Radiant Comics

Sometimes there is nothing more frustrating than software designed to make something simple to do. That is if you already know other software that allows for complexity. I’m talking about my frustrations this week trying to use Apple’s new iBook Author software. Mind you I’m trying to use it for something that it’s not quite designed for but it should be a simple matter to adapt it to my task. Of course it’s not. Isn’t that the way of the world?

I’ve been working on Apple computers for over fifteen years now and I like them. They do a good job. Being a graphics guy I work in Photoshop, Illustrator, and inDesign all the time but I can handle any graphics program that’s thrown my way with a little bit time. They all kind of work the same. There is not much mystery to them for me and I don’t get overwhelmed by choices.

There is even a new breed of image editing programs that have been making there way into the photography world. Most of these new photo apps that are being made for the iPad, iPhone, and Mac are real easy to work. They do a few things and they do them well. It’s a golden age of desktop and digital publishing and there is a lot to choose from. Except I don’t like most of the Apple consumer aimed apps.

I hate iPhoto and barely have touched any of the other iLife apps. Maybe I’d like iMove if I ever wanted to learn video editing but I’d probably skip right over it to a more powerful program like Final Cut. The problem with most of Apple’s consumer creative apps is that they’re not made for me. They’re actually made for people with limited creative talents who want to get things done. They make things easier for people who have no idea what they’re doing by limiting what they can do. The programs are very good for beginners and dabblers who, I would guess, account for the vast majority of computer users. They’re made so that grand parents can use them with their young grandchildren. That’s not a bad thing but not what I need.

I’m more like the professional carpenter who’s been building houses for twenty years. Imagine, if you will, a guy who knows how to build a house backwards and forwards. I might use software to make my job easier but then software is released that lets anyone build a house. But in order to let anyone build a house a lot of choices have to be taken away because building a house is a complex task. The software has to only let you be able to build one of six houses. They might give you options like, “Do you want the bedroom on the north or south side?” but if you want to move the bedroom over six inches you can’t. It’s not in the playbook.

That’s where I’m at right now with iBooks Author. I want to move the bedroom over six inches but I can’t. I can easily do it in a bunch of other programs and have done it countless times before but I can’t get it done in this much simpler application. It’s not one of the choices I’m given because such a choice would make things more complicated for the average computer user. In empowering the masses to be creative this and programs like it actually take away from the ability of a creative person to be creative. It’s a weird thing.

What I was trying to do was make a comic book in iBook Author. More specifically a comic with some interactivity in it. IBook Author is really built for making and selling textbooks for the iPad but you can sell any book you make with it. Except you’re stuck with having to choose from about six text book templates. You can change things around such as moving the bedroom from the north to the south side of the house but if you want to move it six inches west that’s a problem. I spent way too many hours this week trying to figure out how to do the basic stuff that would take me all of thirty second in another graphics program. And I never figured it out. That makes for some frustration. I want to tinker with this scooter until it can race with a Harley but that’s not possible.

iBooks Author offers some interesting and easy to use interactive features that I think I can use to make an interesting comic book. One that I couldn’t make in the world of print. You can create picture galleries, drop in video, make an interactive photo, and other interesting stuff. If only I could lay it out in the way I want to but I can’t. They limit where you can put things to keep it easy for the everyday public but it’s driving me crazy. I wish Apple had some more professional software with such easy access to selling books in the app store.

That’s what this is really about. The gold rush that is the App Store. Not that I have any real hope to make a million dollars selling comics for the iPad but I have some ideas that I want to work out. I’m sure I could get them to work using html or some other program but that doesn’t seem as much fun as iBooks Author with it’s access to the app store. I’ve made plenty of comics that hardly anyone has seen and the internet hasn’t changed that much which is why the promise of the App store seems more interesting to me right now. If only iBook Author would cooperate with me.

Still I trudge on. It’s not like the idea I have would be done anytime soon anyway. It takes a long time to make comics. If I have the energy. I’ll keep working at it and maybe things will come together in six months or so. Who knows? Things change fast in the world of apps.

So here I go with my end of the year football wrap-up. For those of you not paying attention I’m a New York Giants’ fan and the Giants wont the Super Bowl. Yeah, that’s the best possible outcome I could have hoped for but I wasn’t expecting it to happen. Not that I find it totally unexpected either because their 2007 season Super Bowl victory taught me that if they get into the playoffs and play well then they have as good a shot as anyone else.

What is weird is that I didn’t start out this year with high expectations. Last year the Giants managed to finish the season 10-6 and still miss the playoffs. Usually ten wins gets you in but not always. A few years ago the Patriots even won eleven games but still didn’t make the playoffs. It’s not easy to make it to the post season but the main reason I had for my lack of good expectations was the plethora of injuries the Giants had during the pre-season. A lot of the defense got hurt and many of them were out for the year. It did not bode well.

The oddest thing I had to say before the season began was that I hadn’t been this down on the Giants’ chances since they won the Super Bowl back in the 2007 season. The Giants were coming off a season of turmoil in 2006 where they played below my expectations and neither I nor any of my Giants’ fans friends saw anything but more turmoil ahead of them. And though there was plenty of turmoil in the 2007 regular season the Giants pulled it together at the end of the year, played great in the playoffs, and won a victory in the Super Bowl against an unbeaten team that most people expected to win.

This year, mostly because of the injuries, I also saw nothing but turmoil in the Giants’ future. And there was plenty of turmoil all during the year too. Losses to teams that they should have beaten, a defense that couldn’t make a game winning stop when they had to, and a running game that was going nowhere. It was not a pretty regular season but luckily the two other teams in the Giants’ division, who were supposed to be good, also had years filled with turmoil. The Giants were able to win their division this year with just a 9-7 record. That was their doorway into the playoffs.

There was even one game this year when I gave up on the Giants’ season. It was a Sunday night game against the Cowboys. The Giants’ playoff hopes were on the line. If they lost this one their chances of making it to the playoffs would be gone. The Giants were playing terribly and so were down by eleven points in the fourth quarter. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was tired (I hate night games because they end too late and I can’t fall asleep after them) and wanted to go to bed. Frustrated I said to myself, “If they have a miracle finish I’ll read about it in the morning” and so went to bed thinking the Giants’ playoff hopes were dashed. But then in the morning I read about their miracle finish. Holy crap!

Even after that miracle finish the Giants lost the next week to a team they should have beaten and thus made the final two games of the season must wins. Good thing they won them. Then the Giants won three playoff games and were in the Super Bowl. Not easy playoff games either but by that point I had some confidence in the Giants. I expected them the beat Atlanta and they did but despite the lopsided final score it was no easy feat. The next week they faced the 15-1 Green Bay Packers who a lot of people had as the Super Bowl favorites. I gave the Giants a one in three chance in that game but had confidence in them because they had beaten the Packers at the Packers’ stadium during their 2007 playoff run so I had seen it before. They did beat them. Nice.

The last team the had to beat to go to the Super Bowl was the 49ers. San Francisco was favored but I gave the Giants a fifty-fifty shot in that one. The weather was bad which I think favored the 49ers a little. It was a really close game that looked like it was going to come down to who was going to make a mistake. The weather and the two good defenses were making it hard for either team to score any points. But then the Niners made a mistake and all of a sudden the Giants were on their way to the Super Bowl. Quite exciting I must tell you.

As in the Super Bowl following the 2007 season the Giants were going to play the New England Patriots. Weird. A few moths ago a wasn’t expecting to see the Giants in the Super Bowl and I certainly wasn’t expecting to see a rematch with the Patriots. There just aren’t that many Super Bowl rematches that happen. The Patriots were favored, once again, but not heavy favorites this time. I saw the game as a fifty-fifty toss up and would have had a hard time picking a favorite. I though the Giants had a little more talent across the board but the Patriots had a legendary coach and a legendary quarterback. That can even things out.

Like the other Super Bowl in which the Giants beat the Patriots this was a close one. I’m sure glad the G-Men won but it could have gone either way. At no point in the game did I think they Giants had secured a victory. Early on the Giants had some chances to score some points and build a lead but it didn’t happen. In the second half the Patriots had a chance to put the Giants away but they didn’t. Once again the Super Bowl came down to the Giants making a late game winning drive and the Patriots with not enough time on the clock to mount their own and having to try a long desperation pass that came too close to working for my nerves. It was as close as things get. A play here or there going the other way and it could have been a Giant loss. The cliché is that football is a game of inches and it’s amazing how often that is true.

So it’s in the books. I’ve seen the Giants win four Super Bowls in my lifetime and it’s a lot of fun. And now Giants’ fans can say that corny thing that I always hated hearing about other teams, “One for the thumb”. I first heard it as “One for the thumb in ’81” after the Pittsburgh Steelers won their fourth Super Bowl in 1980 but they didn’t win it that year so it became “One for the thumb” until 2006 when they finally won their fifth Super Bowl. Now as the Giants try to win their fifth I suspect I might hear it again and it will still be as corny but I bet I won’t mind it as much.

I’d like to report that, so far, cycling through my second winter season has been fairly easy. Last winter, the first one I ever cycled outdoors through, was filled with snow and ice. I managed to average about three days a week throughout the cold weather and remember saying to myself, “Well, if I could bike through that winter I could probably bike through most of them”. It was that cold and snowy. This year it’s been cold out but so far only one snowstorm. Two if you count the one back in October but I wasn’t counting that freak occurrence. I don’t know how it happened that we’ve had such a mild winter so far especially since there seemed to be snow falling every week of last year but I’ll take it.

I recently saw a TV show in which a scientist was asked a question. Why did people ever bother to move into the cold areas of the world? The scientist answered by saying that with enough clothes people were as warm in colder climates as they were in hotter climates. It was such a simple answer. And that’s also how simple my bike riding has been this winter. With no snow and ice on the road I haven’t had to change off of my summer route. My riding is the same as in the summertime except I’ve got on warmer clothes. Layers and layers of warmer clothes.

There was one close moment though when, maybe, I shouldn’t have been on my summer route. Keep in mind that with only one snowstorm up to this point I was on my summer route except for one day on the winter one. And I wanted to be on my summer route. It’s more fun. The winter one is shorter and I have to do three laps of it. I hate laps. Laps are boring. I much prefer the longer one-pass summer route but the winter one is on residential roads with less traffic so I can easily avoid the ice and snow that gathers on the side of winter roads. That sure takes priority when there’s ice and snow about.

It was a morning after a cold night when a little bit of snow and rain had fallen. Not enough to really get the plows out. I walked my bike to the top of my driveway to check out the road. The temperature was a few degrees above freezing and the road looked mostly wet but there was a little snow at the side of the road. Not much snow and it was melting. As I preferred my summer route I decided to ignore the little bit of snow and take the good weather ride.

The road was clear of snow and the wetness of road wasn’t too much of a problem. I don’t like riding when the road is wet because my bike has no fenders so road filth gets thrown up onto the back of my pants and windbreaker but that’s par for the course on any wet day. Warm or cold. My bike has a few rusty parts from all the riding I’ve done on wet days and it sure does get dirty but I’d rather ride in the wet than not ride at all. No, the problem came as I was going down my favorite hill.

I like hills. I like powering up them and I especially like rolling down them. A flat bike ride is pretty dull. I have a few good hills on my route but my favorite is Reservoir Road. It’s a nice long downhill with a curve in the middle before it turns back uphill. I can go flying down it then hit the curve fast before powering up the other side. Not only is it fun to go down but it ends up being about the fastest I ever go uphill. But on this day it was the curve in the middle that was the problem. Curves are where physical forces meet.

Luckily I saw it coming. I hadn’t run into any patches of ice on the road up to this point but as I was coming down the hill I looked ahead and saw some slush on the curve. “Not ice”, I thought. Just a bit of slush. It must have been built up from cars making that turn and piling up the snow just a little bit in that place. Since it was above freezing and I had seen no other ice along the way I couldn’t quite believe my eyes but I applied the brake and slowed down anyway. Good thing I did because my bike began to wiggle just then.

I don’t know how many people have felt the sensation of a rear bicycle tire slipping out from under them but it’s not a fun one. As a teenager I had my bike slide sideways on some unexpected November ice and I ended up skidding along the ground on my side. I was lucky not to be hurt especially since this was in the days before most of us even knew bike helmets existed. That’s 1982 for you.

This time on this hill I only got the wiggle but even a wiggle is disconcerting. As I slowed down my back wheel hit the little bit of slush and slid from side to side. The front wheel sliding a bit is nothing but the back wheel has my body weight over it so I can really feel that. It’s like, “I’m about to go down! No I’m not! Yes I am! No I’m not!” all in the space of a second or two. I don’t think I really came close to sliding down. It was only a small slip but If I hadn’t have checked my speed it could have been a real problem. It was about then that I thought I should have taken my winter route.

Only one weather related thrill this winter is pretty good. Not that I had many of them last winter but my winter route was picked to minimize all thrills. Maybe that’s why I don’t like it as much. It’s not even mid-February as I write this and there is some more snow moving in tomorrow so I don’t think this ice free cycling is going to last the rest of the winter but so for this winter’s riding has been just as the man said. Like in a warm climate only with more clothes on.

I’m not really sure what I’m doing. Not in any grand sense of the phrase (though that might be true also) but in a more minor and specific way. I’m not really sure what I’m doing in regards to the painting I’m currently working on. Usually I know exactly what I’m doing. I graduated from college back in December 1988 and have been painting on my own since then. Painting-wise it hasn’t all been smooth sailing but I couldn’t have been painting for that many years and not have learned a thing or three. I know how to make a picture and I know how to make a painting. But this week I took things in a different direction.

I decided to start a painting from a sort of stained color field abstraction approach. For those of you who don’t know stained color field painting is done by such famous artists as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. They would create large abstract works of art by using thin layers of paint, the stain in stained, on canvas to build up a usually geometric abstract painting. The thin layers of paint would build up color in such a way that it would have a certain light and glowing quality about it. I’ve always liked stained color field abstraction but I’m an artist who likes to use images so I’ve never done much of it.

This week I decided to try some stained color field abstraction. Or at least start out from that point and probably add an image on top of it. But how to integrate stained color field abstraction with an image? I’ve seen people try to mix abstract painting techniques with imagery and it usually never works. It always ends up looking like bad 1970s illustration. The two do not play well together but somehow I got it in my head to try and make them.

The first thing I did was make a drawing that I wanted to use. I also bought a six pack of 18×24 inch pre-stretched canvases so that was the size I was going to work at. I scanned the drawing in and started to do a color sketch on the computer, as is my usual method, but ran into a problem. What was my color sketch of? The drawing or the stained color field? I had no idea how to integrate the two things into one color sketch. That didn’t bode well. I ended up doing the color sketch of the stained color field. I figured out a basic geometric pattern and color scheme but I still had no idea how it would all turn out.

Years ago I did a little bit of stain painting with thinned oil paint. I didn’t want to use oil paint and turpentine this time because I avoid using turpentine as much as I can these days. The stuff is not good for anyone and I only use it for cleaning brushes. So I decided to go with acrylic paint and water. I bought a few new Rubbermaid containers to keep the watered down paint in and started working. Things didn’t quite go as I expected.

I was working on gessoed canvas, as I usually do, but the water doesn’t really get absorbed into gesso like it would paper or even raw canvas. It sits on top. It dried eventually but it took longer than I thought it would. I wasn’t sure if I had my water to paint ratio correct either. My stains were not looking as I had envisioned them but I kept at it. I had the canvas flat on the floor and after two days of laying down stain (most of that was drying time) I had something vaguely interesting. Certainly not a very good stained color field painting but something I could work with.

The next step was to work with the image I had made. A female figure but one of my strange ones. Normally at this point, if this were a usual painting of mine, I would refer back to my color sketch and start to fill in the basic colors I had figured out. But this time I had no color sketch and opaque filling in a base layer of color was not what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to just put a figure painting over the stained background. I wanted the two to relate in a different way than foreground/background.

I painted the line work of the figure but that really didn’t help me find a direction. I’m not used to being directionless when making a painting. When I lay down paint on a canvas it’s usually in a thick, opaque, modernist way. That wouldn’t help me here so I started scrubbing color on. That’s when you have a little paint on the end of a bristle brush and scrub scrub scrub. You spread out the paint and it ends up being applied thinly. Not something I usually do but tentative enough so that I couldn’t ruin anything.

I must have put tentative scrubs down for two days. Two days of staining and two days of tentative scrubs was far longer than I thought this painting was going to take. A lot of that time was spent doing other things as paint dried but still that was a while. I’ve now worked the painting up to a point where I’m actually starting to like it. I’ve gone in a few times with line, a bunch of scrubs, and some opaque brush strokes. The stained color background and the foreground figure are one and the same in some parts and separate in others. It’s starting to be a real painting. Except I haven’t figured out how to finish it.

That’s the “I’m not really sure what I’m doing” part. As I sit here and write this I look up at the painting and am without a clue. It’s a situation I’ve been in a few times this week and it’s getting a bit annoying. What’s my next step? It gets a little harder after I figured other things out because now I have something I like so I have something to ruin. I almost abandoned this approach because I didn’t like what I was doing but I kept going because I couldn’t ruin a painting I didn’t like. Now I’m at the end and I have to pull it off.

I have confidence that I will be able to pull off a good ending and finish this painting but I still don’t know how or when I will be able to do it. Until then I’ll scrub a little more paint on being careful not to mess up what I like about things and stare at the painting until something comes to mind. After all something has to eventually come to mind. Doesn’t it? And I have five more of these canvases? What have I gotten myself into?

I bought some new headphones after Christmas. A pair of Sennheiser HD 518 headphones. They’re pretty nice. For the sake of this blog I just went to check on the price of them at Amazon and it’s gone up. At this moment they go for $130 but they were only $97 when I bought them in December. They must have been on sale. I also had about $70 worth of “Rewards Points” from my credit card that I applied to the headphones so they only cost me about $35 in cash when all was said and done. I’m not sure I would have bought them without those rewards points. After all I really didn’t need them.

Every few years I seem to get obsessed with getting new headphones. I’m not even sure why. I don’t always get a new pair but I shop around. When I used to commute into NYC on the bus I sure needed a pair. Listening to music, the Stern Show, or whatever else I had to listen to was a must. Everyone was reading or had headphones on during that ride. It’s the only way to survive it. I didn’t ever have very good ones for most of my commuting years. Sure they were always a step up from the ones that came with whatever Walkman or Discman that I happened to own at the time but it was before the days of high end noise canceling headphones and the like.

Whenever I bought a new music player I would also buy a solid pair of headphones for about $40-$50. Back in the 1990s I used to be able to get some good ones from Radio Shack. I hardly ever bought anything from the Shack except for a pair of headphones that would go on sale every now and again. They were the small kind that sat on the ears. Not earbuds or over the ear headphones but more like the old school Walkman with the foam ear pads type. Only much better quality than the ones that came with the any music player.

It was also in the 90s that I first got introduced to ear buds. They are not my favorite type of headphones but what they lack in sound quality they make up for in portability. There have been times in my life when portability trumped sound quality and vice versa. I can’t even remember how I used to research headphones in the years before the internet but I did. I know that because I can recall buying one specific set of Sony earbuds that I was on the hunt for. I remember them because they were good and because I bought them at Macy’s. I never buy anything at Macy’s and who goes there to buy headphones anyway? But they were the only place they had them. They were about $40 and I remember them as my favorite set of earbuds.

I think I probably have always had a fascination with headphones because I never had a really nice stereo set-up like so many of my contemporaries had. I usually had a good boom box but I never listened to music very loud. Except for occasionally on my headphones. Those were what I had for listening to loud music. They were even better for hearing music in general and not just for loudness. With headphones I always heard things I never noticed before in whatever music I was listening to. My boom boxes were too lo-fi and played at too low a volume to hear all the bells and whistles of a song. And forget stereo separation on a boom box. They’re not built for that. You need headphone to really hear all the stereo tricks put into certain songs.

I wonder if as many people these days have home stereo equipment like they used to? I listen to most of my music with my computer and a nice set of speakers. The speakers are really only of boom box quality but they do me well. I have a nice stereo set-up these days but that’s more of a home theatre thing. I listen to way more TV on it than music. I imagine most stereo systems these days are part of a home theatre system rather than a music system. With a lot of music being digital on iPhones, iPods, and mp3 players in general are the younger generation even listening to stereo systems? I have no idea.

The Sennheiser HD 518 headphones that I just got are pretty good. They’re the large over the ear variety that I’m partial to. I already have a pair of over the ear noise canceling headphones so I bought these ones because they are of the open variety. They don’t cancel noise and let sound in and out of the back of the ear pieces. There is more bass in a pair of headphones like this than in noise canceling ones. I couldn’t wear these ones on the bus though because they leak too much sound and I’d have to turn them up too loud to drown out the bus noise. The bus is still a job for my noise canceling ones. Though I’m not on the bus much these days.

I am by no means an audiophile. Those are the guys who are really serious about their equipment. I’m not even sure if they’re that serious about music but they want it to sound really good. I’ve done a lot of reading of headphone reviews over the years and some people insist that headphones don’t sound their best until they’ve been “Broken in”. Some people leave them on at full volume (not while wearing them) for a week or even more after they buy a new pair. Others insist this is nonsense. I have no idea which is true but I’ve always wanted to try it. It’s appealing to think that I could buy some headphones, play them continuously for a week, and then have even better headphones. How cool! Of course I’ve never tried this because how could I possibly tell the difference? It’s not exactly a side by side comparison.

This is the first set of headphones I’ve bought in at least a few years. The last pair I bought was a set of in the ear noise canceling ones that I hardly ever have used. I thought I’d use them more but haven’t. Without the commute into NYC quality usually wins out over portability these days. Most of my headphones usage comes from listening to music when I go for walks. Sometimes I go for walks just to listen to music. Finding time to exercise or listen to music isn’t easy as an adult so I combine the two.

So far I’ve really been enjoying these new headphones. I like the open design as sometimes the noise canceling of my other pair just isn’t needed and I want the deeper bass. They’re big, comfortable, sound good, and fit well over my winter hats. I’ve already used them more than my in the ear noise canceling pair. That’s a win.