Radiant Comics

I got a whole bunch of nothing today. I got nothing done and have nothing on my mind. Not my usual day. I tried to get nothing done yesterday but failed. I have a hard time doing nothing but I wanted a rest. Nothing is good for a rest. Even though I don’t like doing nothing a body needs some rest. Sometimes. Yesterday was the day I picked to get that rest and I almost did. I went for my usual bike ride and then sat down in my chair and stayed there most of the morning doing nothing. Well, maybe sometimes I was playing video games on my iPad. Plus I was listening to the radio. I don’t actually listen to the radio anymore, it was my computer that I was listening to radio shows on, but I still say the radio. Old habits.

Then yesterday at about lunch time my doing nothing ended. Some work needs to be done around the house so the workman hired to do the job showed up to start. The house is being painted so they needed to power wash it first. I find it hard to concentrate on doing nothing when the outside of the house is being power washed so I started doing something. I ended up doing something all day long and into the evening. Isn’t it funny that I can’t concentrate on doing nothing with something is distracting me but I can concentrate on something. The doing something distracts me from the thing that is distracting me. What a circle of concentration. Or a circle of distraction. I’m not sure which.

What I worked on to keep myself from being distracted is some cartoon art cards for my “Drifting and Dreaming” comic strip. I wasn’t finishing any of the strips themselves but I was making the cards which become the panels in the strips. I usually make them in batches of ten cards a piece (it takes three cards to make a strip) and this time was no exception. These are the cards in the strip that have a cartoon person with a word balloon above his or her head. First I draw the balloon, then I draw the person, write the words, and finally hand letter the words in the balloon. This is the only time I still do hand lettering and it’s not the best lettering in the world but I try.

There is a reason that the lettering is often the worst part of a comic when a cartoonist does the whole strip by himself. Or at least there is a reason that the lettering is often the worst part of my comics. It takes a lot of concentration to letter and I often find it hard to have any concentration left after writing and drawing a strip. I find it difficult to care about the lettering as much as the drawing even though I know I should. Lettering is not the same as writing. We usually don’t think about writing as we write words on paper. That’s why some people’s hand writing is hard to read. Lettering a comic has to be done in a way that is clear, pretty, and so everybody can easily read it. That is a whole different task than writing a shopping list. And it takes skill and craft. I often don’t have any of that left over after doing the rest of a comic.

I’ve finally got the lettering on my cartoon art cards at a spot where I think it’s okay. I’m on about my fifth type of lettering pen but I think I’ve finally settled on one that works for me. It only took me about three hundred cards. The lettering is not good but passable and I can get it done. That is the most important thing about making comics when you’re not getting paid for them. That you can do it. Not that it’s good. Not that it’s brilliant. But that it can get done. If I had my druthers my comic strip would be done just like the strips in the glory days of newspaper comics. Let’s say the 1930’s. I’d have models, reference material, and would spend the whole day working on a comic. It would be printed at a large size for everybody to read in their daily paper. But I don’t have the time to do it that way. So I have to do it in a way that I can actually get it done. That means I’ll never have the energy to make the lettering as perfect as I’d like but at least it’ll get done.

Of course today nothing got done. It was raining out so the painters weren’t able to work on the house but I did manage to sneak a bike ride in this morning. It was a damp ride but at least it wasn’t a wet one. After that I sat down in my chair and rested. There I stayed for quite a while. Maybe it was the rain or maybe general fatigue but there I stayed for a while. I had nothing. No energy and no ideas. Well, I had some ideas left over. If I wanted to I have a few projects lying around that I could have worked on but they all seemed like they could wait for another time. Before I knew it lunch time rolled around.

I can’t even remember what I did after lunch. Probably because it was nothing. I remember sitting in my chair at around two fifteen and thinking to myself that I’d get up and decide if I wanted to do something at around three. I was listening to a podcast then and before I knew it three o’clock rolled around. I could barely get out of my chair and could muster up no energy to get anything done. At about three thirty I decided to go for a walk. I actually had plenty of energy for that. I put on my headphones, grabbed my umbrella, and listened to some music as I walked. It was an energetic enough walk and it made me feel good. Luckily I didn’t need the umbrella.

Tomorrow I’m getting stuff done. I already know that I’m going to get some work done on my “Message Tee” comic. I’ve decided that. I always like to know what I’ll be working on for the day the night before. That helps me stay disciplined and get things done. That’s usually not hard for me to do. It’s usually harder for me to do nothing but not today. Today nothing ended up being pretty easy to do.

Football season is back and well under way. I enjoy football season. I like to watch my New York Giants and I also like to watch other games. I might not be as emotionally involved with the other games but a good game is a good game. I like playing fantasy football too. It gets me involved with players other than those on the Giants and it’s a fun way to keep up with a lot of players that I otherwise wouldn’t. My current fantasy football league is in its twentieth year and I was playing in another league a few years before that. Fantasy football is the only reason I know that Gary Brown was a solid running back for the Houston Oilers in the early 90s. I remember a lot of players that I otherwise wouldn’t because I played fantasy football and so noticed their production.

This year the Giants are off to a pretty good start. It’s funny because last year during the regular season the Giants player poorly for an awful lot of games. They ended the year wins nine wins and seven losses. Then after a regular season full of inconsistent play they played well and went on to win the Super Bowl. I won’t say it was a shock since they did something similar in the 2007 season but I wouldn’t have predicted it was going to happen after they lost to the Washington Redskins in week fifteen.

I read a lot of football websites during the season. I read them in the off-season too but there is less to read then. I mostly check out the NFL and CBS Sports sites because I find the most to read there. I rarely check out ESPN because it’s so video heavy and I can watch ESPN on TV so I don’t really care about it on my computer. Plus on the ESPN site you have to subscribe to read the articles. There is plenty of football to be found without having to subscribe there.

The replacement refs certainly added a different flavor to the start of the NFL season. The league locked out the regular referees and brought in some cheaper alternative refs. It wasn’t that the replacements were so bad but it was that they were kind of like substitute teachers. They didn’t have the authority of the regular refs and the players seemed to be constantly testing boundaries to see what they could get away with. As a viewer I generally knew what penalty to expect when I saw a flag thrown by a regular ref. Even before the ref’s announcement either I could see the infraction with my own eyes or one of the announcers had seen it. Everything was fairly predictable. With the replacement refs it got to be where when a flag was thrown no one had any idea what was going to be called. It was a surprise. Football players and coaches don’t like surprises. An element of chaos entered into the game that I had never seen before. It was kinds crazy. I’m glad the real refs were hired back.

One things I’m tired of hearing about the NFL is the people who complain about parity. “Everybody is mediocre. There are no great teams in the NFL anymore” is the idea behind about a zillion articles every year. It’s an article that’s been done to death. Not only that but I say screw the “Great Teams”. I like parity. You want to know why? Because none of these “Great Teams” of the 1970s that are spoken of highly were my team. The Giants didn’t stand a chance against them. If the Cowboys happened upon a group of good players then those players were indentured servants of the Cowboys for life. Not anymore. Players are more free to move around and teams can improve much more quickly than in the 1970s. I like that. What good it is having “Great Teams” if your team has almost no shot of becoming one?

I still hate night games but I stayed up and watched one the other night. Not a Giants’ game. I always stay up for them. But a random other game. I stayed up because I has a fantasy football rooting interest in it. Sometimes one of my fantasy football games comes down to a Monday night game so I’ll stay up to see if I’ve won or not. It’s fun sometimes to hang on every play to see if I’ll get points. Well, it’s fun as long as I get those points. And even though I have a fantasy football interest in the game my adrenaline isn’t pumping the way it is when I watch a Giants’ game. So it’s much easier to get to sleep after the game.

We have Thursday night football games all throughout this season for the first time. Usually we didn’t get Thursday night games until around Thanksgiving. I’m not a huge fan of them. They’re not at a time when I’m that interested in football. Football is an event sport. Your favorite team plays only once a week and it’s an event when they play. When all the games happened on Sunday all the events happened together. It was big. Then they made an event out of Monday night football. They made you wait a day. It was big. Now it’s less big. The Monday night game isn’t even on broadcast TV anymore. It’s on cable. The Thursday night game is on an even smaller cable channel. And they don’t make you wait for it. It’s now the first game of the week. Three days before the other games. Unless it’s your team playing it’s tough to care. Even when it is the Giants I have a hard time getting into it. It’s a night game and on a Thursday.

As a fantasy football player I don’t like Thursday games either. I don’t want to think about fantasy football that early in the week. It’s annoying having to make decisions about Sunday’s games on a Thursday. But I’m guessing Thursday night games are here to stay. After all they are on the NFL’s own network so it’s all gravy to them. And that’s the early season football report. Carry on.

As I sit back to write a little something about my week I examine what I’ve done and try to discern if there is something new that I’ve thought or accomplish. This week there doesn’t seem to be. That could be because nothing much of note happened or it could be because back pain dominated my week. I’m lucky enough not to have a bad back or any kind of chronic pain but this week a recurring problem with my shoes happened again. Well, it’s not really a problem. It’s that my shoes got old and worn out.

I stand all day while I work. I stand at my computer. I stand at my easel. I stand at my drawing table. I like standing. I find it less tiring than sitting all day. If I’m sitting then I’m resting. If I’m standing then I’m working. It’s a system that works well for me. They key to standing all day is good shoes. I wear Rockport Northfield Oxfords. I have feet that are hard to fit and the extra wide size of Rockports fit me best. Plus they offer a good deal of support for standing. Until they get old that is.

I go through two pairs of shoes a year. One brown and one black pair. I usually alternate days with each one but sometimes I favor the black ones for an extra day here and there. That could be why those were the first ones to give out. I can tell my shoes are failing me because I’ll suddenly have sharp stabbing pains in my lower back. It doesn’t even seem to creep up on me over a week or so. One morning I’m standing there working and then: Ow! Ow! Ow! The pain is going to be there for a week or so even if I get out of those shoes right away. I guess I reached some sort of tipping point. Of course the pain is lessened if I get out of those shoes.

I prefer to head this whole situation off at the pass by getting new shoes before the old ones wear out. I managed to do that last year but this year’s budget has been a little tighter plus they wore out a month earlier than I expected them to. I did a lot more walking this year as I made it a habit to get out of the house and go on half hour walks most days so that explains the shoes wearing out faster. If only I had recognized that fact in time. I was hoping I had some time before I had to buy new shoes..

I also failed to replace the insoles in the shoes but I have no idea how much effect that really has on the situation. I’ve been putting those over the counter support insoles into my shoes for over a decade now and wouldn’t want to go without them but in the past whenever my shoes have given me back pain changing the insoles made no difference. The shoes were too far gone by then. The insole instructions say you should change them every three months but I had one pair in all year this year. Normally I change them out after six months but I never did. Who likes to buy insoles? Especially if nothing is hurting.

Since I was resting my back more this week than was normal I got caught up on my current comic book reading. I normally read my comics within a week or two of buying them but sometimes I can’t seem to be able to sit down and concentrate on them. It has been one of those times and I don’t think I read anything for over a month. I’ve been buying more monthly comics rather than collected editions these days so I had about thirty comics waiting in my “to Read” pile. It’s not like I didn’t want to read them but every time I sat down to check one out I couldn’t concentrate on it. That’s nothing new and I go through it at least twice a year but it’s always good to be able to start reading them again. I was able to this week.

Other than that I was working on some of the things I’ve written about lately. I finished the two painting I wrote about last week. One came out fine while the other merely mediocre. I drew some pages in my ink-book. I hadn’t been doing anything in there over the last couple of weeks so I thought it was about time. Plus it’s something to do when I don’t have anything much else going on.

I also finished another large 22×28 inch ink drawing. It happened slowly then suddenly. I worked on a sketch I had in mind for it and then transferred that sketch onto the big paper. After that it sat there on my easel for days. I wasn’t into working on it. It was probably that my back was hurting, less since I got new shoes, and I didn’t want to stand there twisting into various positions to draw. A lot of twisting goes on when drawing on a large piece of paper on an easel. This morning, after I finished an ink-book page, I decided to draw a line or two on the large drawing. I wasn’t planning on working on it today but wanted to start it a little. Then I couldn’t stop. I kept working on it with all the free time I had in the day. I finished it. I don’t even know how I got it done. At times it seemed like someone else was doing it since I never made a real conscious decision to get it done. One of those you start it without thinking about it and before you know it you’re done things. They’re pretty rare.

So that’s my quiet and uneventful week. Back pain, new shoes, resting, and working on some things. I really could have done without the back pain.

Some days I have no idea what I’m doing and then I’m surprised when it turns out that I do. That’s a pretty interesting feeling. Of course I’m talking about painting and not life. I might have no idea what to do in life, as many of us don’t, but when it comes to making a picture I’m pretty good at it. I say that because today was one of those days when I was adrift. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to work on. I had finished all of my paying work and had some time to work on something of my own but what? That is always the question when a person is working on a project of their own where one has to be self motivated. “What should I do?”

Most people spend their lives never asking themselves that question. Most people work at a job all day where they are told what to do and then go home. If they ask themselves, “What should I do?” it generally means “How will I entertain myself?”. That is a whole different “What should I do?” than when a creative person is trying to figure out what project might be worth their time. Sometimes it’s just as hard to answer but it’s still different. I’m really asking myself, “What should I add to the world?”. That’s not an easy question to answer. It also takes some ego to answer it.

I had to ask myself that question today because none of my usual stuff was cutting it. I had finished a few large marker drawings last week, got my comic strips done for this week, inked a bunch of “Message Tee” figures, and finished some cartoon art cards for my “Drifting and Dreaming” strip. That took care of some of my long and short term projects that I have going on and I saw no new ideas on the horizon. So what else should I do? That’s the question I ask myself a lot. Today the answer was to make a painting. The problem was that I was directionless when it came to what painting I wanted to make. I’m usually not good at directionlessness but I decided to give it a go anyway.

Last week I failed at a completely directionless painting. By that I mean a painting I started directly on the canvas without working out a drawing or color sketch first. I do that sort of thing with my small 5×7 inch watercolor paintings all the time so I decided to try it on a larger scale. It didn’t work out. Sometimes things just don’t scale up. I painted a simple face but it was boring and pointless. I gave up on it after about an hour. For this new one I started with a simple drawing of a face and a simple color sketch. I didn’t have a finished painting in mind as I usually do but at least I had something to start with and think about. I quickly transferred the drawing to a canvas and laid down the basic colors. I had no idea where I was going from there so I just started painting.

Painting at its simplest is taking a brush, choosing a color, dipping the brush into that color paint, and applying the paint to a surface with that brush. That’s what I did. The simple structure and color of the face were already there so I stopped thinking about the image as a face and thought of it as a painting. I did that because painting a face really wasn’t interesting me. Painting anything really wasn’t interesting me but since I had already decided to paint I concentrated on one brush stroke at a time. If I though it needed some light blue over there then I put some light blue over there. One baby step at a time. Sometimes that’s the only way to get something done.

I slowly built the painting up. Bit by bit. Color by color. Stroke by stroke. It wasn’t easy because I wasn’t sure what direction I wanted to go in but at least I knew what direction I didn’t want to go in. I wanted to keep the main part of the face fairly clear and not use a lot of the small color ticks and marks that I often use to build up a painting. I ended up using only long stokes of color over the basic drawing. Since the basic color was so simple as to barley constitute any kind of color scheme I created a new color scheme little by little as I built up the painting. That’s something I don’t usually do. Usually the color scheme is figured out in the color sketch and then added to.

A funny thing about that color scheme too. It’s not really like any of my usual color schemes. There are an awful lot of pinks and purples in it. And not my normal dark purples either but some lighter ones. Maybe that’s because the face is a young girl’s face or maybe it’s because I used a different than normal method for working out the color scheme but either way it stands out from my usual stuff. I like that. It surprises me.

It may have taken all day but I pulled it together in the end. I even surprised myself a little. At the beginning of the day I wasn’t into it but at the end of the day I was. I don’t know why I doubted myself because this is what I do and what I’m good at it but that’s not always an easy thing to remember. Especially after making a painting that was a complete failure. And speaking of that failure I was so filled with confidence after completing a painting today that I pulled out the failed painting and started working on it some more. I tried using the lessons I learned on the good one to improve the bad one. It’s slightly improved but there really weren’t enough hours in the day to work on it anymore. I’m still not even sure that I can pull off saving that bad painting but now I think I’ll give it a bit more time. There’s always tomorrow.

Things don’t always scale up. In engineering that’s a truism. Just because your small scale model of a bridge works perfectly doesn’t mean that a full sized bridge built from that model will hold anything up. I hear the same thing all the time with giant monster movies. They say that a fifty foot tall ant, or any other insect, isn’t feasible. They’ll collapse under their own weight. The engineering of an insect works because of it’s small scale. An eight hundred foot building can’t be built the same as an eight foot building. What does any of this have to do with my week? Well in art things don’t always scale up either. A good small drawing doesn’t always look good after being blown up into a big drawing. It’s not as cut and dried as in bridges and buildings but it’s there.

Last March I ordered some 22×30 inch cold press 140 lb water color paper to do some large drawing on. That paper has been sitting there ever since. This week I finally decided to make some of those big drawings I had been thinking about. Previous to that paper purchase I made a single large drawing on similar sized paper and wanted to make some more. That single drawing was done in India ink and and brush with some marker used for the straight lines. I mostly did it to try and see if I could make an ink drawing that large. I think it came out well and I wanted to make some more. Except I never did. Until now.

This time out I didn’t want to use brush and ink but instead I wanted to use black markers. Since I was working on an easel I found it difficult to use a brush and ink with the paper in a vertical rather than my usual horizontal position. Plus it was time consuming since I had to be very careful with the ink and make sure nothing ever dripped or splashed. Since the ink was further away from the drawing than if I were drawing on my desk splashing and dripping were real dangers.

Since I’ve worked with a lot of markers over the last couple of years I knew my best bet was to use black Copic markers. Strangely I only had one black Copic marker. I have lots of different color Copics but I never used the black one much. There are other black markers that I generally prefer for most of my drawings but in this case I needed all the different tips that Copic has for its markers and the consistency of their black ink. I knew Copic’s black ink color wouldn’t vary from marker to marker. I already had one of their original type markers so I ordered a brush tipped sketch marker and an extra wide marker too.

You’ll hear that Copic markers are expensive and at six to eight dollars a pop I’m not going to argue that. But the thing about them is that they’re refillable. A bottle of Copic marker ink is about the same price as the marker and it refills a marker from six to eight times depending on the style of marker. In the end that make a marker about the same price as a regular bottle of ink which can be anywhere from four to ten dollars a bottle. I got two extra bottle of inks because I didn’t want to run out in the middle of a big drawing. I wasn’t sure how much ink a large drawing would use up. Turns out that to be about a marker full of ink per drawing so I had plenty.

For the first drawing I picked a sketch that I already had done. I thought it would look good big and in black and white so I went for it. At first I wasn’t sure how I was going to transfer the sketch to the big paper. When working on canvas I usually grid a drawing up and I almost did that here but I didn’t want to have to erase the grid after I was done. That would be a pain. With a painting the grid would be covered up by the paint but with a drawing it would have to be erased. Not a road I wanted to travel down. Instead I ended up going with graphite paper. I scanned in the small drawing, blew it up to the correct size, printed it out on four sheets of 11×17 inch paper, taped the sheets together, placed the printout on top of my watercolor paper, and then put the graphite paper between the two sheets. Now when I used a hard pencil to draw on the printout it transfers the line in graphite to the watercolor paper. That’s how graphite paper works. Handy stuff.

I used the same method for making my second large drawing except I didn’t have a sketch prepared for it. I started from scratch. I looked through one of my books of small drawings until I found a drawing I liked. One of the things I liked about it was the negative space. The drawing was of a figure off to the right side standing in front of a fence with a vast expanse of open white space/sky/negative space to the figure’s left. I liked it and started to make a finished sketch of it. Except the small drawing didn’t survive the embiginning process. What I liked about it, the negative space, lost all it’s power when in was made bigger. It became empty space. Nothing. What was a strength became a weakness. I hate it when that happens.

I still liked the drawing though. But now I was on a search to find something to fill that space. Instead of going to my stash of books of small drawings I went to my scans of finished drawings. I scan in all the drawings I make because it’s easy to go through them that way. I finish a lot of drawings that never really become anything so I cam use them, or pieces of them, in other projects. I tried out some drawings of buildings and people but none of them worked until I found these drawings of weird black clouds. With a little redrawing they worked well.

Those weird black clouds saved my drawing. At least they saved the bigger drawing. The small little sketch still looked good with its empty sky serving as a nice piece of negative space. But things don’t always scale up like you want then to now do they?