Radiant Comics

I’ve been getting one of my “Dreams of Things” covers done once a week for well over a year now. Maybe it’s even been two years. Today is a Monday and I’ve been getting them done on that day since the end of May. Before that it was on Tuesdays and I think last year at this time it was Thursdays. I like to keep a schedule but I also have to mix up the schedule to keep things interesting.

The part I’ve been getting done on Mondays is to marker color them. All through the year I make pencil drawings at 6×9 inches that I then blow up and print out on 11×17 inch paper. I ink the drawings on that paper and then marker color right over the inks. The logos and trade dress are also printed out on that paper.

I got four covers pencilled over the weekend. I go through bursts of them. First I looked through one of my inkbooks (a sketchbook drawn in ink) and picked out some thumbnail drawings that I wanted to turn into finished covers. I like to do these in bunches so I have some choices of what I can draw. I picked out six thumbnails, blew them up to 6×9 inches, and then printed them out on 6×9 inch paper. I already had three or four of them still undrawn from the last time I did this so I had plenty of choices. From Friday to Sunday I drew four of them and then set them up for inking.

Though I have choices when I pencil them I usually color them in order. This week’s cover was number 308. I can’t believe I’ve made over 300 of these. Until recently I’ve always colored these with dye based alcohol markers. Copics, Blicks, and Artfinity markers. But recently I’ve added some Pantone pigment based ink markers into the mix. I did a couple of these cover with just the new pigment ink markers but this time I decided to use both.

Usually I take the inked cover that I’m going to color out the night before I’m going to work on it. I like to look at it and see if it gives me any ideas before I start it. For some reason the idea I got was plaid. I never draw plaid as my pattern on a cover but I was going to attempt to. The next morning that’s the first thing I did. I had a weird idea to make it Miami Dolphins colors. So I used an orange, a light blue, and then some yellow. I don’t remember yellow being in the Dolphins’ color scheme but the other two are. I used a straight edge to make the plaid lines nice and straight.

The next color I worked on was the triple blue waves behind the main figure’s head. For some reason the plaid and this blue were the only colors that I had in mind as I started this. Often colors suggest themselves to me as I go along but with this one it was only the blue. The rest of the colors all took a bit more contemplation than I’m used to. That is probably because of the plaid. It’s a pattern I’ve never used before on one of these covers so working with it was new.

The next color pattern was the wood grain on the right. I wanted a pattern to play with the plaid but it had to be dark and neutral. I went with one of my classic wood grains. It looks weird next to the plaid but this whole cover looks a little weird.

I put in those orange bars next. Top and bottom. I needed something simple and bright to ground the piece after all those patterns.

Then came the weird piano keys on top. They were just rectangles to begin with but then I used dark and light colors to give them more rectangles inside the original ones. I did them all in shades of grey because I wanted another neutral after all those patterns but then I didn’t like the grey so I colored over them with yellow. I like the yellow/grey combo.

I dropped the purple pattern in next to bounce off the orange. I also needed it to be a strong color that wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the plaid. I think after I put the plaid in it took all the rest of the colors to tame the plaid. No wonder I never use it!

After the purple came the red bar and the yellow brown circles. Nothing special with those two spots but they get the job done.

The three red, blue, and yellow fellows on the right side were next. I think I knew what color these guy were going to be all along too. They were in the back of my mind as I chose all the other colors plus they were simple to do.

The rest of the piece was coloring the figure. That took some contemplating! I went with the orange belt first and knew I wanted some purple in it too but everything else was up in the air! It’s hard to even describe my process for this part because it was slow going. I’d add in a little yellow, some pinks, a red and a brown here and there, and some dark purples.

This part was like organizing chaos. That plaid and all the other patterns in the piece made color choices hard. As a matter of fact I think chaos won. There are a lot more colors and patterns fighting with each other than is usual for me. My eye bounces all around this piece.

The last thing I did with this one was after I finished all the color I added in some more ink lines. I don’t always do that but sometimes I think it adds clarity. Especially when things get a little chaotic. I beefed up the lines around the circles and added some curves lines inside them. Then I added little tick marks inside the figure in certain spots to give the drawing some depth.

In the end despite the simple composition of this one it came out quite complex. The space is really different than I usually do and the word chaotic keeps coming to my mind. I like it.

I haven’t done a Friends walkthrough in a while so I think I’ll do one. I haven’t watched an episode in months so let’s see where I’m at. I’m on Season Eight Episode Five “The One With Rachel’s Date”. This first ran on October 25, 2001. Let me check my calendar and see what I was doing that day.

The only notation I have for that day is “Print Stuff.” That means that I was probably working on some digital prints. I’d draw stuff by hand on paper, scan it in, and then color it digitally. This was probably the very beginning of me making digital prints. I still make them today but not as often as I once did.

I also notice that I was working on my website earlier in the week. This was probably when I first got www.jaredosborn.com online. It has been a while.

On the Saturday following this Thursday I read that I played some touch football. I used to play some pickup games in New Jersey. Everybody who played was generally a person who worked at either Marvel Comics or Wizard Magazine. I think our last game was in January 2005.

Let’s get on with the show. We start with Monica working as a chef as Phoebe stops by. Phoebe takes a liking to the new sous chef, Tim, and flirts with him so Monica quickly hooks them up because she’s in a hurry. Monica is not yelling!

Here comes the theme song. I haven’t heard it in a while. It’s filled with nostalgia for me.

Next scene is at Chandler’s office. He starts with a joke and then Ross stops by. They’re heading out to lunch. A co-worker calls Chandler “Toby” and he just rolls with it. That’s Chandler’s plot for this episode. The guy thinks his name is Toby and it’s too embarrassing for Chandler to correct him because he’s been calling him that for five years.

Ross finds out after all these years that Chandler’s middle name is Muriel. “Your parents never even gave you a chance” is his reaction. Ha!

New scene. We’re on set with Joey on “Days of Our Lives” and Rachel is with him watching the monitor as Joey acts. Rachel gets an intro to one of the actors, Cash. This must be the date that the title refers to. If I remember correctly Rachel is pregnant (it’s early on) with Ross’s baby but they’re not together. So this sets up a jealousy angle.

Now we’re at Central Perk with Monica and Phoebe. Phoebe had a great date with Tim but Monica wants to fire him because he’s bad at his job. Some solid jokes and then Monica is convinced to give him another chance.

And we’re at Joey and Rachel’s apartment and it’s time for Rachel to find out that Cash wants to ask her out. Joey said he didn’t think she’d be dating anyone because she’s pregnant. Rachel says she wants the date. This is a solidly funny scene.

Back to Chandler’s office and a continuation of the Toby plot line. This is a mildly funny plot but there is really not much to say about it. It’s discomfort humor. Not my favorite type.

More Phoebe and Monica. Tim has got to be fired. But the twist is now that Phoebe wants to break up with him. He’s too clingy but she doesn’t want him to get dumped and fired on the same day.

More uncomfortable Chandler in the office humor.

That was a quick scene and now we’re back to Rachel and Joey as she’s about to go on her date. She’s not going to tell hime she’s pregnant. Ross walks in as Rachel is getting ready and it’s the first he hears about the date. It’s not weird for him. It’s regular. We get uncomfortable Ross. And then he gets upset.

The scene is Central Perk. Tim arrives and we know that Phoebe is about to break up with him. He’s really too wimpy for her. Before the breakup can happen Monica pages him 911 from the restaurant. Imagine that. A pager makes an appearance. This was before the age of the cell phone.

Meanwhile Ross and Joey are at his apartment. Ross is worried about the date. It’s a lot for him. His vision of him, a wife, and child all living together is moving further away form reality. A lot of sadness in this scene. Plus a couple of jokes.

Back to Chandler’s office. We didn’t get a lot of scenes of Chandler’s work place until these later seasons.

Now it’s time for Monica to fire Tim but Phoebe shows up. He gets fired and dumped at the same time. Funny scene but brutal for Tim. He’s a nice guy and takes the high road. He’s so nice that Monica decides to give him a second chance. Phoebe does not.

A newsstand scene as Ross and Rachel meet out on the street. The date didn’t go well. She told Cash that she was pregnant. He cheers her up by telling her about Chandler’s middle name. It’s a sweet scene as Rachel realizes that dating is over for her for a long time and Ross tells her how much she’ll love her baby.

Immediately Ross walks into Central Perk and Runs into Mona. A woman he met at Chandler and Monica’s wedding and liked. Rachel walks in and then walks out again to sad music.

The credits scene is one final Joke about Chandler being called Toby at the office.

Now it’s time to check out what was cut out of this script for syndication. A Monica yelling joke in the beginning. Then nothing until a “I’m not telling him I’m pregnant” joke later on. Finally a bit of the Chandler office stuff. Not a lot of stuff in this one but I still prefer it in.

I’m going to check my ratings from back when I rated all of these episodes on iTunes years ago. But first I think I’d rate it a three stars out of five right now. That means it’s an average episode. That’s still good but not special.

I gave it two stars back in the day! That means below average. That could also be because the one before this one, “The One With The Videotape” is a five star episode (the best). If I watched them back to back I could see how this one would pale in comparison. But after not having watched an episode in months this one seemed more near an average episode to me.

Until next episode.

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. As a matter of fact I’ve never made one. I can make resolutions at any time during the year and act on them so I’ve never had the need to do them at the beginning of a new year. But I do like to look ahead at the new year and try to figure out what art projects I want to get done in the next year.

There is nothing written in stone about these projects. Sometimes I get them done right away, sometimes they take years, and sometimes they never get done. But I do like to think about things.

Also there could be things I haven’t even thought of yet. Last summer I got five 24×36 inch paintings done. I hadn’t even thought about getting them done until a few months into the new year. So just because I don’t think of something now doesn’t mean it’s not going to get thought up later.

So here is what I’ve been thinking about getting done.

The first thing is the Great Gatsby Illustrated book that I’ve been working on for years. I think I’m just finishing up year four of working on it. I’ve almost got it done. I’ve already made many illustrations for it and after many months of getting nowhere on the book design I made some progress this past fall.

I might get it finished this year or I might not. When I first started working on it I made a promise to myself that it would be open ended. I wouldn’t give myself deadlines. I’m doing it because I want to. There is no pot of money at the end so I may as well enjoy the process.

As a tie in to the Illustrated book I’ve been mulling over the idea to make a Gatsby comic strip. I’d have to work up a series of turnaround drawings for all the characters and then use those to make the strip. That’s what I do with my “Four Talking Boxes” comic. It’s going to take a lot of work. I remember when doing the same thing for my comic strip characters it took me two weeks solid per character. Twelve, forty hour (at least) weeks. It will take me that long on Gatsby too. So maybe that can be my summer project.

Back in the late 1990s my friends and I self-published some comic books. They never made us money and most of them never got out into the world. As a consequence I still have a lot of them. I think I want to turn some of them into sketch covers. I’ll pull the staples on the books, put a new blank drawing paper cover on them, and then add the staples back in. That way I can make sketch covers out of my own comic.

I might also do some printed alternate covers that way. I made some prototypes a while ago printing out some of my “Dreams of Things” covers and then using the same staple pulling process to make a new cover for the book. I might do some more of that.

I’ve been watching a few TikTok videos by an artist giving advice on how to sell art. I’ve seen, heard, and read a lot of such advice over the years and none of it has ever worked for me. But still I like to keep my eyes open in case some of it ever does me any good. One piece of advice led me to think that I should put some stuff on my TikTok shop again. It’s been years since I had anything up but I might try again with some stuff.

I’m going to start with some small things. I might put up some of my tiny drawings. They are the ones that are only one by one and a half inches. They’re cute and people in real life have responded to them well. I’m just going to put stuff up and see if anyone responds to it.

I also might make some Gatsby prints to put up. It’s a popular book (in the public domain) so I think that people search for Gatsby things. I already have all the illustrations for the book I’ve been making but they might be too quirky for the general public. I might make some 1920’s style prints. That’s what people expect and I’d like to try to make some.

I’ve also stumbled upon the ACEO algorithm on TikTok and have been seeing people’s journeys selling those small, baseball card size, pieces of art. Mostly they do it on eBay and I might try there too but I also want to post them on Etsy. I already have a lot of them and I’ve been making them for years but I also just made some new ones. Abstract art ones.

I’ve never been a big abstract art painter. I love images a lot and therefore love working with images. I’ve made some abstract pieces over the years but not many. But I got it in my head to make some small ACEO ones. I like exploring abstract art ideas on a small scale rather than a big one.

I’ve made two types of ACEO abstract art cards so far. The first kind is of the abstract expressionist school. I use various acrylic pens and work in layers of paint on the small piece of paper. I usually have a few of them going at ones and switch between them. It’s all about making marks. I use a variety of techniques to put the paint on the paper and build it up into something interesting.

The other type is of the geometric abstraction school. First I draw a composition of rectangles on the paper. I start in pencil and then ink the edges of the rectangle with a thin black marker. After that I fill in all the rectangles with color. I’ve found the best color tools for this are my new Pantone markers. They’re water based inks and go down nice and smooth. Plus they are archival and the colors won’t fade like dye based markers will.

So far I’ve made about fifteen abstract ACEOs and I like the way they came out.

That’s all the stuff I’ve I thought about so far. There will probably be more but it’s only December 27 as I write this. Sometimes I’m thinking about this stuff all through January.

Glass One

This past weekend I dove into designing the book for my illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby” once again. After letting it sit around, for somewhere around half a year, because I hated the book design I made for it I finally got going on it last month. Now I’m working on even more ideas for it and keep giving myself more work.

Last time I wrote about Gatsby I mentioned the vines and drinking glasses that I drew. Well, I’ve already abandoned the vine idea but the drinking glasses live on. I figured that I could use the glasses in one of the party chapter and that lead me to thinking about things I could use for the other chapters.

The first thing I thought of was grass. In the first chapter there is a description of Tom and Daisy’s house that includes a very vivid description of the lawn and how it runs up form the street, over things, and then ends at the house. So I decided to draw some grass.

I drew the grass digitally in Adobe Illustrator and made about ten different versions of grass. It was grass as seen in a side view where I drew individual blades as shapes and drew them at three different heights on three different layers. This way I could mix and match them.

After I had enough grass drawn I decided to set them up at the bottom of the page in the first chapter. As I put them in the pages I thought that the grass should grow in height as the pages turned. So I strung and the grass together in a thirty inch wide file and made the grass on the right a little bit taller. Then I brought it into the design document bit by bit. Now the grass grows as the pages turn.

The next thing I did was water. There is a big water theme in Gatsby especially in the last chapter. So I made a bunch of marker and watercolor drawings of water. Water like in an ocean or lake. “A corrugated surface” as they say in the book. I think these came out alright but I may still have some more work to do on them. That’s the story of this project.

Glass Two

In chapter two there is a mention of windows so I decided to make some windows. I made about twenty of them so each page could have one in the lower outside corner. I thought it worked well except nothing ran across the bottom of the page like the lawn did. It was just the corners. So I added a couple of lines and some texture between the windows to indicate a wall. I thought this made things look better.

I think I had only made about ten drinking glasses at this point so I decided to make about fifteen more so I could put a unique one in the corner of the pages I did that and I thought it looked pretty good.

Next I made bottles. I thought that they would look good in another of the part chapters. I decided to run them across the bottom with two bigger bottles on either end. I made the smaller ones that run across the bottom in grey so they’d fade back a little. I rotated the end bottles that I would use as the two big ones and also rotated the smaller grey line of bottles so that they weren’t the same ones in the same place every page. They looked pretty good.

The next thing I made were some hourglasses. There is a chapter in which time is mentioned and Gatsby leans on a clock so I thought I’d put these at the bottom of that chapter. After making twenty or so hour glasses I put them in place but thought they looked a little sparse. I wanted something like the lines and textures that hinted at a building in the windows one.

I had previously made some digital brush strokes in Adobe Illustrator in an attempt to mimic the real life brush strokes I made in the beginning to look like vines. After some messing around I got these digital brush strokes to remain me a little bit of wind. The winds of time. So I added them in between (and behind) the hour glasses. I think it works.

Glass Three

But now the pages with just the glasses were looking thin. I thought that I would copy the bottle pages and run a bunch of glasses across the bottom in-between the two big ones on the ends. This took some time to set up but the adjustment was worth it in the end.

Another idea I came up with was because of the trip into NYC that Gatsby and Nick made where nick said that anything could happen in the city. I had already drawn a bunch of small thumbnail drawings of all sorts of faces, bodies, and random scenes in my sketchbook. I decided to see if I could use these “Anything goes” bits of drawings.

They were just thumbnail drawings and I was contemplating turning them all into finished drawings but first I just wanted to place them to see what they looked like. I put one on the outside bottom corner of each page. I liked what they looked like but they looked thin compared to the pages that had things all; the way across the bottom of the pages.

This lead me to the idea of running more thumbnails across the bottom but I didn’t have any more in my sketchbook. I didn’t really want to draw more but that brought me to the idea of using my Tiny Drawing. Those are the 1×1.5 inch drawings I’ve made with a face and a single word balloon with a single word in it. Maybe I could run those across the bottom.

It was the single word that tripped me up. If I was going to have a word then it should be one from the book. So I decided to draw all new Tiny Drawings and add a word from the book to them. I decided that I’d need six Tiny Drawings a page (twelve a spread) and I’d probably need around 120 drawings in total.

After I’ve drawn twelve tiny faces I picked one page from chapter four and highlight twelve words on it. Those are the words that I’ll put on the twelve drawings. One word a drawing.

So far I’ve got forty eight Gatsby Tiny drawings done. It’s going to take me a while to get them all done but with no deadline I’ve got time. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m generally an organized person plus I like to put things in order. A place for everything and everything in its place. At least at the beginning. I’m not an overly neat person so entropy works its chops on me and things slowly get disorganized until one day I have to clean things up. It takes a while to get to that day though.

Then there are the times that I have to come up with a whole new order to put things in. I’ve got to rearrange my space until I have things where I need them to be. That’s where I found myself with my drawing table recently.

You may remember my previous blogs where I wrote about buying some new Pantone markers. Well, I had to find a place to put them. They came in these flat boxes of nine markers a piece and I have eleven of those boxes. For the first two weeks I just stacked all eleven boxes on top of each other and stuck them on the surface of my drawing table.

After I was done using them I cleared out a spot where I could move them too. But they were a bit tricky to move. Moving a stack of eleven inch and a half tall slippery boxes wasn’t easy. One time they all slid over and more than half of the markers slid out of their box. It took a while to put them all back so I knew I couldn’t keep moving them whenever I wanted to use them.

Over the years I’ve found that the key to using any particular art supply was to have it handy. If I tuck something away I’ll never use it. It’s hard enough to make anything in this world and any obstacle that gets in the way decreases the odds of ever getting anything done. So I knew I would have to find a handy place for those Pantone markers.

One of the things that you can buy for a drawing table is a side tray. It’s a plastic tray about six inches wide by thirty inches long. It attaches to the side of a drawing table and has all sorts of compartments on it for pens, pencils, and lots of other art supplies. I bought one with my drawing table back in the early 1990s and have been using it ever since.

I’ve even added custom things to my art try. I’ve extended it out another four or five inches by attaching another box to it plus I added some pen holders on the side of it. On the left side of my drawing table I even built another side try to hold my other markers. It’s about seven or eight inches wide by thirty inches long and is flat with sides but no compartments. It fits marker cases nicely.

I even built some extensions for the top of my drawing table. I screwed on some short pieces of 1×8 inch pine. I have a houseplant on one side, an essential oil diffuser in the middle, and some more pens on the right. Not I had to figure out where to put the new Pantone markers.

It took me the better part of a Saturday morning and afternoon to organize everything. I spent the first hour moving things around to try and see if I could find a good spot for them around the studio. With that I tried to figure out an easy way to move them. Maybe in a big box. I came up with nothing and that’s when I decided to try and fit them on my drawing table.

The upper left of the table was the most obvious spot. I had some random stuff up there already so there was a good chance I could relocated some of it. By upper left I mean the actual surface of the table and not the side tray. I don’t usually like stuff on the actual surface of the drawing table as that’s my working area that fills up with whatever I’m working on at the moment. After messing around with the placement of the markers I decided that it wasn’t working. I ended up deciding that I was going to have to push the markers onto the side tray.

I had to clean out the top part of the side tray but the good news was that I could. It was, sort of, an out of the way area that didn’t have a lot of stuff I needed at my fingertips. I would also have to level it off a little. The compartments in it made it hard to put the marker box on top of it. It wasn’t steady. I had to make a platform out of foam core board to get it to stay.

Then I needed a second spot. The spot I had the markers in wasn’t good for a stack of eleven boxes. I would have to break them into two stacks. I tried the top left and it almost fit. I was so close but something would have to go. I would have to remove my parallel rule.

A parallel rule is for doing mechanical drawing with a triangle. It’s like a permanent t-square. It slides on wires up and down the table and gives you a straight edge to draw straight lines with and to sit a triangle on and draw more straight lines. I used it a lot in the 1990s when I was drawing comic book pages but I haven’t used it much in recent years.

The parallel rule only takes up the top four inches of the drawing table so it’s out of the way. I’ve never bothered to remove it because I hardly ever use the top four inches of my drawing table. But now to be able to fit the markers on the top of the table I was going to have to take it off. So I did.

The parallel rule is only held on by a few screws and some wires so it wasn’t hard to get it off but it made me feel a little sad. It had been part of my drawing table for over thirty years and seeing it go made me a bit nostalgic. Since I removed it I haven’t missed it at all but even now I get a little melancholy thinking about it.

It must have take me from about ten in the morning until two in the afternoon (with a lunch break) to find a place for those markers. It seemed like it should have taken less time but I had a few false starts. In the end it seemed like the perfect spot. Not I look up at it and it’s like they have always been there. I can’t ask for more than that.

And here is a video of the setup. https://youtu.be/Mt9BU03C8Fw