Radiant Comics

This week I was replacing some worn out parts on my bicycle with some fresh new ones. In the process I did one repair that I’ve never done before in all my years owning a bike. Changing the chain. I’m not sure why I never needed to do it before. It could be that I ride more often these days since I ride all the way through the winter. But I had my previous bike for twenty years and the chain never wore out. Maybe bikes were just made better in the 1980s.

I have changed my rear gear cassette before on this bike before. I bought the bike in March of 2009 and put a new gear cassette on it in July of 2012 and then again in June of 2014. Being that I put another one on this week that means they’ve been wearing out faster and faster. When the gears get worn they get pointy on top instead of flat. That means they don’t grip the chain as well and can slip when I’m pedaling. Plus the harder I pedal the more likely the chain is to slip. That is not a good thing.

The first thing I changed out this week was the front pedal crank. That’s the two big gears that go in front and are connected to pedal cranks and the pedals. I noticed a lot of those gears were looking pointy and since it had yet to be replaced on my bike I thought it was a good idea to do so. Another thing I had noticed was that the chain wasn’t quite sitting on the top of the gears as it should. It looked like the chain wasn’t catching in the gears until it was hitting the front of the gear wheel. I’m pretty sure that can cause the chain to slip.

Since I had to take my pedal cranks off a couple of years ago and clean the axel I already has the special tools that I needed to switch out the new crank for the old one. It’s easy to do and in no time I had the new pedal cranks on and was ready to go. As I looked at how things were meshing I noticed the chain still wasn’t sitting in the gears on the top of the wheel as it should. When I took it for a test ride the chain slipped worse than it ever did before. That’s when I decided to order a new chain.

Chains don’t just come off the bike frame. You have to unlink one of the chain links to get it off. I ordered a new chain and a chain link breaker tool to get the chain off. It was also easy to do. You put the chain in the tool and then turn the bolt on the tool by hand and it pushes the tiny chain link axel out of the center of a link. I watched a YouTube video to see how it was done. I’m glad I did because one of the things the video said about putting a new chain on was to make sure it had the same number of links as the old one. Don’t go by the length of the chain. That’s because it turns out that a bike chain doesn’t really “Wear out” it actually stretches. When I put the old and new chains side by side they were about the same length but when I tried to line up the individual links side by side things got confusing. There were more links in the new chain than in the old but they were the same length.

I eventually got the chains lined up to where I could figure out the correct amount of links and had to remove a couple of links from the new chain. Then I had to put the new chain on the bike frame. Turns out the new chain I bought has a master link that allows you to take the chain on and off easily. But it also said I needed these special chain pliers to use it. Crap. I didn’t have those pliers. Another Youtube video came to my rescue as it showed how to put the master link on by hand. Turns out that you don’t really need the special pliers but they make things a bit easier. I may buy some in the future.

With my new chain on it was time for a test ride again. But first a little background. When I ride my bike I mainly use just two gears. On the back cassette I keep the chain on the third largest gear and then I alternate between the larger and smaller gears on the front pedal crank. The smaller gear is for going up hills. In the winter I keep the chain on the second largest back gear as I need the bike to pedal a little easier in the cold. This means that this two gears will wear down and the others won’t. When I went for a test ride and had the chain on the third largest gear and boy was I getting slippage. I put it up in the second largest gear and things were smooth. I was happy about that but knew I had to order a new gear cassette.

I had read that you should replace the chain and gears on your bike all at the same time. I never had before and so never quite could see the reason why but now I do. I had also read that a bike chain could stretch over time but also never quite believed that. Metal could stretch? How? I still don’t know how but now I know that it does. Plus I’m assuming the stretched chain was wearing down my gear cassette at a faster speed than a good chain. That’s why that last gear cassette wore down in less than a year. It’s all good to go now but I’ll probably have to replace more stuff. I could use a new front brake. My current one sticks a little, the Allen bolt that hold it on is stripped (I’ll have to break it off), and its little thumb lever snapped off. It still stops me fine though so I haven’t been in a hurry. As long as nothing is slipping it’s all okay.

This week I dipped into the well of things I like to make and came up with one of my “Covers to Comics That Don’t Exist”. That is when I draw my own comic book cover. I make a logo and trade dress for it and come up with a concept for a cover to draw. I’ve done a bunch of these over the years and therefor have a number of logos ready to go for them. Some of them are your normal sci-fi, horror, or superhero genres and some to them are just plain weird. This is one of the just plain weird ones. “Psychedelic Dreamer” issue number 29. I don’t have 29 of them done. I have four or five of them done. I just like to spread the numbers out to give myself a sense of the history of the fake comic.

Psychedelic Dreamer #26 in the sketch phase.

This cover, like most of my work, started out as a drawing in my sketchbook. I hadn’t even thought of the idea to make another cover but was just looking to work on a drawing when the initial ink sketch caught my eye. I printed out that sketch in blue line on a six by nine inch piece of paper. That’s my small pencil sketch size (half of a nine by twelve inch piece of bristol board) and working that small helps me work figure out a lot of the basic drawing and composition. There was also pattern stuff to work out. This is also one of my asymmetrical drawings with the appearance of symmetry in it. That means everything appears to be symmetrical in it at first glance but they are really not. Things are shifted over half an inch or so and the left hand side is not quite identical to the right hand side. It’s a technique I use fairly often.

After drawing it at the six by nine size I didn’t think I had it. The woman wasn’t really worked out as much as I needed her to be and I really didn’t come up with a solution to the visual of her standing on the lip of the giant face behind her. I decided I needed another pass at it at a larger size. Sometimes I’ll go to an eleven by fourteen inch size from here but I decided I wanted to got to the bigger eleven by seventeen inch paper. That would give me a little more room for the small figure.

The larger drawing went smoothly except for the asymmetrical symmetry gave me a little trouble. At least in the area of the large face. I really didn’t work out the symmetry of the glasses and at a larger size the differences started to expand beyond what I thought were allowable tolerances. I had to go in and redraw the big face and glasses to make them more symmetrical. I also pulled out my French curves and such for the larger pencil drawing. I locked down the mechanical edges and used my Haff cross hatching matching to get my spacing even on the parallel lines. It’s always easier to do that stuff in the pencil stage so the inking goes faster. I also added some more decoration to the woman’s clothes and turned the large face’s lips into a mechanical platform. That seem to solve my lip problem.

Psychedelic Dreamer #26 in the pencil phase.

One of the interesting things about the pencil drawing is that I didn’t leave any room for the logo and trade dress of the comic. That’s because I decided to make this drawing into a comic book cover after I made the six by nine inch sketch. I could have fit the logo onto the drawing at the point of the larger pencil drawing but decided not to bother. I knew I could slide the drawing down and cut off the bottom of it without much fuss so I kept drawing the sketch as it was. This isn’t a solution that works very often but I could see it wouldn’t be a problem here.

I ended up doing a lot of work in the inking stage of this one. The initial inks were easy enough but then I went in with a lot of spotting blacks and patterns. I started out buy printing the logo and trade dress in black on a piece of eleven by seventeen inch bristol board along with the pencils in a light blue. The light blue means that when I scan the inked piece into the computer I use the “Bitmap” setting and all the light blue will drop out. Almost all of the light blue ends up unseen underneath the black ink anyway.

Psychedelic Dreamer #26 in the ink phase.

This became a much more visually complex piece after the inking. The main thing I changed from the pencils was the radiating lines on the glasses. I liked them in the pencil stage but they didn’t play well with the other patterns and I ended up making that whole area black. That makes a much stronger statement. Blacks also went down in some of the diagonal clouds and the big shirt. I broke out the Haff machine for the lines that create the grey patterns. I think my favorite grey pattern is the swirls behind the figure’s head. I’m a fan of swirls and sometimes use them as patterns but it cam be a bit tedious. I had to make all those little swirls in the stripe behind her and though I enjoy it when it’s finished it’s annoying as I’m doing it. Some techniques are like that. I went with some decorative elements on the three circles too.

Oddly the last thing I drew on this cover was the polka dots on her pants. I say oddly because that was the first of the patterns that I decided on but I resisted drawing them until the end. I’m not really sure why except I was so busy trying to work out the other patterns that the pants didn’t interest me. Or maybe I was saving it for a finishing touch. Either way I looked at the piece, decided it was done, and then added the polka dots.

I spent this past weekend painting. Not such an odd occurrence but turns out that I haven’t finished an 18×24 inch painting in a little while. I bought five new canvases that size this winter but haven’t worked on one of them. I already have another canvas that same size on which I started a painting but never finished it. I ran into a problem that I sometimes run into where I plan out the painting so much that I get bored with it before I actually do it. That’s why I usually leave myself some room for spontaneity when I paint. But it doesn’t always work out that way. I’m pretty sure I’m going to finish that painting eventually but I haven’t in the last two months. So I decided a different approach was in order. A more spontaneous one.

Slide Heels

I’ve tried painting in a less planned out manner before. It usually doesn’t go well. I have a few finished paintings I made like that laying about the place and I can tell exactly which ones they are just by looking. They’re generally less fully realized. The advantage I had this time was all the spontaneous ink drawings that I’ve been making lately. They’re small 2.5×3.5 inch drawings that I’ve been making with a brush and ink. And I’ve made quite a few of them. About fifty or so.

My spontaneous pen drawings are different than the brush ones. With the pen drawings I’m looking to create images that I’ll eventually turn into finished pieces. With the brush drawing they just are. I don’t turn them into anything. They just exist as small drawings. I’m not even sure why that is except that little brush drawings are all about mood and shape. Those are two things that don’t scale up easily. A blob of ink that works just fine at half a centimeter tall might not work at all once I tried to remake it at ten times that size. Small ink drawings are their own thing. Line drawings on the other hand I can blow up and work with easily. That’s why I spend most of my time with them.

With this painting I decided that if I was going to get anything done I would have to use my small ink drawing approach. I have a spin brush that is a sort of scaled-up version on my normal pointed watercolor brush that I use for ink. I figured I could use that plus some liquid black acrylic on the canvas to mimic what I was doing on a smaller scale with the brush and ink. Of course the problem with this method would be that I couldn’t go backwards. Once I put paint on canvas it was there. Being this was the first time I was trying this it was a little intimidating so I decided to just dive in.

Detail Number One

I laid out some of my ink drawings on my desk for inspiration but I didn’t want to copy any of them. Then I grabbed my brush and paint. The first thing I painted was the black line on that horned robot-like creature on the left. I was quite hesitant with him and I think it shows. He’s not really on the ground and his legs are awkward. But there was no going backwards so I had to go with what I had. I glanced at my ink drawings at this point and decided to go with the arc/doorway that surrounds him. I had done something like that in one of my smaller drawings and thought it would work here.

The next thing I went for with the black paint was the woman on the right side. She’s a bit androgynous but I think of her as female. It’s the high hips. I knew that I wanted her tall and slender but not the full height of the canvas. I stopped her in mid-air not knowing what I would paint under her. It ended up being that strange stool with a face. At this point I had my initial black paint image work done. Two figures, a face/stool, and a passageway. It was time to figure out the color. None of the small ink drawings I made had color so I was stepping into a new area.

At this point there was no distinction between the sky and the sky behind the passageway. I decided to make one. I went with a thin wash of blue for both of them but a lighter blue behind the passageway. Then I wanted a more opaque look for the top sky so I went in with brush strokes of light, medium, and dark blues to indicate some clouds. After that the only solid colors left were the orange of the woman’s shirt and the green of her pants. Plus the purple on the face/stool. And a little pink in the woman’s face.

From here on in I knew I was mostly going to be using short brush strokes of color in a spontaneous way sort of like the initial black paint drawing. I kept going back and forth between the woman and the robot adding more strokes of different color. I think I first used pink and purple in the robot but over time added two yellows and a brown. It wasn’t until I finally hit him with some green that I was satisfied. The robot was definitely the hardest part of the painting to get to work.

The woman was a bit easier. She’s pretty well grounded on that stool and has a nice orange and green base to bounce the other colors off. Plus she has some interesting hair. All in all the stool was a little harder to get right than her. After all that I put in the grass. I didn’t want real grass so I went with blobs of paint in a pointillist manner. It’s mostly green on a light green wash with some red and blue in there to keep things lively. The grass is not spectacular but stays out of the way and gets the job done. I put the blue and purple city in behind the robot last. I also didn’t touch the sky anymore in the passageway.

Detail Number Two

The final thing I painted was the lines and small boxes that sit on top of everything. They’re a staple of my painting and I think they work well here. Half way through making the painting I knew I would need those lines and they would have to be red. So I kept red out of the rest of the painting except in the grass a little. The rest of the little color boxes I made as I saw fit.

The funny thing about this whole process is how long it took. Once again things took longer to do than I thought. Spontaneity didn’t save me any time. It took two days to make this painting which is the same amount of time as one of my usual ones. Oh, well.

I’ve got one section of my studio that has a standing file holder on it. That’s basically a flat piece of plastic with other flat pieces of plastic sticking out of it in a perpendicular fashion. You put folders in between the plastic supports and they stand up there. For me it’s a place to put odds and ends. Mostly old drawings that I might not want to tuck away just yet or some half finished work. That happens every now and then. I start something but then don’t finish it. It’s far enough along that I don’t want to throw it out but I have no idea what to do next. In the file it goes. Today I decided to pull three things out of that file and look at them.

“Leaping Lord” Unfinished

Since they’re not finished these have no names. So I’ll have to name them now. The first is “Leaping Lord”. Sometimes I think of it as “Unfinished Purple” but that’s too literal for me. I have no idea how old this one is. I’d guess it’s five to ten years old. It’s a technique I tried out a while ago and made some paintings of. It’s a monochrome watercolor technique. I use one thin layer of watercolor at a time and slowly build up color on the piece. It takes a long time because I have to wait for the watercolor to dry in between each layer of color I put down. I remember I finished about six to ten pieces in this style but never this one. I think it was the last one I did like this and ran out of patience. That said I kind of like this one as it is. I’ve written before about how purple is a tricky color to use but I really like the purple here. The problem is that I bit off more than I could chew.

There is no line work on this one as that was the last step I’d take. First I’d make the drawing. It doesn’t look like I made the drawing on this paper. I drew it separately, scanned it, and then printed it on watercolor paper. So the grey line under the watercolor is computer printed. It would eventually get obliterated anyway as I painted over it. Most of the other paintings I made in this style were smaller and less complex. “Leaping Lord” has a lot of parts. It’s not that it’s an especially complex drawing but for this technique it is. All those little stripes, circles, and shapes would have to be differentiated with different purples. Meanwhile I was only working with one transparent purple watercolor layered over and over again. I quickly reached the point where I couldn’t really get the purple any darker yet there still wasn’t enough tonal contrast in the piece. Looking at it again I still don’t see a way through. As an unfinished piece I do like it. I guess it’ll just have to stay that way for now.

Once again I’m not sure how old this next unfinished piece is. I’d guess three years or so. It dates back to the time I was trying to figure out a way to use markers as a finished technique. Once again it’s unnamed so I think I’ll call it ‘“Spring Worm”. It looks like I was also using a monochrome technique with this one except I used various shades and hues of green markers for the top image and various blue markers for the bottom. It looks like I spent a bit of time trying to figure this one out but never did. I didn’t do a color sketch. That was my problem.

“Spring Worm” Unfinished

Like the first piece this one also has the image printed on the paper via my inkjet printer. Then I went over the printed line with a thin green or blue marker. After that I tried to figure out the color. Looks like I failed miserably at it. I don’t like this one very much even as an unfinished piece. The darks aren’t dark enough and due to using marker it’s not really monochrome enough. There is too much color variation from green to green and blue to blue. Some greens have a little more yellow in them and some a little more blue. It doesn’t hold together and I should have figured it all out with a digital color sketch but I probably thought this was just going to be a quick piece but then it wasn’t. In the end I couldn’t fix the mess.

No date on my third unfinished piece either. Five years ago? Ten? Who knows? This time it’s gouache on paper. I’ll call it “Sunrise Poem”. It looks like I taped the sides on this one. I do that sometimes with my gouache paintings. That way when I pull the tape off at the end I have a nice clean edge. Lots of artists do this. I can tell I gave up on this one because I pulled the tape off. With other unfinished pieces I’ve left the tape on until I decide to finish the piece. That I took the tape off without finishing it means I gave up on it.

“Sunrise Poem” Unfinished

This one is unfinished because of a problem I’ve had with a few drawings. The positive and negative space looks good at the drawing stage. All the shapes and lines work together well. But in the color stage the shapes no longer play the same way. Usually because there is too much “Air” in the piece. Coloring the background of this piece yellow (or any color) makes the background too dominant. The whole “Face and Vase” interplay of positive and negative space of the spirals (now red and blue) and background disappears when they’re two distinct colors. Without color the eye connects the head to the neck-like thing to the right of it but with the color there it doesn’t. Everything that seemed connected in the drawing gets disconnected in the painting. When working with weird objects, shapes, and space I’ve had this problem happen before. In the end this one is merely okay. It’ll hang around as a cautionary tale. Nothing like tales of failure to send chills down the spine.

Roll your own cigarette.

I’m sitting around here this evening thinking about things I want to do. Creative things. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually do them because who does everything they think of but you got to think of things anyway and then pick and choose. Of course the first thing I thought of was writing this blog. I’m going to get that done for sure because here I am writing it. There is a no-brainer.

They next thing I have to get done is a no-brainer too. I have to correct a typo on my web comic that posted today. I hate typos and always try to correct them. I make my “Four Talking Boxes” comic in an odd way. For the last year I’ve been writing them in the morning as I get ready for the day. That means I write after my shower as I get dressed. It takes about twenty minutes to half an hour. Yeah, I get dressed slowly these days. I run spell check to try and get all the typos out but don’t really proofread. Then on Thursdays I put the art together five strips at a time. I read the strip again at that time to make sure things are okay. Then the comic posts the following week and I read it online each morning to make sure it posted correctly. Like I said I don’t really proofread but I read it enough times that errors don’t get through too often. Today an error got through. I didn’t even read the strip this morning so it’s been there all day. I used your instead of you’re. It happens. After I finished writing this I’ll go fix it.

The other things I’ve been thinking about doing are more creative in nature. For instance another comic strip thing I’ve been thinking about doing is voiceover reading for the strips. Since “Four Talking Boxes” is all conversation it might be fun to read some of them and make a video of it. Nothing fancy. Just read the first character’s part and then the second. Switching back and forth through the four panels of the strip and the camera pans across the strip. I’d probably have to do it with other people since I have six characters in the strip and three of them are women. I don’t think I have a very convincing female voice. I don’t know how interesting it will end up being but it’s something to think about.

I did finally finish one thing this week. Also “Four Talking Boxes” related as I turned the first five hundred strips into a digital book. I had to design and make a cover for it as well as a back cover and some inside chapter break pages. I even wrote some little stories for the chapter breaks. I’m not even sure why I thought the chapter break stories were necessary but I wanted them there. As an artist things are often about getting things just how I want them to be. Now I have to figure out what to do with the digital book. How to get it out there.

I had been working on the “Four Talking Boxes” digital book for a while an finishing it got me started thinking about more digital books to get done. I’ve had my “Little Red Sketchbook” digital book sitting around for two years now and I haven’t finished it. I don’t know why. It just never came together. I also have another digital book called “Moments Float Back To Me” that I was working on a few weeks ago that features my art and photography along with a story. Once again I’m finished with the art and design part and am working on the story. I often have find the writing hardest to get done. I keep thinking I’m a planner when it comes to writing, as I often am in other things, but it turns out I’m more of a spontaneous writer. I have to sit down and get going with it. I think that’s why I’m good at short pieces of writing. That’s also how I got the “Four Talking Boxes” chapter pieces written. I just did them. I’d get up, bang something out for fifteen minutes, and then back off it again for twenty minutes. Repeat for a day and a half.

Now I’ve got it in my head to make yet another digital book. I think I’ve got a one track mind today. I’ve been making these little ink drawings lately. They’re on my 2.5.3.5 inch art card paper and are drawn with brush and ink. All sorts of little rough looking men, women, and strange creatures. None of them are great on there own but put them together and they add up to something. There is something about little ink drawings that when you blow them up to a larger size that look cool. I don’t know what that is but I have an idea to construct a story around them, blow them up, and make another digital book out of it all. I think I’m going to call that one “Large From Small” or some such.

And one more digital book idea. My monster a day drawings and a story of the woman who spends her time keeping the monsters of our collective unconscious at bay.”Fifty Four Monster” could be it’s name.

I also want to make some videos for my YouTube channel of me using my fortune card telling deck of cards that I made last decade. That is going to be tricky only in that I’ll have to learn what the cards mean. Sure I made up the meanings but that was a long time ago and I don’t have them memorized at all. I’m actually going to have to practice with them and that doesn’t fill me with joy. Maybe one of these days.

One final thing thing I’ve been pondering. Finishing up the “Organics” comic story I’ve been working on for ages. I’ve got 30 or so pages out of 42 pencilled, inked, and lettered. I’m not sure if I want to color it because that is a lot of work. Still have to finish those last pages too.

Oh, and I’m always thinking about new paintings and drawings. But that’s another story.