Radiant Comics

I just opened up the lid of my year old air freshener that is only supposed to last three months. It’s of those cheapo things that has a big wick sticking into some sort of smelly oil. It doesn’t really freshen the air in any way but it makes the room smell sweet for a little while.

The reason this air freshener is only supposed to last a few months is that is says, in the instructions, to throw the lid away. Yes, it actually says to unscrew the cap and toss it in the trash. Why anyone would do this is beyond me. I kept my cap so I could turn the air freshener off.

The problem with scented air fresheners, beside the fact that sometimes I don’t want to smell them, is that eventually your nose gets use to them and you can’t smell them. They may as well not be there. Where is the point in that? So I like to cap mine after a while and save it for later. Since the cap isn’t off twenty four seven it lasts a lot longer than three months. I think I’ll cap it now though. It’s giving me a headache.

Last night I had a hamburger for diner. I had it a different way than usual since I’m big on new ways to eat the same old stuff. I had it on a toasted and buttered roll with hot sauce. It was good.

I was in Wisconsin once and butter on top of a hamburger was one of the ways they served them there. It was at a famous hamburger joint the name of which escapes me now. They had a lot of different ways that I had never heard of to serve a hamburger. Even the famous hamburger joints in Manhattan I’ve been to didn’t have all these different kinds of Wisconsin burgers. And the Manhattan joints have a wide variety of burgers.

My variation on the butter burger was good. The difference was that I buttered the roll and not the burger. And of course I added hot sauce. Now I’m not going to tell you it was better than the Wisconsin burger joint’s one, because it wasn’t, but at least it hit the spot for me. I was looking for something different and I got it.

I tried a new genre of video game on my Nintendo DS this week. It was a “Seek and Find” type mystery game. There really is no point to the mystery except to use it as a framing sequence for the seek and find stuff. What you have to do is find a picture of some small object amongst a whole lot of small objects on a bigger picture.

It wasn’t the most challenging game in the world but after “Advance Wars: Days of Ruin” it was refreshing to have something not so challenging. The game keeps your eyes nimble as you are constantly moving them around while scanning the picture for the objects on the list. It reminded me of doing the find the hidden pictures puzzles in “Highlights” magazine when I was a kid. Who didn’t love those?

My computer went a little crazy on me this week. On Sunday night I noticed that the sound coming from my Harmon Kardon Soundstick speakers was muffled. On Monday morning it was still happening so I ran through all of my trouble shooting procedures. From a Safe Boot to running Disk Utility to booting from an install disc nothing that I did would fix it. So I gave up and went for a ride on my stationary bike. When my exercise was done I came back, restarted my machine, and everything was fine. I have no idea why. The mystery of computers.

One more food related thing from this week. It has to do with potato knishes. I haven’t had a knish in a little while but had one this week. I always have my knishes with mustard and usually a little cheese too. Cheddar or Pepper Jack are my usuals but this week I had one with Mozzarella. I think I have a new favorite now. I slice open the knish and put mustard on one side and the cheese on the other. Then it goes in the microwave for a minute before the two haves are reunited. The creamy texture and taste of the Mozzarella just went so well with the potato knish. Good stuff.

This week I added drawers. What a fun thing. To modify things. To make them better. Or at least to make them suit my needs better. Where I’ve added drawers is underneath the surface of my drawing table.

I’ve modified my drawing table quite a bit over the years. I originally bought it way back in about 1991. It wasn’t the best table I have ever seen. It’s basic structure seems a little needlessly complicated and it has always annoyed me that I have to undo two wing nuts to change the angle of the table. A classic drawing table has one big wheel on the left side that you loosen to change the table’s angle. That is a little easier than the two wing nut method.

For some reason the store I bought this at (Pearl Paint in NJ) didn’t have any tables in the classic big wheel style. I got this one because it was the best one they had. It has served me well over the years but it is not an example of outstanding craftsmanship. It’s solid and stays together but is hardly inspiring as a piece of furniture.

The first modification I made was to add a side tray to the table. That is a typical drawing table accouterment and nearly everyone I know gets one when they buy a table. The side tray screws on to one side of the table and has lots of little sections and wells to stick pens, pencils, erasers, and everything else in. It’s essential. Without it there’s no place to pile up your crap except the table top.

The second immediate modification I mad to my drawing table was to jack it up. I work standing up and tables are built for sitting down. It wasn’t tall enough. So I built a platform out of two by fours for the table to sit on. Then it was tall enough.

I also made the platform serve another purpose. It holds the barbell I used to use for curls. The barbell sits at nearly ground level across the bottom front of my table. It keeps the weights out of the way and anchors my drawing table very nicely. I don’t exercise with that barbell any more since I switched over to all dumbbells but it’s tucked away and not bothering anyone. And bump into the table all you want. It has seventy five pounds keeping it in place.

They other modifications I made to my drawing table mainly have to do with expanding the side tray. I’ve used wire, screws, and even tape to attach extra penholders and things onto the side of my side tray. Who can have enough penholders? My side tray is about twice as big as when I bought it. I have about fifty different pens, pencils, and markers sticking up out of it.

I also built a small platform for the left side of my drawing table. This holds my jars of water that I clean my brushes in as I work. It’s much smaller than the side tray since it’s main purpose is specific rather than the general “Holds everything” nature of the side tray.

I even built a little extension off of the top edge of my drawing table that holds a small plant.

My latest modification is one that’s been rolling around my brain for years. Since there is space immediately underneath the surface of the drawing table and since I stand at it and don’t sit then there is room for drawers. I always looked at the space and thought I could use it constructively.

What finally motivated me was the ever shrinking size of the work space I had on top of my drawing table. It was constantly being cluttered up with drawings and papers in general. Every so often I’d clean it off but I usually had no place for the stuff to go.

Sometimes I have ten or twenty drawings piled up that I had worked on in the last couple of weeks. Some would get past the drawing stage and be made into something but plenty wouldn’t. Either way I needed them handy to look at. Tucking them away wasn’t the answer even though that did clear off my drawing surface. Easy access drawers close by were the answer.

I searched out how to stick some drawers up under my drawing table. Turns out it was easy. I found a place on the internet that made “Add a Drawer” kits. They are made to go underneath any old work table. First you assemble the drawer and then you screw the top of it into the table’s underside. It was easy. It all took only a couple of hours to install.

The drawers were also a nice size for what I needed. They are twelve by eighteen inches plus about four inches tall. Since I work on a lot of eleven by seventeen inch paper (or smaller) they fit in the drawers neatly. I have two drawers side by side underneath my table.

So now I’ve reclaimed my drawing table’s surface space while still having a lot of drawings at my finger tips. Another modification that makes life a little easier. That’s what it’s about. If only the rest of life were as simple.

Album art. That’s one of the things I was doing this week. That is, I was making my own album art. It was the final step in getting my iPod Touch to look exactly as I wanted it to.

I’ve written before on making playlists (à la mix tapes) in iTunes (or whatever program you prefer). It’s how I like to listen to music these days. I even copied the MP3s of my music in my playlists so that I could enter new information into the songs’ metadata and give them my playlist name as the album they belong to. That keeps things from getting messed up.

The one thing I overlooked after I set up my thirty-some playlists was album art. Since all of the songs on my playlists now stated that the album they belonged to was the name of my playlist rather than an actual album the original album art that was attached to each song disappeared. Poof! Into the ether.

There was still album art associated with each song but is was a nearly random default piece that attached itself to my playlist named albums. Each of my playlists had a piece of art attached to it from some actual album art in my collection. My playlist “Rolled and Landed (don’t ask me what it means even I don’t know) had a James McMurtry album cover attached to it. It was confusing.

Since it took so much work for me to get my playlists up to snuff I was tired of dealing with them. Random art from other albums was okay with me. Also making an album cover takes a while. More time than I wanted to spend. But then, unbeknownst to me, my brain was working on the problem. And interesting way to make a quick album cover hit me. Google images.

In case you’ve never used Google images before it’s just like a regular web search at Google (or whatever your favorite search site is) except you hit the “Images” link and it just shows you pictures instead of web sites. Lots and lots of pictures.

So I would put the name of my playlist into Google images and see what sort of images it found. Sometimes the results would be literal, such as for my “One Wolf” playlist, and sometimes anything could happen, such as for my “Phineas Flatters Us” playlist.

Lots and lots of choices. And since the images were only going to be seen on screen low resolution images were fine. I’d pick an image, open up Photoshop, and add the name of the playlist in type. No fancy type work. Just basic. I kept things simple and got things done.

As I said before it takes a lot of work to make a real album cover. Or at least it should. I have seen plenty that were badly cranked out. But thanks to random images on the internet I was able to make a low res album cover that was interesting enough for me (and I’m fairly picky) in about five to maybe ten minutes (for the couple of stubborn ones).

I’m generally pretty fast with graphics on the computer (it is my profession) but it was the vast number of images out in cyberspace that made this little project of mine go so fast. There were so many interesting choices that I was bound to find something. And quickly. Image, type, choose font, and it’s done.

This isn’t a method that would work for commercial purposes. The images are property of whoever their copyright holders are and someone would need permission to, say, put them on the cover of “Time” magazine but for a guy making album covers that almost no one will ever see but himself it’s a great method. I knocked out thirty something album covers in an evening.

So now my iPod Touch is looking real cool. It’s loaded with all of my playlists and when I flip it into “Cover Flow” view I no longer get a useless collection of album covers that don’t even relate to my playlists. I get a series of album covers with interesting images on them that also state the name of my playlist. They’re useful now.

The images can surprise me too. I made them so fast and furiously that I don’t even remember what some of them look like. So as I flip through my playlists in Cover Flow view I say, “Oh look at that cool album art” as if some one else put it there. Gotta love album art.

I ordered some new shoes this week. I have short, wide, and tall feet that are hard to fit. I used to dread going shoe shopping because out of every ten pairs that were supposed to be my size maybe one pair would fit me. Then, years ago, I found these Northfield Oxford shoes. They fit great and I have been buying them ever since. They are about a hundred dollars a pair plus I have to get insoles for then since they don’t have enough padding for me. So cheap they’re not.

But this little piece of writing isn’t about my shoes. My shoes just got me thinking about shoes in general. One observation, that has been made numerous times, is that women like shoes a lot more than men do. Cue all the shoe shopping references from “Sex and the City”.

A second observation is that a bunch of guy I used to work with were concerned with how a woman’s feet (and shoes) looked. They were by no means foot fetishists but a woman had to have pretty feet for these guys to be interested in her. This was foreign to me.

I’d also like to point out that these guys were ten to fifteen years younger than me. I mention this because none of my friends, who are my age (40-ish), have ever mentioned anything about a woman’s feet in any of our “guys sitting around talking about chicks” discussions. I mean never. And women are a common topic among men.

This brings me too the thought I had about a woman’s footwear and its relationship to the world. I think women’s feet and shoes have become a form of sexual expression. They always were to some extent but now it’s mainstream. It’s linked to women in the workplace.

With men and women working together all the time the subject of what is appropriate and what is not always comes up. In our society men are usually the aggressors and women usually are the ones who dress sexy to get a man’s attention. But that dynamic doesn’t always work in the office. A man can get into trouble for being too forward with a woman and a woman can get in trouble for dressing too sexy. These are the pitfalls of the modern office.

I think that the interest in the sexiness of women’s feet and shoes has grown up to compensate for this. If a bunch of guys are overheard talking about a woman’s tit’s or ass at work then there is a chance that they could get into some real trouble. If they talk about a women’s sexy shoes there is almost no chance of a reprimand. It’s not a hot button.

Women also have almost no chance of getting in trouble from their shoes. A woman could wear a top that is too low cut or a skirt that is too tight and be told to dress more appropriately but no one will ever mention her shoes. She could come to work in five inch spiked stripper heels and as long as she is wearing a conservative grey suit she won’t get into trouble.

So there is my though about shoes for the week. Not that women haven’t always used shoes to express their sexuality but because of the rules of the work place shoes and feet have taken on a new life as a safe and mainstream expression of sexuality.

I just never know where my thoughts are going to take me.

This week I restocked some art supplies that I was running low on and bought some new things to try out. I finally got a new roll of canvas. I’d been out of canvas for a while. I only used small pre-stretched canvases last year and my large roll of canvas was completely gone. I don’t think I stretched any of my own canvases all last year. I don’t know why. Except it’s easier to buy small (8″x11″ or 11″x14″) canvases than to stretch my own. With bigger canvases it easier (i.e. cheaper) to stretch my own.

I ordered a bunch of stretcher strips too. Those are the four pieces of wood that make up the rectangle that you stretch the canvas over. Since I had some ideas for what I want to paint I bought specific size stretcher strips. Some long and some short. Since I bought all these supplies from a web site I couldn’t inspect the stretcher strips and one of the longer ones (38″) is useless. It’s bowed about half an inch and will not square up. That’s the chance you take with pine. It costs less than four dollars so it’s not worth returning but now I have to replace it. Luckily it’s one of the few things I ordered that I should be able to get at a local store.

The temperature around these parts dropped into the single digits (Fahrenheit) last week and that lead to a strange thing happening with my order. I bought a bottle of ink along with everything else and when I opened my box full of supplies I noticed something was amiss with the ink.

At first the bottle looked like it had a black cork sticking out of it. This looked odd because corks aren’t used on ink bottles. And corks aren’t black. Then the cork broke off of the top of the bottle. I didn’t quite no what was going on and expected the ink to spill all over everything but it didn’t. Y’see the cork was the ink.

It took these supplies a few days to get to me and they must not have been kept anyplace heated because the ink was frozen solid. It also expanded as it froze and broke the plastic cap right off of the top of the bottle. The frozen ink “cork” was sticking about an inch above the top of the bottle. The bottle was only about four inches tall so that was some impressive expansion. The bottle was also wrapped in bubble wrap so that made for an even more odd sight.

Things would have been much worse if the ink was liquid when it spilled. All of the paper I had in the order would have been ruined. I’m glad it was just an ink bottle cap that got destroyed.

I bought a few of other things that I haven’t used in a long time that were in that box. I got some marker sets. I haven’t used magic markers, except for single color drawing (usually black) in a long time. Back in my school days I was pretty adept with markers. I enjoyed using them. I’m looking forward to trying out some of these new archival type markers that they have nowadays. I got a set of 24 brush markers and a set of 12 basic design type markers. We’ll see if they do anything for me anymore.

Colored pencils were among the other things in the order. I don’t think I’ve used colored pencils since 1988. I was never a big fan of them either. As a matter of fact I don’t know why I ordered them. I’m not sure what I’m going to make with colored pencils. They are some kind of oil based pencil and maybe I just thought the set looked cool in the catalog. I am a sucker for sets of things.

I also found a good container. I mix some of my acrylic paint in these little plastic jars with lids called cubbies. They’re airtight and the paint lasts a long time in them. I have a lot of them with various colors of paint inside. I’ve been keeping the cubbies in cardboard boxes but that is getting cumbersome. I’ve been looking for a more durable box to put them in. I ordered the ArtBin 900IDS storage container and it is just what I wanted. Now I need four more of them. Who doesn’t love storage containers?

My order of art supplies came in four packages spread out over the end of the week. The one with the most fun stuff in it (markers, colored pencils, ink) was the last package delivered. I guess they were building up some suspense. I also got some boring old gesso and workable fixatif at a local store so I’m well supplied for the moment. That always feels good.