Radiant Comics

I’ve been a digital photographer for a long time now. I got my first digital camera back in the year 2000 and haven’t shot film since. I consider my second semester of college, back in 1985, to be when I first started shooting film so that means that I’ll soon be passing the point where I’ve been shooting digital longer than I shot film. Maybe I already have. It’s just a matter of months. But even though the vast majority of my photos never get made into prints these days I find there is tremendous satisfaction when I finish one up and make a final print out of it. I made a group of prints this week and they came out pretty cool.

These days I have a few different ways that I make finished photographs. The newest way is on my iPad. These are purely digital as of yet and I post them to my Instagram account. That means they’re in a square format and I use a bunch of iPad photo editing apps to make them. One type is mostly done in an app called Snapseed and these are my basic photos. I take one of my street photos, crop it, and then use various enhancements on it. Nothing too drastic and it falls into the realm of normal photography.

The second way I do things on my iPad is to add design elements and type. This is a variation of the style I call “Photocaps” (short for photos and captions) and involves using a few different apps. I use one called “Tangent” to add design elements of various shapes, patterns, and colors and one called “Over” to add type. Of course I could also use a cartoon app and a painting app to take the photo further into the realm of digital manipulation. Both of these iPad ways are for screen and I have yet to print any of them out.

The photos of mine that I’ve printed out the most of in recent months are five by seven inch versions of my street photos. I have a little easel on my desk that I decided I wanted to put a street photo on it and then change the photo every couple of days. I had read that digital photographers should print out their work to see every day and motivate them and I thought that was a good idea. At this point I have a few dozen street photos finished and printed out that I can change whenever I want to. They’ve all got a little Photoshop work done to them but not so much that I’d call them digitally manipulated. Just regular darkroom stuff.

The photos that I printed out this week were my big ones. Ten by fifteen inches on eleven by seventeen inch paper. These ones were my digitally manipulated Photocaps. I’ve been working on a few of these over the last month or so. They’re different than my other photos not only in how they look at the end but in the fact that I know that I’m going to have to think up a sentence to go along with the photo. Not all photos lend themselves to that. I think it’s only a small percentage that do. That’s why I have to look through a lot of my photos until I see something that I think I can work with. Even if I don’t have the entire sentence right away I need a word or feeling that the photo evokes in me that I think I can work with.

All my ten by fifteen inch Photocap photos are worked on in Photoshop. They all have lots of effects applied to them. I have what I like to call “Filter Recipes” that I run on the photos. That is that I don’t just apply a single filter to a photo but rather a series of filters in a certain order to create a certain look. It takes a while to perfect a filter recipe buy with macros I can record the steps and apply the recipe with the press of a button. Over the years I’ve developed four distinct recipes: one with color shapes, one with half-tone dots, one with brush strokes, and one with duo-tone colors. Each one also involves creating different geometric patterns on the photo. I use all sorts of rectangular shapes in all sorts of colors to create a design within the photo.

I’ve also learned to mix and match my filter recipes. The last two I did involved two of my recipes. I wanted some half-tone dots over the color shapes. These Photocaps also can involve a bit a preparation to get them ready to uses the filter recipes. Sometimes it’s a simple as adjusting the tones and contrast of the photo and sometimes it’s masking out or changing entire background elements. For one of my recent ones I deleted half a dozen people from the background of a photo. They were distracting and I wanted them out of there. This was one of the more involved bits of preparation I had to do but still it wasn’t too bad. The changes didn’t have to be perfect since running the filter recipe will obliterate a lot of the detail so the changes don’t have to be as flawless as they would if I was making a normal photo.

I haven’t been printing out these Photocaps that I’ve been making lately just because I haven’t wanted to use up my printer ink. No other reason but that. Ink is expensive and I hate buying it. But what is the point of having a printer if I don’t print on it? So after making a half dozen or so of these Photocaps of the last month I finally decided to print some them. After all I hadn’t even seen some of my never filter recipe mixtures printed out yet. I’d just seen what they look like on screen. So I printed one up. And then another and so on until I printed four of them. I liked the way they looked. And they made me happy. Sometimes you have to print your photos out. Especially the ones that were meant to be prints.

Between jury duty and poison ivy it’s been a really tough week to get things done. Too many distractions. I didn’t have to actually go in and serve on a jury but I had to call every night and see if I was needed for the next day. Monday and Tuesday no one was called in and on Wednesday they only wanted numbers 1-60. I was number 72 and therefore didn’t have to go in. All in all it was only a minor distraction compared to the poison ivy.

This is the same poison ivy I mentioned in my Bryant Park blog and it was mostly on my lower leg. By the time I went to Bryant Park I had already had the poison ivy for a week and I was expecting it to go away soon enough. But soon enough turned out not to be soon enough. The poison ivy turned out to be at its worst on the Monday and Tuesday after my Bryant Park Sunday. It was crazy itchy. I was using all sorts of anti-itch cream which calmed it down for the most part but there were times it felt like little insects on fire were crawling on my legs. At one point on Tuesday I went to the store to get more anti-itch cream and on the drive home I had to grit my teeth because the irritation was so bad. Going out and walking seemed to really irritate it the most. By Wednesday it had calmed down and by Thursday it didn’t itch at all. The skin is still healing though. The whole time I had the poison ivy I managed never to scratch it. Scratching makes it worse so at least I didn’t do that.

“Judge Too Much”

Trying to get any art done that week was a tough chore. I did do some things though. The first thing I was glad to get started was the coloring on my “Organics: The Ghost of Fifth Street” story. I was having trouble figuring out how I wanted to color it and the sheer number of pages I needed to do was daunting. It really had me stuck. The I applied the “Keep it simple stupid” approach and got things going. I abandoned the idea that it had to be in some sort of style and decided to do it as basic cut color. Style really doesn’t matter as much as getting the basics right. I can always add style later if I lay the groundwork now.

I went back to Coloring 101. I opened the first page in Photoshop, set up the document properly, and then started coloring the backgrounds of each panel. That is generally how you figure out the color in any work of art. First the background and then the foreground. First you have to establish the color of the world around a person and then the color of the person. And be sure to have a good palette of neutral colors. Those are the key to getting things right. You need browns both warm and cool plus some various greys for the brighter foreground colors to play off of. I find things go much smoother and faster if I figure out my background and neutrals first. And they did. I managed to get a page or so done a day in my off moments. Since I was keeping it simple it helped relax me.

The other two things I managed to get done that week were two ink pieces. One came out okay and the other was a failure. They both came from a box I have that holds some of my current work that has yet to be completed. When I can’t think of anything I want to do I open the box and see what’s there. I picked a piece that need to be inked with a lot of straight edge work. Often I find that can be dull and I don’t want to do it but sometimes I like to do it because it’s all I con concentrate on. I found a drawing called “Judge Too Much” that needed some inking.

Using a straight/curved edge and a pen can be tedious because it has to be done carefully and there is not a lot of room for variation. It’s all drawn with the same line. I moved pretty quickly on it and as I was getting it done I wasn’t too fond of the way it was coming out. It was looking a bit bare. I don’t think I ever really finished the drawing on this one and maybe was going to draw a bit more on it rather than go to inks. Either way I decide to add a whole lot of black shapes to the drawing as I now inked it. That took a bit more time. I had to figure out which shapes would be blackened and which would stay white. I liked it in the end but it was touch and go for a while.

“Beat Holder”

The second piece was called “Beat Holder” and was another drawing that needed to be inked with a pen and an edge but I didn’t feel like doing that again. Instead I decided to try a bit of an experiment. I would use my broken brush dry brush/wet brush technique. That’s where I use one of my old brushes that no longer comes to a point and use it to dab on ink in a flurry of little marks. I’m never making a line or just one mark but multiple ink marks. I like this technique but it works best on large images. This piece had lots of small shapes in it so I wasn’t sure how well it would come out. Turns out not so well.

I tried my best but I could get the big bends of space like I could in a larger image. I couldn’t get a shape to bend into darkness because there was not enough space. The shapes kinda look pasted on in a shallow space. That was not what I was looking for. Turns out I didn’t like the drawing very much either. I think I picked it because I was going to abandon it anyway. It’s listless and awkward. Working on it in ink brought that out more than it changed it. After a while I stopped trying to fix it because it was impossible to fix. Sometimes art is like that. You have to know when to abandon certain pieces because they’re fundamentally flawed. But at least I got passed the distractions and got something done.

I thought I’d do something different today and write a bit as the day goes on. I’m heading down to Bryant Park in NYC to take some street photos and I’ll write this as I go along. As of this first paragraph I’m sitting at home after eating breakfast and packing my day bag full of stuff. Unfortunately I have poison ivy at the moment. That could really put a damper on things but I’ll give it a go. It’s mostly on my lower legs but I also have some on my wrists. I really should have put on my long pants before doing yard work last week. Regrets. I hope the poison ivy doesn’t slow me down too much today. I’ve been using some anti-itch spray on it but I don’t think a spray bottle will carry well. Plus I’ve got long pants on over the poison ivy for the first time this week so it’ll be tough to use the spray. I’m going to stop off and get some cream.

Now we flash forward and I’m sitting at the train station in Nanuet waiting for the train. I drove fifteen minutes to get here and now I wait. That’s one of those things that people never mention when you ask them how long their commute is. The waiting time. Sure there is none if you’re driving all the way but if you have to take a train or bus add an extra ten minutes to your commute. You don’t want to chance it getting the there just as the bus or train arrives. You’ll miss a lot of trains that way. I’m  here fifteen minutes early so I’ve got a wait. My poison ivy is making things pretty uncomfortable. My legs have a low level burning and itching to them. No fun.

Now I’m on the train and moving. I’m taking this one to Secaucus Junction and then catching another one for a quick ride into Penn Station. Normally I read on the train. The first two trips in this year I saved a issue of the magazine “The Sun” to read on the train but this time I decided to try writing on the train. I’m writing on my iPad. It all seems a little clumsy as I try to type on glass as the train shakes. For years I took a bus into the city but back in 2008 they cut the bus schedule in half and it became much less reliable. I’ve been stranded waiting for a bus that never showed up. The went from running every half hour to every hour. If one didn’t show up it was a long wait for the next one. If I was still commuting into the city I might take the bus but off peak it can’t be counted on. At least the train shows up when it’s supposed to. It’s fun to watch the scenery go by and the traffic stops for us. That beats being stuck in traffic.

Well I made it to the city and now I’ll take a little break an write for a moment. I got off the train at Penn Station and then went outside to take some photos. I took some outside of the station for a few minutes because that is a solid place for people watching. Or street photo taking. After that I walked up Seventh Avenue taking photos as I went. Let me tell you the poison ivy is distracting. I stopped at a place on 7th and bought some anti itch cream. I couldn’t put it on then and there so I continued on my way to Bryant Park and then immediately sat down and put some on. It helped but I still feel the pants rubbing against it.
After the cream I walked around the park taking photos as I went. This is the first time I’ve been here on as Sunday as I’m usually down on Saturday and there are fewer people. Of course it’s also the fifth of July so a lot of locals are out of town. After the park I made my way to the front steps of the library and shot there for a while. Plenty of people taking photos on those steps for me to take photos of. Now I sit writing and applying more cream. This poison ivy is evil. Time for some baby carrots.

Here I am again waiting for a train in Secaucus. I’ve got a half hour wait this time since I caught a slightly earlier train at Penn Station then the one that hooks up with the train to Nanuet. I always think I should stay and take pictures longer but that ends up being too long. I get there at 10:30 and leave about 3:00. That’s four and a half hours of walking and taking photos. That takes more out of me these days than I think it will. After I’m done writing this I’m going to have another granola bar. I used to come home from a day like this and get a headache. I think it was because I didn’t eat enough.  I like to stay light on my feet when I shoot and not eat a lot but I think I payed a price for that. Today I ate more as I shot an didn’t get a headache.

The afternoon went pretty much like the morning. I walked around the park many times and went to the front of the library multiple times too. I walked up and down 41st between 5th and 6th avenues a few times. I set myself down a couple of times an had a snack and shot from a chair few a few minutes. This gave my itching poison ivy a little while to calm down. Between the sweat from my legs and my pants rubbing against it my legs were itchy the whole time. I never scratched it though because that would only make things worse. As I sit here at the train station I have my pants legs rolled up and I put some more anti-itch cream on. I must be quite the sight. But at least the itching calmed down.

“The Ghost of Fifth Street” Page 1

I am trying to get things done but it’s not easy. Today I finally finished the first draft of the writing of my “Organics” comic. The story is called “The Ghost of Fifth Street”. This is not a comic I make in an ordinary way and I haven’t done one in a decade and a half so actually getting this far is an accomplishment for me. Most of the “Organics” stories I did back in the 1990s were eight to ten pages long but this one is forty two pages. That’s a lot more ambitious.

First off my “Organics” comics are a lot different than any other comic that I make. The way you make a comic is to write the story (or at least the plot of the story) and then draw the comic. That’s pretty standard. Generally you need to know what you are going to draw before you draw it. But not with “Organics”.

I developed this method of storytelling when I was younger and learning to draw using a Surrealist automatic drawing method. It helped me a lot because in applying it to comics I had to do a lot of drawings. Back in those days I would rule out some panel borders on an 11×17 inch piece of paper and then close my eyes and scribble on the paper. I’d move the paper around too and even scribble with my left hand to mix things up. Anything to make new and different lines. Then, like finding faces in clouds, I’d see what I could find in the scribbles and make a drawing from them. Only after I had eight pages or so done would I lay them all out on the floor, arrange and rearrange them, and see what story they told. Then I’d write that story.

My drawing was different in those days. Not as sophisticated or, at times, illustrative. I was looking for more mystery back then and to see if people could see the same things that I did. Most of the times they couldn’t. I learned the lesson of clarity from that. If I want people to see what I see then I really have to show them. It took me a while to learn that lesson though. Possibly by then I was bored of the “Organics” method I had come up with so I never really made anything exceptional with it. I remember going back a few years later to try and redraw some of my early “Organics” stories and make them more clear but I abandoned that. I had lost interest.

All these years later I was looking for some type of comic book project to work on. I didn’t know what though. Comic are exceptionally hard. They take a lot of time and drawing so if you’re not getting paid for it drawing comic can eat up your life. I needed something I could work on slowly and could break up into pieces. That’s when I thought of my old “Organics” way of doing things.

First off I’m way better at drawing than I was in the mid 90s. I’ve been drawing using a Surrealist automatic drawing method for twenty years now so it’s second nature to me. I even have a few different techniques rather than just the scribble on the page way. As a matter of fact I hadn’t done the scribble on the page way in ages. As a friend once said the scribbles are in my mind now.

The first way I have of making an “Organics” page is in pen. I made a template in Photoshop that has blue lines on it that divide up a page. I print those guides out on a piece of paper. I get two small side by side pages on a 9×12 inch piece of bristol board. Then I can easily divide the page up into panels with the blue lines as a guide and start drawing. I draw in ink with one of my sign pens. No plot or script as of yet just automatic drawing. I scan these pages into the computer, blow them up, and print them out in blue line on 11×17 inch paper. Then I draw right over top of them with pencil and ink until I have a finished page ready to scan in.

When I started this project I didn’t know how long it was going to be. I knew I wanted it to be longer than eight pages but since I had no story in mind I had no idea about the length. I think I originally wanted to go to about twenty pages. I don’t know when I decided to up that to forty but I did. As a consequence of that I wrote the story in pieces. After I had eight or ten pages done I decided to start writing the story. That way at least I’d know where it was going.

I wrote the story right over the artwork. I set it all up in Adobe Illustrator and even put down all the caption boxes and balloons first. They weren’t set in stone but I could easily see how much room I had to work with. I found the vertical format of a page in the horizontal format of the computer screen at bit awkward to works with. I had to pan and zoom a lot and I found that a lot more distracting than I would have imagined. But I got the first ten pages done and knew where the story was going. That was back in October of 2013 so this has taken a while.

I’ve squeezed in a page or two when I could and slowly built things up. The writing took nearly as long as the drawing at least in terms of me getting it done. I could draw a couple of pages in a couple of days but then it would take me weeks to get around to writing the next chunk of eight or ten. It was just a clumsy process. Now the first draft is done and I’ll have to read it all and get to work on improving it. That and the coloring. I want it in color but forty two pages is a lot. Comics take a long time.

Some days I really wish the world liked what I like. Not every day but some days that’s really true. This week’s specific subset of things that I like that the world doesn’t is my faux comic book covers called “My True Face”. In my defense the world doesn’t look at my art work very much because it’s a big world and there is a lot to see so maybe more people would like my stuff if they could actually see it but things being what they are that’s far from a reality. In the small sampling of people who have seen my work there are some things that I find are more popular than others. People like color and I’m good at color so I’d have to say my color work gets the best response. Then, of course, on the rare occasion that I draw something that is already popular, like Batman, then that tends to be popular too. I think that’s one of the secrets of popularity. Latch on to something that is already popular. Even my other faux comic book cover get a little bit of love but my “My True Face” ones don’t.

I love drawing faces. I do it all the time. Not portraits or realistic faces but faces where I can play with the arrangement and shape of eyes, noses, and mouths. Faces that I can decorate and make into things other than ordinary faces. I’ve drawn tons of faces over the years and have done a lot of them in recent years at a five by seven inch size. I’ve made them in marker, ink, watercolor, and gouache. Whatever I feel like using. But then a few years ago I was trying to sell some art on Ebay and I decided to work up some faux comic book covers at a size closer to a print size comic book. I made a few different types of them on 9×12 inch paper but no one was interested in them so I abandoned the idea. But one of the types was “My True Face”.

First I developed the “My True Face” logo and integrated it into my existing Radiant Comics cover trade dress. Then I drew a couple of faces. Weird faces. Faces I added all sorts of marks, shapes, and tattoos to. I liked them because that something I always like drawing. But they seemed to draw the least interest of any of my faux comic book covers. Not that any of them drew much interest so I let the concept lay fallow for a while. Then this week after making a full size “Punk Rock Love” cover I decided to make some smaller covers too. “My True Face” came to mind.

One of the reasons it came to mind was that I wanted something I could finish fairly quickly. Sure in the end it took me longer than I thought but it was still not nearly as long as a full size cover. At first I printed out the logo and trade dress at size (about 6.5 x 10 inches) and was going to draw a face in pencil on it. Then I stalled out. That was too big a size for me to quickly work out a pencil sketch of a face. Instead I turned to my archive of scanned drawings on my computer to see what I had. What caught my eye was my “Message Tee” drawings. I drew all sorts of weird faces on those characters, I had a lot of them, and they were only a couple of inches tall so there was plenty of room to develop them at a larger size. I picked out one that I liked and printed the face out at about a 5×7 inch size. Something I was very used to. Turned out that was a pretty good idea as I was able to redraw the face into something I liked with a lot less work than starting from scratch.

I then scanned in the penciled face and put that in my template than had the logos in it. After placing the pencil drawing I converted just that part into blue line. That way I could print the piece out onto a sheet of bristol with the logos in black and the pencil drawing in light blue. Then it was a matter of inking over the blue line with black India ink to make my final drawing.

Do you know what slowed me down at this point? It was my ink. About a month ago I ran out of my favorite brand of ink. Sennilier. It’s not a brand I can get at a nearby store and I’ve been short of money so I decided to just go with some other ink. I’ve got other inks around the place but I have only one favorite. The ink I was using Black Cat by Dick Blick is okay but it’s a little too thin for my taste. I had to got over certain lines twice and that takes more time. I got the first “My True Face” cover done this way (issue three since I had made one and two years before) so I didn’t like not having my favorite ink stop me but the whole time I wished I had some of it. I even switched to my second favorite ink. Unfortunately I was running out of that one too. After doing a second and third cover with those inks I broke down and ordered some more of the Sennelier. It was worth it.

So in the end I had four new faux covers. They were all the size of a comic book so I could slip them into a comic book bad with a backing board. I thought that was pretty cool. Three of them were done from “Message Tee” faces and the fourth was another drawing in my archives. Over all I like the way they come out. I might do more. Now if only the world would demand them of me.