Radiant Comics

Well I finally did it. I bought a new laptop to replace my six and a half year old Apple Powerbook. I has been saving up for it for quite a while. I almost spent a chunk of the money this past Spring on an iPad instead but I couldn’t find one in the store. I could have ordered the iPad online and waited a few weeks for it to arrive but somehow I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to walk into the store, buy one, and go home. I figured that I would wait a few weeks and then get one when they were in stock. But they never were.

Somehow during all of that waiting a couple of months passed by. I continued to save up money as I knew I had to replace my old laptop sooner or later and then a funny thing happened. Sour grapes. Since I couldn’t get an iPad I lost interest in owning one. I had some ideas for things that I wanted to use it for but they got less interesting to me. Soon I lost interest in the iPad altogether and decided to replace my laptop before getting an iPad.

Though I knew I was getting an Apple notebook I had a hard time deciding which one to get. I have a tower that I do almost all of my work on and that is my main computer. I do my writing on the laptop. That explains how I could still be working a six and a half year old computer. I don’t need it to do the heavy lifting. When I bought the Powerbook it was easy for me to decide which one. There weren’t a lot of models and options and I just chose the smallest and cheapest one. A 12 inch Powerbook. It was the bottom of the line.

Now Apple has about twice as many options in it’s Macbook Pro line plus it has a Macbook Air line. I was checking out the Macbook Pros. The 13 inch one is the smallest nowadays but there is a choice of two processors and two levels of RAM. So each model size 13 inch, 15 inch, and 17 inch, actually comes in four choices. And bottom of the line is a little more bottom of the line than it was back in 2005.

I had a choice to make. Do I spring for more RAM now? Do I get a faster processor? I wanted the 13 inch one but that one comes with a glossy screen and I prefer a matte screen. They only come with matte screens once you’re up to the 15 inch model. And it’s an extra $150 for a matte screen. Yikes! I’d go to the Apple online store and add on all of the options I liked to see what they all cost. Plus I kept saying to myself that if I added on just one more thing it would be a much better machine. Pretty soon I had a computer costing $2800 when I only wanted to spend about half of that.

I really couldn’t decide which I wanted to buy. Then I read that Apple was about to update their Macbook Air line. The Air line is less powerful than the pro line but makes up for it with portability. The Macbook Airs are thin, light, and have solid state flash hard drives. They come in 11 and 13 inch models. The base 13 inch model was right in the price range I was looking for. Sure it didn’t have the matte screen but I wasn’t going to end up paying extra for that anyway.

About a month after I decided that the Macbook Air was the one for me Apple finally confirmed that the new model was coming out in the middle of July. I had the money I needed saved up and was ready to go. Except I wasn’t. I think it was the “What new thing can I do with this” question. Before I buy any big new piece of equipment I like to prioritize my purchases but asking myself that question. Y’know how sometimes a person can get all excited about an expensive new gadget and when he gets it home it doesn’t seem like a very big deal anymore? I like to avoid that buyer’s remorse by deciding what an expensive machine can actually do for me, or what I can do with it, before I buy it.

That is why I originally decided to buy the iPad first and the laptop second. I thought that I could do something new with the iPad, content creation-wise. Of course now I can’t even remember what those ideas were. Hence no iPad. Now here I was buying a new laptop but there was really nothing new I could do on it. It was a replacement purchase. There is nothing very exciting about replacing something.

I even like my old laptop. I’ve had it for six and a half years. Last year I opened it up and replaced the logic board in it. It’s seen me through a lot of writing sessions. It’s been durable and reliable but eventually it would need to be replaced. It already can’t run the newest operating system and its battery life is down to less than an hour. I hardly even use it on battery anymore so it’s always tethered to the wall. I was ready for a new one. Still it took me a week to actually buy it.

I planned on going to the Apple store a few times before I finally did. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to. It was hard to spend the money I had saved a long time for but why else had I saved it? That’s a strange feeling. After all I didn’t want to spend it on anything else. It’s not like I wanted a jet ski or something instead. I think I was a little annoyed that I had to spend the money. I kept the Powerbook running for a long time and it still was running but nothing lasts forever. Especially computers. There is a difference between “have to” and “want to” but sometimes the line gets blurry. I think it was that blurriness that was bothering me.

Ask anybody today if it’s time to replace a six and a half year old laptop that you depend on and they’ll tell you it is. Yet I was having trouble accepting that. I knew it to be true but that truth was going to cost me a bunch of money. It’s much easier to except truth that doesn’t cost you anything. Yep, it took me about a week to accept that before I went in and handed over my dough. The new machine is nice and I have no buyer’s remorse so in the end it all worked out fine. After I spend more time with it I’ll have to write down my impressions of it. Stay tuned.

Oh, and happy birthday to me.

Sure is hot out there. And here I am to ramble on about a one hundred degree day. I have nothing new to say about the heat though and I prefer to say new things rather than the same old things. Of course everything is probably the same old thing and I’m just fooling myself after all plenty of people have written about plenty of days, hot or otherwise.

I went for a walk in the heat this evening. Ninety degrees out at 7:30 PM. At least I didn’t go out in that one hundred degree heat of the afternoon. Actually I did go out in the afternoon but I wasn’t walking. I was driving. It was cooler than walking especially with the car’s air conditioning on although I didn’t have it on all the time since the drives were mostly short. Too short to use the AC. On short drives I’m often I’m sweltering in the car’s heat waiting for the cool air to kick in. It’s cooler to have the windows open if the drive is short.

I did go for a cycle this morning. I normally cycle after nine AM so I can get a good hour’s worth of work in to start my day and to avoid the rush hour traffic but this morning I left half an hour earlier. It was already eighty four degrees out and I wanted to hit the road before it got even hotter. It was eighty seven degrees out as I finished my ride about forty minutes later. And it was humid too.

My seven year old nephew once asked me why I have two water bottles on my bike. It’s for days just like this one. Normally I only go through one water bottle a ride. I even drink from the smaller bottle. It’s about sixteen ounces with the larger one probably being around twenty ounces. Today I nearly finished both bottles. There was only a little bit of water left at the bottom of each. That only happens a handful of times per summer.

As I was finishing my ride I had a funny moment. Here I was riding through the heat and humidity of a hot summer morning and my mind flashed back to my winter bike rides. This past winter was the first time in my life that I kept my outside bike ride up all season long. The moment I was remembering was when the temperature would dip down to about twenty degrees Fahrenheit and the surface of the water in my bottle would freeze. Though I certainly wasn’t drinking much on those days, I would maybe drink half a bottle, when I needed a sip I’d have to break the ice to get one. That memory made me smile in today’s heat. The world is a wondrous place.

When I ride my bike I never wear headphones but when I walk I do. I walk to get out of the house, break up the day, get a little exercise, and listen to some old Howard Stern Show tapes. They are actually MP3s these days but you get the drift. I also listen to music as I walk but lately it’s been mostly the Stern Show. I can always use a good laugh.

I’ve been a regular listener to the Stern Show since the late 1980’s but I’ve never gone back and listened to old shows before. They sound fresh but can also be nostalgic. People have left the show over the years and sometimes I am hearing once familiar voices that I have not heard in a years. Plus all the show MP3 files have dates on them and as I look at the dates I often think back to what I was doing then. Such is the way with most things that have obvious dates on them. They can be time machines.

I drink a lot of water on my walks too. Often more than when I’m on my bike. My main bike ride lasts about forty or forty five minutes and I drink up the smaller sixteen ounce water bottle. My walks are from thirty to forty minutes and I bring the twenty ounce water container with me. It’s often done as I am returning. I walk during the hotter parts of the day so that probably explains why I drink more than when I cycle but it’s also because I carry the water as I walk. I may as well drink up so the bottle is easier to handle. I also can’t really over-drink as I walk. If I drink too much when I’m cycling I get a sick-to-my-stomach felling for a little while. That doesn’t happen when I walk.

Another thing I did on this hot day was to go out to the diner with a buddy. It was a late lunch and I was, once again, glad to be out of the house. Things have been a little too routine for me lately so breaking the routine can be a relief. Often when I go to that diner I get breakfast. French toast with two over easy eggs right on top is a favorite. A little bit of syrup over them and I’m good to go. I don’t use the butter they provide at all.

But today I went for the hamburger. A cheeseburger to be exact. It hit the spot. I was thinking about getting the cheeseburger deluxe but decided against it. I kind of wanted some fries but I really didn’t have the room for them. I’m not a big eater and it was a late lunch for me. I have gotten the fries before but I have to be sure of it. If I have doubts about if I want them or not I err on the side of not. I’m not big on that after-eating bloated feeling.

That late lunch threw off my teeth cleaning schedule. Though I brush my teeth multiple times a day I floss and rinse right after dinner. Since I had a late lunch I didn’t eat diner. I snacked through it. Nibbled a bit. It’s about 8:30 PM as I write this and I just remembered to floss and rinse. That’s a couple of hours late. I stopped writing this to brush. We’re all creatures of habit.

Besides working on a bunch of paying work today the other thing I did was watch some TV. I had no energy today to get any of my own work done. Well, not more than a couple of minutes at a time. I hit some creative doldrums. The TV show I watched was a couple of episodes of the new season of “Burn Notice”. That’s a show that I usually watch right away but for some reason haven’t this season. I had the last three episodes on the hard drive and checked out two of them. They were good. That show has held up well over the years.

Another mundane thing I got up to today was to check if the patch I put on a bike tire tube held. On Tuesday morning I went to go for my usual bike ride and discovered that my tire was flat. I changed it out for a good tube and went for my ride. It wasn’t until Thursday that I got around to patching that tube and another that had been sitting around with a hole in it. I tested them on Thursday and only one tube held air. I had to patch the other one again and there it sat until this afternoon when I got the pump out to check it. The new patch held. Now I have two spare tubes again. Both have a few patches on them. I’ve been looking into buying some tougher tires.

That’s how I spent my hundred degree day. No great excitement or great insights but at least I didn’t get heat stroke and die. That’s always a plus. It was much like any other day except it was really hot out.

Drawing can be a tricky thing. Or maybe it’s illustration that’s tricky for me. What’s the difference you ask? As I break it down illustration is a subcategory under drawing. At its most basic drawing is putting marks on paper (or whatever) in an interesting way. Illustration means “To show”. So with illustration you have something you want to show and audience and you try your best to show it to them. Illustration is usually commercial so you want to show that your product is the best so you come up with a picture that shows that.

I don’t do much illustration. I mostly draw without having a idea before hand of what I want to draw. I’m looking to pull images out of my head that haven’t been seen before. Something new and intriguing. Or at least a little different than so many things that have been drawn.

Even in my comic strip I did a lot of the illustration ages ago and manipulate those images as I make a new strip. It would drive me crazy to draw the same talking heads over and over. That’s why I came up with an alternative way to make “Four Talking Boxes”. That method allows me to get the strip done. It’s not my creative preference but it’s the only way for the strip to exist. Now I’m trying to find a way to get another comic to exist. “Message-T”.

The main problem that I’ve been having with my “Message-T” comic has been that the drawing is boring me. Conceptually there isn’t much to the drawing. It’s a person standing there as we read the message that’s on his or her T-shirt. Easy to illustrate but difficult to make an interesting drawing of. At least so far.

At first I tried to focus on the character’s faces. That’s what I chose to make interesting. I like drawing faces and making a person’s features out of odd little shapes. My idea was that the shirt would be a billboard while the face would have character. I did pretty well in that respect. I managed to complete about a dozen of the single figure comics. But they still bored me a bit. The faces were only about twenty five percent of the drawing so the rest was fairly dull. I made things more interesting with color but it was not interesting enough to make me do more.

In looking back at those drawings I think I did a nice job but I still have no motivation to pursue them any further in that direction. A few months later, when I bought some marker sets, I tried to find a new method to make the drawings interesting to me. Once again, they were okay but I stopped after two drawings. They took too much time to do and weren’t that good in the end. It was actually a step backwards.

Yet somehow the whole “Message-T” concept wouldn’t leave my mind. Probably because it’s simple and up my alley. I like drawing, I like writing short pithy sentences, and I like mixing words and pictures together. Though oddly enough I never wear Message-Ts. All my shirts are blank. Still, I’ve been thinking about the comic again lately.

My latest idea for the “Message-T” comic came from looking through an old sketchbook. It wasn’t even one of my main drawing books that I go through for most of my images but an odd one that I did some drawing in years ago. There are not many useful drawings in those type of sketchbooks but there were some small figure designs that I liked. People wearing some weird clothes and drawn graphically. Lots of black shapes. I wondered if I could turn those drawings into something. I ended up not turning them into something but it inspired me to draw some new ones like them.

That is when I started making little ink sketches and stopped taking the name of the comic, “Message-T”, so literally. I realized that everyone I draw doesn’t have to be wearing a literal boring t-shirt. They just need some room on their upper bodies for a message. With the new sketches I played a lot more with the positive and negative shapes of the clothes and used solid black to design clothing that wasn’t relentlessly symmetrical.

Most of the women are even wearing dresses. They are a lot more fun to draw as there is more variety in dresses than there is in pants. Pants can make for a real dull drawing. They are usually one solid color and one pair of pants looks much the same as any other. With dresses almost anything goes. Pattern, shape, and style are all in play. “Messages-Dresses” sounds pretty cool too.

Since I took a more graphic approach to the shirts and dresses in this go around I also took a more graphic approach to the color. In the earlier ones I attempted to add a little shading to the T-shirts but it didn’t add much to the drawing. The shirts were flat and symmetrical and a bit of shadow didn’t change much. This time the color was flat but added to the overall design. I think it works better.

The comic still isn’t quite ready to go just yet. I have managed to get four of the new ones finished but there is something I still don’t like about them. I’m not sure what though. I like the comic better than I did before. I even think the new strips make the older ones look nicer. With more variety in the over all look I find the face centered ones more interesting than I used to. I think I’m going to have to get more of the new ones done before I decide if it’s the right direction. But at least I have a direction. That’s always a good thing.

I have pretty good powers of concentration. I can shut things out and get things done. But usually when I work I move in and out of concentration. I can concentrate for a few minutes, relax for a few minutes, and then move right back to concentrating. That’s how I work. It’s not that I’m hard to distract it’s that distraction is part of concentrating for me. As long as it’s the right kind of distraction. Some sort of entertaining distraction.

Of course, my usual distraction is just like everyone else’s. TV, music, or the radio. I like non-interuptive stuff that doesn’t demand I look at it. I listen to the Howard Stern Show, I like music I can sing along with (or ambient music if I find words too distracting), plus I’ll put on some TV shows. Shows I’ve already seen preferably so that I don’t have to pay attention to every little detail. I also like documentaries because the good ones tell a story that I can follow even without looking too much at the TV.

Those are all distractions but they’re the good kind of distraction. I’m in control of them and can pick and choose among them as to which I’d like to hear. Sometimes I’ll put on the TV and it will be irritating so I’ll switch over to some music. They’re all good distractions as compared to a screeching bird. Last summer a couple of hawks of some kind took up residence in some trees along my street. They screeched and screeched all afternoon long to each other. That was an annoying distraction. It was neat for a little while but after a few hours it was enough. They eventually moved on though.

This week I had to put up with a bad distraction. Workers were over working on my home while I was trying to work. Nothing new there. Everyone finds construction at the home/workplace (mine are one and the same) to be a hassle and a distraction. There are people stomping through the place all day and making noise. They might be keeping as small a footprint as possible but they’ll still be a bother. That’s just life.

This week I found the hardest part of workmen being in the house was not concentrating but being able to move in and out of concentration. I actually got a lot done. I worked on a painting and some art cards. It was the painting that was a lot of work. And it was hard. Not hard because it was different than my other paintings but hard because I couldn’t stop concentrating.

When I was working on the painting it was all “Go-go-go”. I was concentrating a lot without moving in and out of concentration. I found it hard to take a break because I couldn’t relax with all the bad distractions going on around me. I had to keep pushing myself to keep going because stopping would just mean irritation. That lead to a real tiring state of affairs.

After the first day of painting I was pretty happy with myself. I got a lot done and the painting was coming along nicely. Then I realized I was having a hard time stopping concentrating. It wasn’t easy returning to the real world. My parents were up and over for diner but I was having a hard time focusing on eating. I was still off in another world that was inside of my head. That was a weird felling. It took me a couple of hours to get back to normal. And I was tired. Brain fatigued tired.

At the start of the second day I was still optimistic but wanted to adjust my concentration a little. I wanted to take more breaks and see if I could relax a little more. I finished the painting that day and it ended up that I did manage to relax a bit more. I didn’t have to come down as far after my day was done. Though it was still real tiring though and it took a lot of will to keep going. That and the knowledge that just sitting there and being irritated was worse. Thankfully the painting came out well. A lot of work went into it.

By the time the third day rolled around I knew I didn’t have the strength anymore for the same concentration I had had the two days prior. I was glad my painting was done. It was easy enough to work on my comic strips that morning because the workmen came late in the morning so I had some peace and quite for a while. After that I decided to work on a photo. It was a little challenging to get my brain to focus but working on a photo on the computer takes me less concentration than a painting. That might be because mistakes are way easier to fix on the computer. I have to think things through visually when I’m painting before I put paint down. On the computer all I have to do is hit “Undo” and the mistakes are gone. Too bad life is not like that.

On the morning of the fourth and final day of the workmen doing their work I was really burned out. They weren’t even there yet and I was irritated. I worked on coloring (with markers) some of my cartoon art cards that get turned into my “Drifting and Dreaming” comic strip. That’s a fairly low concentration task but I could barely do it. I went for a bike ride at 9 AM and hoped that would give me some energy. That worked and I was able to get back to work with a little more zip to my step.

The guys finished up around noon that fourth day and boy was I glad. They did a good job but I was tired and frazzled. That was not their fault, of course, it was just life. I am happy I got all the things done that I wanted to do but that type of concentration takes a lot out of me.

I’ve seen people with that total type of concentration where they go at something for hours and hours. I think it’s actually more common than my type of moving in and out of focus concentration. I’ve also seen people with that type of concentration not want to get started. They procrastinate. I’m not sure if the two things are related but I can see how they might be. That prolonged concentration takes a lot out of you. It hurts. I much prefer my usual method.

Normally I don’t suffer the type of burnout that I had this week. Moving in and out of concentration makes me be able to concentrate for a long time with less effort. After all I don’t have to concentrate on concentrating. I’m not sure why I’m good at that but I learned the value of distracting myself a long time ago and incorporated it into my work habits. It’s served me well. That is as long as nothing else comes along to distract me from being able to distract myself.

It was the middle of May when I went to the Hawthorne Comic Con in New Jersey. I went there mostly for the fun of it. I do a web comic but hardly anyone besides my friends read it so it’s not like I have fans or even that the public has the slightest clue who I am. But this little anecdote isn’t about that. It’s about when little things disappear and then reappear seemingly out of nowhere. Or at least it seems to be nowhere.

Since I was going to be sitting behind a table at the comic con basically doing nothing I decided to bring some art supplies with me. Among those supplies was my set of Copic brush markers. I have a wallet/case for them that is pretty nice. It’s black vinyl fabric, keeps the markers lined up in their slots, and has Velcro to keep it securely closed. A nice holder.

While at the comic con I didn’t do a whole lot of drawing. I mostly socialized with some of the other guests at the con that I know and talked a bit with some of the fans as they ambled by. I did one or two small things and brought the Copic markers out for a moment but they generally stayed in my art supply bag. I passed a pleasant afternoon and then went home.

I can’t remember when it was that I discovered that my orange marker was missing but it couldn’t have been too long after I arrived home. I probably put my art supply bag down on the chair or couch and then emptied it a little while later. It was as I was emptying the bag that I noticed the orange marker was missing from its designated slot.

It was not a big deal as I assumed it somehow slipped from the marker wallet and must be kicking around my art supply bag somewhere. It was after I searched the bag and didn’t find it that I became confused. I didn’t remember using the orange marker at the comic con. And the marker wallet was Velcroed shut. I even went out to my car to search that in case the marker fell out during the ride home. Nothing there. I figured it must have gotten left behind at the comic con somehow.

Flash forward to the end of June. A new Dick Blick art supply store opened up in Paramus NJ about forty minutes from my house. My friend Bob and I decided that we wanted to take a ride there to check it out and get some art supplies. I use their website a lot to buy art supplies so I thought it would be cool to see the store. There are only arts and crafts stores nearby and they have some stuff I need but it’s always fun to go to a real art store.

Since this past winter I stocked up on a lot of art supplies I really didn’t need much stuff but I decided I wanted to try some of Dick Blick’s heavy duty canvas stretchers. Stretchers are pieces of wood that form the rectangular frame over which canvas is stretched. Usually I use light duty ones (they’re a lot cheaper) and reinforce them with cross bars but the painting I wanted to do was forty eight inches wide and that is pushing the limit of light duty canvas stretchers.

In the past I’ve built my own stretchers out of lumber when I’ve wanted to make a large painting but I haven’t done that in a while. It’s a lot of work but cheaper. For two forty eight inch and two twenty eight inch heavy duty stretchers it was around forty dollars. I can buy a lot of lumber for forty bucks so you can see why I haven’t tried the heavy duty stretchers before. But I dropped the money on them this time.

And what was the only other thing I needed from the art store? Oh yeah, an orange Copic brush marker. I hadn’t even used the markers since the comic com but it bothered me that it was missing. It’s the collector in me. Sure it was a tool I used that needed replacing but it was also a collection with a hole in it. That slot was empty in my marker wallet. How annoying. Of corse I was going to replace it.

Then a funny thought ran through my head. Wouldn’t it be strange if after I bought another orange marker the first one showed up again? I had searched all over my studio so the only thing I could imagine was that someone at the comic con saw that I left it behind and somehow returned it to me. That was the only scenario I could come up with for my marker to return and it was pretty absurd. I promptly forgot about it and went and bought my marker and stretchers.

After I got home I put the new orange marker into its designated slot with a sense of satisfaction. All the colors were there. The marker wallet was now full and complete again. Things were as they should be.

Since the markers were now back to normal I didn’t give a single thought to the lost orange marker. That is until a couple of days later I moved my recliner and there was the missing orange marker. It was underneath the chair looking like a lost puppy. It’s not like I hadn’t moved the chair many times in the previous month so it was quite an odd sight to see the marker show up there.

I still don’t know how the marker got out of the marker wallet and my art supply bag but clearly it had fallen into the recliner and stayed there for a month until it was finally dislodged. It’s not a grand mystery or even much of a mystery at all but it is a story of a small and unimportant thing that disappears unexpectedly and then comes back unexpectedly. I find stories like that interesting. Everyone has one but they’re just mundane enough to go untold.

Even with the obvious explanation of it falling out of its case I still wonder how it happened. There were markers to the left, right, and on top of it so why was that the only one to fall out? All the others were secure in their slots. Why wasn’t the orange one? I know it happened but not how it happened. That’s the story of a lot of small things that disappear. They’re not that important so we don’t pay close of attention to them. Then things happen when we’re not looking. Ain’t life funny that way.

The ending to the trying of the heavy duty stretchers hasn’t quite been written yet. Y’see when I got home and went to stretch canvas over the stretchers I discovered that I had no canvas. Since I stocked up on everything else over the winter I assumed I had un-stretched canvas. I walked out to the garage where I keep the canvas and there was nothing there. I buy my canvas on a roll that is about five feet tall so it’s not hard to miss. I was a bit confused.

I now remember that last winter I bought a few medium sized pre-streched canvases plus I stretched a couple of large ones and was planning on painting on them before I bought more canvas. I made paintings on some of them but not all. Before I went to the new art store I was going to continue painting on the already stretched canvases but then I came up with a new image I wanted to paint that had different proportions than the canvases I already had. Somehow it didn’t occur to me to check to see if I had the canvas to go with the stretchers I was planning to buy. Life can be tricky as well as funny.

So there you have it. Two mostly meaningless stories about things disappearing. One came back and one was never really there in the first place. It disappeared but just from my mind.