics

I’m looking for something to write about tonight and so far I have nothing. Some nights are like that. I say nights because that is, mostly, when I write. I’m a morning person so that is a little opposite for me. Well maybe not since it makes sense that I’d write at night. After all I have to work during the day like everyone else so when else would I write?

Yet I think that I might write better at night. That’s the opposite part. I draw and do everything else better between the hours of 8 AM to 2 PM. Once the clock hits 3 PM my concentration isn’t what it once was. I’m better after 6 PM and can make my way through stuff then if I have to but after 10 PM I’m nearly useless.

I’ve never pulled an “all-nighter” in my life. They are just counter productive for me. I don’t gain any time on a deadline staying up late. I mess things up and make mistakes when I’m tired. I’ve always been better off going to bed and getting some rest.

All that does make it a little odd that I think I write better at night. Maybe it’s the quiet. All my other work, whether I’m drawing or on the computer, I do amongst noise. I’ll have music, the TV, the radio, a podcast, or something on to listen to. But for writing I need some quiet to hear the words in my head.

Isn’t it odd that to see lines on a paper when I’m drawing I prefer to listen to things? Sometimes the quiet gets in the way of my concentration when I’m doing that. If it’s too quiet my mind starts to wander away. It drifts outside of the confines of the paper I’m drawing on and I can’t get anything done. I daydream instead of draw.

Yet when I’m writing I have to turn all the noise off. It doesn’t have to be dead quiet but I don’t want any music or voices in the room with me. The words in my head don’t come if there are other people talking. Even music that is all instrumental is no good. I can write through it easier than if there were vocals but still that makes it hard to concentrate.

It could also be the dim lights at night that help my writing. When drawing I need all the light I can get. I like working in front of a window with the world going by outside. It helps my concentration. But when I write everything visual becomes a distraction. The TV being on, even with it muted, becomes too much of a distraction when I try to write. At night when the blinds are closed I can write easier.

I’ve been learning to touch type recently and that has been a huge distraction. I can see why people never bother to learn to touch type once they’re past school age. It’s real real slow when you start out. People who learn to touch type in school probably aren’t trying to concentrate on writing as they’re learning to touch type. It’s two different tasks at once.

I’ve been doing it for a few weeks and I’m up to only twelve words a minute. That is way slower than my brain is going as I write. I’m probably three times as fast as that when hunting and pecking. I keep switching between the styles of typing because the my touch type slowness is frustrating and impeding my writing.

Since the writing in the main purpose of my typing I have to go back to hunting and pecking at times when my brain wants to speed up. I also notice that though my writing is better at night my touch typing gets worse the later it gets. It’s a weird situation but I still haven’t given up on touch typing. Maybe someday my speed will increase but not yet.

I looked up on the internet how to touch type and one site said that a person should be up to speed in about a week but I took that with a grain of salt. Unless that is a week of typing six hours a day I doubt anyone would be up to their eventual full speed of touch typing in their spare time.

So that’s the state of writing with me.

The NFL draft is almost here. It starts on Saturday the 25th. An oasis of football in the middle of the off season. Unfortunately it’s not that exciting an event. A list of college players names really. And draftees often don’t end up doing well in the pros no matter how high they were drafted. But it gives all teams hope and us fans something to do for a day. Even if that day is just filled with a list of names.

I have another off season football source now. Since I changed from cable TV to satellite TV I actually have the NFL network. I can get a fix of football 24/7. Well, almost. Most of the NFL network is pretty uneventful. Some of the news and commentary shows are good but there is not always a lot of things to talk about in the off season. There is more than there used to be but football news isn’t football.

The NFL network covered the NFL scouting combines thoroughly. The problem is that is not an event that demands to be covered thoroughly. It’s a bunch of college athletes running, jumping, and going through football drills. It’s hardly riveting television. The forty time that a player runs at the combine might be important to the player and the scouts but hold little excitement for me.

The combine is also a little disturbing in it’s resemblance to a slave auction. We get to see players poked and prodded at little like cattle. Of course I haven’t seen a real slave auction but this is kind of how they look on TV or in the movies. That can be a little strange. It reminds me of Spartacus. Such is the life of a wannabe pro athlete.

There are also a lot of “Top Ten” specials on the NFL network. Top Ten Nicknames, Top Ten Characters, Top Ten Draft Steals, Top Ten Trades, and Top Ten You Get the Idea. These shows can be entertaining but there is too much padding in them. Too much what’s coming up, what has gone before, and repeated footage. An hour show has about forty minutes of stuff in it. Throw commercials in and these shows are tough to sit through.

I like the highlight package “America’s Game” that they show on NFL network. They are the same ones that you can buy on iTunes and are well done. They highlight Super Bowl teams of the past and tell the tale of their championship year. There is also a series called “Missing Rings” about really good teams that didn’t win the Super Bowl. That’s a interesting show.

I haven’t been able to get into the replays that the NFL network broadcasts of recent games. I find them too edited. It ruins the flow of the game for me. Sometimes plays start and end too abruptly. Plus it seems like the game is edited around the commercials. The game used to exist because of the drama on the field and now it exists to show commercials. Something is backwards about it.

There is this weird thing the NFL network does. It’s called “As it Happened” or something similar. They show you the good plays of any given Sunday as they happened in real time. If there were six games on at once they show you which game had the most exciting play at that moment. They start with a play from game three and then switch to game six and then to game four. It’s a really weird way to watch football. I’m not sure if I like it or not. It’s just plain strange.

So that’s my take on the NFL network. There isn’t really a ton for them to do in the off season. We got two weeks of Jay Cutler trade speculation this year. Not terribly compelling television but the talking heads were glad to have that to talk about. They really have to vamp to fill time in the off season. But here comes the draft.

I am a sucker for TV shows about unsolved mysteries. Historical mysteries, crime mysteries, astronomical mysteries, zoological mysteries, and even, on occasion, supernatural mysteries. I bring this up because I have been watching what is probably the best of these shows. “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World”.

I like the thirteen episode series because it is the most straightforward and scientific. They cover a variety of subjects and have a lot of eyewitness stories but don’t spend much time on wacky speculation. They lets stories be stories and facts be facts. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don’t. Arthur C. Clarke will let you know when he has doubts.

I also like the style of “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World”. Being that it was made in 1980 or so there is some solid film making. It was before the MTV age of fifty edits a minute and people talking over beds of music for no reason. They put a camera on a storyteller and let him tell a story with subtle camera movements and thought out reframing. They make it easy for you to pay attention.

I was a fan of the Leonard Nimoy narrated “In Search Of…” series when I was a kid in the 1970’s. That was a continuing series and therefore much more hit and miss that the Arthur C. Clarke one. “In Search Of” was much less scientific but not always so and was often entertaining in its wackiness. There was a one on past lives that made me laugh even when I was twelve. And I wish I could see the one about finding out if plants scream. Some mysteries are bigger than others.

For some reason the “In Search Of…” episode that I still love best is the spirit photography one. It’s filled with people in the 1970’s going around to all sorts of places and taking photographs in hopes of a ghost showing up in one. The people are so ernest too. They really think they are taking spirits’ pictures.

There are three brothers in the episode who use a Polaroid camera to take their photos. They go to a graveyard, take a pic next to a grave, wait a minute before peeling the Polaroid film, and then hope a ghost shows up in the photo. That looks like a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. If I ever go ghost hunting I want that same type of Polaroid camera. It seems the most appropriate.

The mystery type shows that I like the least are the U.F.O shows. They are all exactly the same. The same story over and over with no corroborating evidence. Yeah yeah, I know, the government is keeping all the evidence under wraps. Yawn. There has been no new information on any U.F.O. TV show since the 1970’s. The same crap over and over. I can’t take it. U.F.O.s go away.

Another thing I can’t take are some of these newer hour long unsolved mystery shows (and TV documentaries in general) with a lot of padding in them. When the show starts they give a preview of what they are about to show, as they go to commercial they give a preview of what is coming up after the commercial, and when they come back from commercial they recap what they’ve already shown you and give a preview of what’s coming up. It’s repetitive and annoying. I don’t need to know what you’re going to show me. Just show me.

I always liked the actual show called “Unsolved Mysteries” hosted by Robert Stack where viewers could call in and help solve whatever was unknown. There was a lot of crime stuff on that show that eventually got solved and they would hit you with an update in a later edition. Sometimes we got closure on their stories.

A fairly new type of show is the “Ghost Hunter” type show. A group of people go out with all sorts of equipment and try to find ghosts. Needless to say they never find anything. The only show of this type I like is the first season (2002) of the British TV series “Most Haunted”. It was a lean half hour of the host and crew mostly did nothing but scare themselves late at night. They never found any ghosts but it was entertaining. The next season the show became an hour long and was dull and padded. I think the show is still on the air today.

Yep, I’ve seen all these type of shows. All that conspiracy stuff that was in “The DaVinci Code” was old news to me. There had been quite a few shows about it. There were many more “The DaVinci Code” conspiracy shows after the book was a hit. None of them added much to what I already had seen but a couple were okay.

One day I hope to see a show where they finally find Atlantis. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Six weeks. That’s how long it took me to get step one done on my web comic. Hmmm… maybe it wasn’t really step one; maybe it was step one in the drawing of it. Either way it was a tough step.

What this step included was character design and and character illustration. I decided to take a whole different approach to drawing a strip than is normal for a comic. I don’t have the time to draw a daily strip so I’m going with a different approach. A cut, paste, and manipulate approach.

I started with the characters faces. I drew six different views of a character’s face, scanned them in, and colored each of the faces in Illustrator. I then drew three different poses for said character, scanned them in, and colored each in Illustrator. I then put each head variation on each body variation. I did this for four characters. That’s a lot of heads and bodies to draw, color, and bring together.

To help with the construction of the eventual strip I had to pay special attention to characters’ eyes and mouths. I made these separate from the faces so that I could manipulate them when putting together a strip. I can change the expression on the characters’ faces by changing the mouths and eyes a bit. I don’t want to endlessly draw each character’s face over and over for each new strip. I couldn’t do it. At least not for free.

Having the characters look at each other as they interact in the strip is important so I constructed the eyes in such a way as to be able to change the way the eyeball is looking. This took some more time but will save time in the future. That’s what this was all about. Saving me time in the future.

It was tough sledding though. I’m not a fan of character design and working on only the nuts and bolts of the strip with no finished product in sight was hard for me. One of the reasons I like making art is because I like to finish things. Finishing a piece is often the most satisfying part and slogging through all the stuff you have to do to get to finish something is what stops most people from ever finishing anything.

After I finished the first two characters I almost gave up and threw in the towel. My strip is about conversation and is mostly talking heads so visually it’s tough to do something interesting. I grabbed a few of the strips I had written and tried to use my two finished characters to make the dialogue come to life. I couldn’t. It looked awful. All of the variation I had drawn into the characters was negated by the sameness of each panel.

I was frustrated and nearly gave up at this point but I left things for a few hours and then came back to it to try again. I abandoned my ideas of literal storytelling with the pictures and concentrated on making the strip look good. I varied the sizes and positions of my two speakers with no regard for how they were literally moving around on the stage. The dialogue was literal enough without the staging having to be so too. I put together a couple of strips with looser staging.

That seemed to pull things together for me. That and changing the characters’ expressions a bit more. It took me weeks to get those two characters finished so seeing a couple of strips nearly finished and generally to my liking gave me the motivation I needed to get the other two characters done. Two men and two women. They have no names yet. And so far the men have on weird masks and the women weird hats. That makes things more interesting for me.

The best character I designed was the last one. That’s because I built her in Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is a vector graphics program which uses points to make a line (sorta like connect the dots). When I scan my art and bring it into Illustrator it uses thousands of points to make the lines in my artwork.

The same line that Illustrator’s “Autotracing” makes with twenty points an actual person can make with two. So I made a character’s head with the minimal number of points I could. That’s cool because now I can use that basic head and manipulate a few points to make a new character. Wider jaw – shift these two points, bump in the nose – shift this point, and on and on. Once again this is all about saving work in the future.

Now I’m tired of working so much now to save me work in the future. The characters are well under way and I can start finishing some strips. I still have no idea what it’s called or where I’m going to post it but I’ll cross those bridges when I come to them. Right now I want to finish a couple of paintings and then a couple of strips. I haven’t gotten to finish anything is six weeks and that is fatiguing.

I was thinking about ink today. It’s an important part of my drawing. Since a lot of my work comes out of a comic book tradition I use a pencil and ink method of working. That means that first I draw something with a pencil and then go over the pencil drawing with ink. That way of working originates with the fact that it is easier to consistently mass reproduce a black ink line as opposed to a grey pencil one. Hence a comic book or strip is usually reproduced from an ink line. I say usually because due to new technology and better printing these days comics can be made from a pencil line.

I first started learning to use ink back in my college days. I can’t even remember what brand it was. It was probably whatever I could get my hands on. I remember soon after college I decided to get a nice big bottle of ink. I think it was a liter. I didn’t look at the label closely enough though and ended up buying non-waterproof ink. At the time I had only ever seen waterproof ink and didn’t even know to check.

The way I found out it was non-waterproof ink was because of my hand making stamps. As I inked my hand was resting on the paper. Just like as if you were writing. Except to draw in ink I have to spin the paper all around and work from different angles. This means my hand can often rest on areas I have put ink on. This doesn’t matter with waterproof ink but with non-waterproof ink it does. The moisture from my hand (it must have been summer) picked up the non-waterproof ink and each time I put my hand back on the paper I made a little stamp of the ridges on the side of my hand.

Needless to say I was a bit stunned when I looked down at the paper and saw the mess I was making. The tough part was that I had to continue using that ink for a while. I spent about thirty bucks on the giant bottle and being that I was just out of school I didn’t have the money to replace it. I carefully placed a scrap piece of paper under my hand as I inked so the moisture from my hand wouldn’t touch the ink. Eventually I got some more waterproof ink. I still have most of that non-waterproof ink left.

Something I used to have to be concerned about was how well the ink resisted lifting up when erased over. Since the pencil then ink method leaves a lot of stray pencil marks on the page you have to run an eraser over the whole page after you are done and the ink is dry. Thus erasing the pencil marks and leaving the ink marks. Except when you do this some inks go from black to grey. It’s usually not a problem but sometimes it is. So any ink I would try out would have to be given an eraser test. If it lightened too much then out it would go.

Luckily because of the advent of computers and 13″x19″ home printers I haven’t had to worry about the eraser test in about ten years. Now instead of inking over my pencils I scan my pencils in and then print them out on a separate piece of bristol (paper) in non-photo blue line. This way I can ink and not have to worry about erasing anything. Good show!

Higgings T-100 Drafting Film Ink was my ink choice for years. It had a nice consistency, was a matte black, came off the brush well, and did great on the eraser test. I liked it. So off course it’s hard to find now. I’m not even sure if they still make it. I don’t think much drafting is done on film anymore. I used to buy bottles of it every time I saw them but haven’t seen them in a while. I’ve seen bottle of it on some obscure web sites but the main web sites that I buy art supplies from no longer carry it. And they carry tons of stuff.

So I’m always looking for new black India ink to try. I’ve tried all the varieties of Higgins brand ink and none thrill me. Higgins Black Magic is the best but T-100 was much better. I tried some Dick Blick Black Cat ink recently but I found it a little thin and not as dense as I’d like.

A lot of people find many varieties of ink too thin. That is fairly easy to fix. Leave the cap off of it and let some of the water evaporate out. That can take a bit of time so some people boil their ink. I haven’t tried this. Usually I leave the cap off. That’s what I did with the Black Cat ink to make it more to my liking. I also recently did that with some Liquidtex acrylic black ink. It needed less evaporation than the Black Cat ink so I liked it better.

I did find a new brand of ink a few weeks ago that I like. Sennelier India Ink. It’s dense and flows well. No evaporation needed. Though it was a small bottle of it I bought. I notice that sometimes the small bottles need no evaporation while the larger bottle of the same ink do. Must be physics or something.

Different inks have different odors but the Sennelier ink definitely has a familiar one This ink smells like the airbrush paint that I used to use in college and not any other ink. I wonder what gives it that smell?

Those are the thoughts I’ve been thinking about ink lately. From density to smell. I cover it all!