Radiant Comics

I dug out a bunch of old paintings this week. I tend tuck things away in boxes and in cabinets and there they sit for years only to be taken out and looked at on occasion. This box has a lot of small gouache and watercolor paintings in it. The sizes are from around art card size, 2.5×3.5 inches, up to about what looks like 6×8 inches. They’re from before I jumped on the art card bandwagon though so none of them are exactly that size. The closest ones are 2.75×4 inches which is a little bit bigger. I have no idea why I decided on that size back in 2003 (as the date on the paintings says) but it seems a good size.

I made these small painting specifically to be really nice objects that you can hold in your hand. Their tactile “Pick them up and look at them” nature is integral to why they exist. They’re all on nice watercolor paper that feels good when handled. There are some 4×4 inch ones that are on smooth 150lb watercolor paper and the 2.75×4 inch ones are on an even thicker 300lb rough watercolor paper. I could never decide if I liked a rough surface or smooth surface better so I worked on both of them.

I’m going look at three of the 2.75×4 inch inch ones because I just put them in my Etsy store so why not give them a look?
My Etsy Store.

The first of them is called “Double.” It also has the number 13 on it so I must have numbered them at first and then went back and gave them names at some point. The name “Double” seems pretty literal for this one because the painting is of a person with a face on his shirt. Two faces therefor “Double.” I don’t usually name things so literally. I like the colors on this one. It’s a nice mix of earth tone oranges, reds, and yellows. Nothing is too bright. The blue in the eye on the shirt really stands out as it’s the only blue in the piece. The “Hold in your hand” part works well as I like to bring it closer to my eyes and look at the faces and the edges of the green background. Overall it has a simplicity that’s appealing to me.

The second one is numbered with a five and is titled “Brian in Blue.” Once again a very literal name despite me having no idea why I used the name Brian. I’m guessing it was just for the alliteration. I remember using these blue colors for a bunch of paintings. I mixed up about ten different shades of blue gouache and painted a bunch of small paintings with them. This one seems to have a Cubist bent to it but upon close inspection the shapes don’t define the space like Cubism does. It reminds me more of a Mondrian type geometric abstraction. A couple of the shapes on the face vaguely follow the cheekbones but the shapes aren’t very three dimensional as Cubist shapes would be. It’s an odd thing to be sort of Cubist but not really.

The third painting is numbered one and named “Sentinel.”Once again this name seems very literal to me as the woman is giving us the side-eye and watching us as a sentinel would. I must have been going through a very literal naming person back in 2003. This painting is notable for its bright and low contrast line.The other two have dark lines and though they aren’t black lines they create enough shape separation as if they were. This one has a red line with another purple line inside it. The red line acts line a dark line in the face but in the rest of the painting it vibrates with the purple line and makes it hard to focus on either. It’s as if the line starts to fade away. That her shirt is dark brown adds to the effect. The hints of blue do more to anchor the shapes than the outlines do. That doesn’t happen very often.

Since I mentioned my blue paintings I’m going to pop over to one of the blue faces that I painted back in 2003. I have about eight of them in this box but we’ll look at the one named “Dream State.” It also has the number two on it. Though it’s on a 4×4 inch piece of paper the painting is only about 1.5×2 inches. I usually don’t leave that much blank paper around a painting but I think I did it to give the painting more of a presence as you hold it in your hand. This might have been the only time I’ve painted this small. I’m not even sure what motivated me to make these tiny faces. They are obviously not photo referenced as they are very simple and filled with asymmetry. Just glancing at this one neither the eyes, nose, or mouth is symmetrical. Why is that? I have no idea. It looks like I took great pains to make the hair and face smooth so I was going for some sort of realistic look but the features are awkward. I obviously meant them to be but looking at them now the awkwardness is hard to take. And all of them share this awkwardness. Weird.

The last one I’ll look at is from 2005 and is called “Mummy Girl.” Another literal title. This one is tall and skinny at about 2×6 inches. Of all the paintings I’ve looked at so far this one has the brightest colors. Bright green, bright magenta, and a strong blue make this one more typical of my work. I’m not sure about the imagery though. It’s a little bland. It’s a basic elongated figure that looks like it was drawn on the spot in paint. It’s not terrible but I’ve done better. The horizontal lines that go across her body are the most interesting thing in the painting. I’m guessing that I put those on last to add some more visual interest. Overall I do like the color and shape of it.

So there you go. That’s what happens when I dig through boxes. I get paintings from fourteen years ago to look at and maybe figure out what they’re all about.

In deciding what to write about this week I dug through a box of old drawings. I’ve got lots of boxes of old drawings. Some of the boxes are store bought and some of them are homemade. My fanciest store bought box is an 11x17x4 inch aluminum box. I don’t remember how much that one cost me but it must have been somewhere near fifty bucks. I can’t fathom now why I even wanted to spend that much money on a box to hold some of my art but I did. I must have made some extra money that month.

The aluminum one is a great box. It’s easily the best box I have to hold my drawings and it’s tough to describe how cool it looks and feels. The top totally separates from the bottom and it’s a matter of holding the top as the weight of the bottom slides away with tolerances so precise I cam feel a cushion of air between them. I wish all my art boxes were aluminum. That would be really cool.

The one problem I had with the metal box was that it was nearly an exact 11 inches wide. I had some of my favorite drawings and prints in mylar sleeves that made them slightly larger than 11×17 inches. So I couldn’t keep them in the sleeves if I wanted to put them in that box. A minor annoyance but an annoyance none the less.

The next type of store bought box that I have is the type that’s made out of archival cardboard. It’s closer to a matte board or a illustration board than the cardboard of a cardboard box. These are usually sold to store photographs and can get pricey but nowhere near aluminum box pricey. I only have a couple of these and I think I have photos in both of them. I remember liking them but thinking they weren’t quite sturdy enough for the price. Not that I was building pyramids out of them but when I spend money on a box I don’t want it to feel flimsy. On a flimsy to sturdy scale of one to ten I’d give these a seven. That means they were sturdy enough but not sturdy enough for the price.

The third type of store bought box that I have is one made out of a corrugated plastic. These ones are tough but ugly. Both the cardboard and the plastic ones are a clamshell design. One side of the box is hinged and the top and bottom pieces can’t be separated. The hinge is just the plastic or cardboard material compressed so it’s not the fanciest of designs. The tolerances on the plastic one are especially clunky.

In order to make the hinge work the bottom of the box has no wall on the hinge side. After closing the top it makes the missing wall for the bottom box. This design works fine for the stiff cardboard boxes but the plastic ones have too much give. Every time I try to close a plastic one the top and bottom hit each other and it doesn’t close smoothly. That makes the drawings slide around and block that open side from closing too. It’s not the end of the world and really only means that the box takes an extra four seconds to close but it annoys me every time. That’s the price I pay for the cheap boxes.

The next type of box that I have is the homemade ones. I’ve always liked making boxes but I usually make small boxes for art projects and such. I’ve made boxes that fit sets of my art cards, I’ve made boxes that fit small paintings, and I’ve made boxes to carry dice in. Whenever I needed a small box I’d make one.

When I used to play Magic the Gathering in the 1990s I made special boxes that were narrow so I could carry a deck of cards in my art portfolio. A normal box for MTG cards is about two inches thick (or more depending) and my portfolio was thinner than that. So I made boxes at a quarter that thickness but four times the width and height (2.5×3.5 inches). That made them much easier of me to carry. I even decorated those boxes with classical paintings pulled out of old wrecked art textbooks (which I think were from my college days working at a book warehouse). Those were cool little boxes.

I used to have all my drawings stacked in cabinets on shelves. That worked for a lot of years but eventually the stacks got too high. It was then that I decided to put all my drawings into boxes and it was then (over a period of time) that I bought all my store bought boxes. I eventually decided that none of them were perfect and I would make some boxes of my own.

I needed three size boxes that corresponded to the size paper that I used. 11×17, 9×12, and 5×11 inches. I’d want them a little bigger than that. I learned my lesson with the aluminum box. I decided I wanted a plan so I measured everything out and built a diagram with measurements on it in Adobe Illustrator. That way there would be no mistakes. I decided to make the boxes out of foam core board because it was sturdy. I could have chosen the cheaper route of matte board but it was too flimsy. I didn’t want to put in all the work for flimsy.

I measured out and drew one of the designs on a piece of foam core board. Then I cut it out with a straight edge and an X-Acto knife, folded it in the proper places, and taped all the edges. Foam core board is a quarter inch thick so the edges are broad and vulnerable to breaking. Tape helps out with that. I repeated this process about ten times until I had all the boxes I needed. It took a while.

In the end I think my box design depended too much on tape. I used a white paper tape that lasts a long time and the boxes are solid but they look a little sloppy. They’re not out in the open so no one ever sees them but every time I take them out I notice. I’m still glad I got them made because it makes storage a lot easier. Too bad they couldn’t all be really cool aluminum.

This week I went through a drawing burst. I made nine new working drawings on six by nine inch sheets of paper. They’re all about the same size but don’t all have the same proportions. I was at a creative standstill and couldn’t get anything done. I had some things already started that I could work on if I had wanted to but none of them interested me. So I decided to start over. I grabbed one of my ink books that has all of my marker drawings in them and found a few small drawings that interested me. I took these three small drawings, blew them up on the computer and printed them out on some six by nine inch Bristol board. I repeated this over three days.

The first drawing is named “Empty World.” It’s a figure drawing but the figure isn’t near the realm of realism. The woman has an impossibly long neck and some teacup hips. That’s what I call those super-curved hips that look like an upside down teacup. And what’s that on her head? It could be hair or it could be a hat. Either way it has lots of stripes for putting color in. This one is sufficiently dreamy enough to become one of my dream-like faux comic book covers.

The second drawing is named “Trivial Agency.” We have a lot of symmetry going on here. It’s almost perfectly symmetrical except for the eyebrows. I like symmetry but also like things to stop short of perfect symmetry. I can see this one being a large black and white marker drawing. It has good shapes that I can add black too. I think it’ll look best at a large size.

The third drawing is named “Brow Line.” This one has a lot of negative space in it. The whole thing revolves around the sky in the background. I’m not sure exactly what I want to do with it since so much of it would depend on color. I may even have to add some more elements to it in the color phase. This might be the most “Unfinished” of the drawings.

The fourth drawing is named “Deployed Bits.” This one is a face without a face. That’s unusual for me. It also has a lot of symmetry. I keep wanting to see a face where there is no face. It’s a bit confusing. I like the composition of this one but it really needs color to give it clarity. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it but it would look best as some sort of painting.

The fifth drawing is named “Act of Wraith.” Alright, what the hell is going on in this one? I’m not really sure. I remember thinking that about the thumbnail drawings of it too but I liked the shapes and general composition of it. The two one eyed creatures on the bottom are a mystery but the top is even more so. It looks like a head with some sad eyes but it could also be the sun. The repeated oval shape could be a halo for a person or a halo for the sun. I lean towards a person but the shapes are so simplified that I could be wrong. This one cries out for color too.

The sixth drawing is named “Fair Brains.” This one I can see as one of my large ink drawings. Twenty by thirty inches. We’ve got two faces and a body. One face is the body. I’m not sure exactly how I’d work out all the shapes as a large black and white drawing though. That would take some time. I’d need to find places to put patterns and such. I’m sure I could work it out but this one is far from finished.

The seventh drawing is named “Lost Banana.” Except for the background sky this one has everything there. Lots of shapes and pattern plus a big face. The neck area is odd. It might need rethinking. Or maybe not. It could be that it’s not a neck solution that I used to. The more I look at it the more it looks okay. The rest of it is settled.

The eight drawing is named “Stop Now.” I could go in a color or black and white direction with this one. I can see it as a faux cover or as a big black and white drawing. All the shapes and patterns are thoroughly worked out. I think it’s easier to work everything out if the drawing has a big head in it. No matter how weird I make the head it still acts as an anchor of the expected. We all know and expect to see faces. I can distort them a whole lot and they’ll still read a faces. That helps.

The ninth drawing is named “Soul Hero.” One more big face in this last one and it’s the most realistic face in this series of drawings. It even looks a bit odd. All this weird stuff around a semi-realistic face makes me wonder what is going on? Are all those shapes a look into her mind? A look into her dreams? Just the mention of the word “Dream” makes me think this will make a good “Dreams if Things” faux comic book cover.

Nine drawings. All in pencil on six by nine inch Bristol board one blue line. It took me a while to get them all done. They vary in the time it takes to draw them but if I had to pick an average I’d say they each took a couple of hours a piece. The symmetrical ones usually take the longest because they don’t always start out symmetrical. I usually decide part way through that I want them to be symmetrical and that means figuring out which half I like, or taking pieces for each half, and then duplicating the half on the other side. I use tracing paper and graphite to do that so it’s not hard but I have to pay attention. Nothing worse than asymmetrical symmetry when that’s not what I’m aiming for.

I am not a fan of wasting paper. Especially not drawing paper. There are a lot of different kinds of drawing paper from cheap to really expensive. Cheap is usually just any old kind of paper. I know artists who will draw on whatever is at hand. Some draw on a plain old piece of printer paper (it used to be typing paper but who has a typewriter anymore?). It’s cheap and it’s handy.

The next thing up from printer paper is the paper found in pads sold under the name “Drawing paper.” That’s the paper you can find in any basic arts and crafts store, general store, and even a well stocked pharmacy. There is nothing special about it that I can see and I generally stay away from the stuff. I stay away from all cheap paper most of the time. I don’t like the stuff. I find it too smooth, too hard to erase on, and I struggle with drawing on it in general. It also doesn’t take ink well. Don’t use tools you struggle with if you can help it. It’s better to make things easy on yourself.

The most expensive paper that I’ve used is a 300lb watercolor paper. That’s some thick paper. Paper is measured by weight and the higher the number of pounds the thicker the paper. 300lb is about as thick as it gets for me. One 22×30 inch sheet of 300lb watercolor paper is going to run about $15. It’s well worth it if you’re going to make some large watercolors (or even small ones) but that’s not the kind of paper I work on as my everyday paper. Mind you I’d hate to waste a sheet of that expensive paper but I’m not sure I ever have. I don’t use it often and when I do it’s usually at the end of a very long process where I have most things worked out so the chances of the drawing going wrong are slim.

Things going wrong is one way that paper can be wasted. That happened to me recently with some sketch covers. I had an idea come to me and I quickly implemented that idea. Too quickly. The drawings came out terribly and I ended up with a couple of wasted sheets of paper. Usually I’m patient so that type of wasting of paper doesn’t happen too often. That and I start my drawing out small. Wasting a five by seven inch piece of paper isn’t too bad. In the story I just told the pieces of paper were eleven by fourteen inches. That hurts a little more.

The more common way for me to waste paper is in my preparation process. That’s where I messed things up today. I had finished nine small six by nine inch pencil drawings and was setting a few of them up to be covers in my faux comic book cover series. I scanned the drawings in and then blew them up and placed them into one of my cover templates. The cover templates are designed and made up to look like comic book covers. They’ve got the logo and trade dress of a comic book. In the trade dress is an issue number and a month just like on an old comic book cover. And I keep track of them too. If issue one has January on it than issue two will have February as its month.

The series I was working on today was “Dreams of Things.” I’ve done about fifty drawings in that series and it turns out I messed up last time I printed some out to be inked. That’s another thing I do. I prep some covers for inking and coloring in bunches and then let them sit there until I get to them. The last two I let sit there I messed up on. First of all, I accidentally made two different issue number 50s and printed them out. That was annoying but not too big a deal since I had duplicated numbers in this series before. I did those on purpose though so doing it not on purpose was a disappointment.

As I was setting up issue number 52 I checked to make sure I had the correct month on it. It turned out to be August and everything was okay. Then I did a few more unrelated things and came back to set up issue 53. I checked the month and got all confused. I’m not even sure what caused the initial confusion but eventually figured out that both of my number 50s that I set up weeks ago had the wrong month on them. Crap, that’s annoying. At least I hadn’t inked them yet.

The paper that I usually work on is a two-ply Bristol board. At 96lbs it’s a pretty thick piece of paper. You can buy it with a smooth or rough surface in many different sizes. The size I was working at for those covers was a fourteen by seventeen inch piece of paper cut down to eleven by seventeen inches. The Bristol I buy costs about $15 for twenty sheets. That’s not too bad. There is more expensive Bristol out there but I only use that on occasion. I prefer to use a watercolor paper if I’m upgrading my paper.

So now I had the choice to live with the wrong months on the cover or print out two new versions with the correct months on them and throw $1.50 down the drain. As much as it pained me I went with the two new versions. It’s not a ton of money but I hate to waste stuff.

So now I’ll aim to not waste the two pieces of paper. The key is to use the back of paper to make a working drawing. Something that isn’t going to be a finished piece. Sometimes in this situation I’ll cut the paper into smaller pieces to draw on but in this case I think I’ll keep them at eleven by seventeen inches. I can make a full size working drawing on the backs of them. Let’s hope they come out okay.

I’m rebuilding some logos this week. What the heck is that you may ask? It’s something that I do when I make an old comic book cover recreation or when I make a blank sketch cover (which is a comic book with a white cover that a person can draw on. They make them for that purpose). I know what you’re going to ask, “Can’t you just buy a blank sketch cover?” The answer to that is yes. If I wanted a blank sketch cover to draw on I could find some random ones at my local comic shop. But they are at least four dollars per comic and that makes it an expensive piece of drawing paper. Plus I’ve got tons of comics about the place that are cheap and unsalable. So I’ve recently decided to make my own sketch covers. Some I’ll draw on myself and a few I even put up for sale on eBay. If someone wants a sketch cover on an old school comic they can get one from me there.

Anyone can make a blank sketch cover of their own if they want to put in the time. All it takes is a piece of drawing paper (I use two-ply Bristol) cut to the right size, some needle nose pliers to bend the staples straight, and a steady hand to put the staples back in their original holes with the drawing paper wrapped around the comic. Of course that will be a true blank cover. Most of the ones that the comic book companies make have the logo printed in place so it looks like a real comic book cover. I like to print the logos on my blanks but that means I have to remake them. I don’t have access to the companies’ logo files and some of the old comics I put blanks on are from before the age of digital so there might not even be digital versions of them. I build my own digital versions.

One way to go about getting a logo that you can use for a sketch cover is to scan in a printed cover and then clean the scan up in Photoshop. But that’s more work then it looks like. Unless you have a good clean scan of the logo with no art overlapping it the digital clean up part can take a while. I’ve seen people scan in logos from blank covers and they work best with this method but not every comic has a blank version. I prefer to rebuild the logo from the ground up.

Instead of pixel based Photoshop I like to rebuild the logos in vector based Illustrator. I scan in a comic book cover with the logo I want to rebuild on it, place that image onto a layer in Illustrator, and then remake the logo on another layer on top of the scan. The way a vector based program works is that you make a point, then make a second point, and a straight line is made between them. Drawing in Photoshop mimics drawing with a pencil or pen but Illustrator feels more like building something.

Of course you can make more than straight lines in a vector program. Every dot that makes up the lines comes with two “handles.” Pull those handles one way or another and the straight line curves. So I make a dot at the corner of a letter, make a second dot at the next corner, and pull on the handles to get the correct curve of the line I’m trying to recreate. It’s easy but tedious. I call it rebuilding a logo because it has more in common with building a bookcase than drawing. Each individual logo can have it’s own challenges too.

One of the logos I rebuilt recently is “The Official Handbook the the Marvel Universe.” That one was a four step process. First is the straight up type. That’s the “The Official Handbook of” part. I just have to find the right font and type the words out. On these old comics the plain, basic, type is almost always a Helvetica. I don’t even sweat it if I can’t find the exact version of the font. Close enough is good enough otherwise I can fall down the rabbit hole of searching endless variations of fonts for the perfect one. That can suck up more time than building the rest of the logo. Avoid that time-suck.

Step two was to build the main outline of the logo. I built each individual letter on its own and in place. That’s easy enough to do. The program keeps the line the same weight all around so all I have to do is build the logo point by point and curve the lines where they need to be curved. None of this is hard but once again it’s tedious. There is no creativity to be found in doing this. It’s a task. The next two steps are even more of a task.

Step three is making the black space background. It’s the black part that’s inside the letters. It’s made up of straight lines, curved corners, and little half circles cut out of the lines. It takes a while to rebuild all that. I had to pay attention to spacing and that’s not always easy. Having some good podcasts or some such helps because you won’t be using a lot of your brain doing this. Also part of this was making the white stars. They are just little ovals but it takes a while to make that many of them.

The final part is the corner box. This one didn’t have corner box art, which can be a problem, and was just type so it was easy to recreate. The only thing that could have been a problem was the little “CC” Curtis Code world logo but I had that done already. That’s another tip if you want to recreate logos for blank covers. Keep all the various pieces you’ll use again in one folder so that you can find them. As a matter of fact the main thing to keep in mind when rebuilding a logo is organization. It’s as much an exercise in organization as in art.