Radiant Comics

I hardly ever look at snapshots that people post on the web. I’m on Facebook a lot but it’s mostly to communicate with far away friends. Sometimes I will take a peek at old snapshots that a friend has posted but I’ll hardly ever look at new photos. I joined some snapshot sharing website ages ago but never go on it. The reason is that most people take bad photos and even if they take some good ones that don’t know to edit the bad ones out. That’s always they way it’s been with snapshot photography but with the advent of Facebook and other sites it’s easier than ever for people to share their awful snapshots. Most people don’t know their pictures are bad and I don’t blame them for wanting to share their photos but I don’t look too often. But lately I’ve been noticing a change in snapshot photography.

The change mostly has to do with camera phone photography and the filters available on the camera phones. “Hipstamatic” is an example of one for the iPhone. It was sometime in the late 1980’s when I first heard of “Lomography”. You see, the Lomo was a cheap Russian camera that was making it’s way over to the West. They supposedly had nice glass but were also plastic pieces of crap and were prone to light leak and had other flaws. But that’s why people liked them. When you shot with a Lomo you were not always sure what you were going to get. This appealed to a certain group of people who weren’t into the photographer’s usual attempt to control things in order to make a photo.

I never shot with a Lomo but it sounded interesting to me. I decided when I first picked up a camera that I wasn’t going to try and control everything like a normal photographer but would work with what I got. I get enough of trying to control everything when I paint or draw and so am a little more losey-goosey when I take photos. As a consequence my photo aesthetic isn’t the same as a lot of people’s. Blurry is as important to me as clear focus. And not blurry in a “Controlling depth of field” way but blurry in a more random and unexpected movement way.

Most photography is about control. Control what’s in focus and what’s out of focus. Control the light and shadow. Control the color and the grain. Control, or at least appear to be in control of, your subject. All of this has leaked down to the snap -shooter as “Turn on the flash, face the camera, lean in, and smile. Half of the photos on Facebook show people with big toothy grins and they are all leaning into the center of the camera despite there being plenty of room to fit them all in. This is a legacy of the days when cameras didn’t have wide angle lenses like almost all snap shot cameras have now.

What I’ve noticed lately is that the old snapshot aesthetic is starting to change. What Hipstamatic and other camera phone apps do is mimic the random light leak and other faults of cheap cameras like the Lomo. They mimic the old 1970’s film look too and plenty of other strange things. All live, simple to use, and on you iPhone’s nice screen. And then upload it to the web on the go. No computer needed. People are having fun with it and it’s creating a new aesthetic. Blurry, grainy, casual, and candid are gaining ground. All tools I like to use in my photo toolbox.

There is also a bit of backlash against Hipstamatic pictures too. After all, it has “Hip” right in it’s name and hipsters annoy some people. It’s not a surprise because there was a backlash against Lomography too. Most photographers spend all their time trying to be in control of what their photo is going to look like. That takes a lot of time, effort, and skill. You have to envision what the photo will look like, plan the steps you need to do, and have the technical skill to make that vision into a photo.

Now along comes another photographer who says to heck with picture taking skill I’m going to take a lot of pictures with my unpredictable camera and see if any come out interesting. The skill is in the editing. Choosing which pictures are good. Of course the photographer who uses all his skills before the editing is a bit flabbergasted because this other way of photography downplays a traditional photographer’s skill set.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret. The first photographer is using the law of averages to his advantage just like the second one is. Though he plans out and sets up his shot he also exposes a lot of frames of film. He doesn’t press that shutter just once. The law of averages is your friend in photography. If I could paint the same picture a dozen times in the time it takes to paint one and pick the one that came out best I’d have a lot more good paintings. That’s just the way the medium of photography works.

An interesting old time example of the blurry, grainy, casual, and candid aesthetic that I mention can be found in an old TV show I’ve be watching recently. The opening credits to “The Rockford Files”. I never really noticed before a few weeks ago but the opening has no moving pictures in it. It’s all still shots as the music plays and the camera pans and zooms on the still shots. And the pictures are a mixture of blurry, grainy, casual, and candid. Notice it the next time you watch the show.

So despite me occasionally reading some random photographer poo-pooing Hipstamatic photos people continue to take them and embrace a new snapshot aesthetic. I hope it catches on even more because me poo-pooing the old snapshot aesthetic certainly hasn’t decreased the number of bad photos by any significant amount. Maybe technology can succeed where I have failed.

I had a hard drive failure this week. Not my first one ever but always a pain. Being that I have four internal and two external hard drives connected to my computer it’s no big surprise when one of them fails. The first clue to a drive that’s about to let me down has always been the same. It starts not mounting properly. I turn on my computer and it doesn’t show up. I then have to turn the drive on and off and plug it in a few times to get it to mount. Don’t ask my why this works.

As soon as the drive didn’t mount in the morning I got on the internet and ordered a new one. I seem to always hope that drive isn’t failing and it’s some other problem causing the drive not to mount but my hopes have consistently been dashed. I’ve learned my lesson.

I ordered the new drive on a Wednesday and it was supposed to arrive on the following Friday. My plan was to just keep my computer on for two days so the drive wouldn’t have to mount again. I’m not sure why I thought that as long as it was mounted that it would be fine but that was my plan. It was the drive that held my paying work so I copied the most recent data that I needed to a backup drive but didn’t copy the whole thing because that would take more drive juggling than I cared to do. All these big drives with large files can make backing up hard to do. I have to make choices about what data is really important.

A snow storm ruined my plan by stranding my hard drive in an airport somewhere. Now the drive wouldn’t arrive until Monday. Oh well. Over the weekend my computer developed more problems. My USB devices stopped being seen by the system unless they were powered up on startup. So I had quite a few extra startups and the bad drive didn’t always mount. I ran some utilities to try and figure out my USB problem and found out that I had some disc permissions that were un-repairable. Upon consulting various message boards I thought this was causing my USB problem. Turns out it wasn’t.

The drive that was failing wasn’t even a USB drive. It was my one Firewire drive. That’s why I didn’t suspect it. And my hope that it wasn’t really failing was still going strong too. Now that I think about it I’ve never had an internal drive fail. It’s always been external drives that let me down. I wonder why that is? Anyway, after trying many different ways to fix my unfixable disc permissions I figured the only way was to reinstall the system. This I didn’t want to do so I decided to just wait until my new drive arrived and deal with that problem first.

By the time my new drive arrived on Monday the Firewire one was really being twitchy about mounting. That was when I had wished that I backed up the whole thing a few days earlier. Not that I would have lost anything too valuable since all my current work was backed up but I didn’t want any surprises. Surprises and computers do not go together well. My bad drive was at the point where it would mount but if I tried to open a folder on it the system would crash. That’s when a drive is useless.

Carbon Copy Cloner came to my rescue though. That’s a program that let’s a person copy the entire contents of a drive onto another drive. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work on a drive that was too far gone for me to just drag and drop copy but it did. I set it up to copy overnight and I’m glad of that. It took over ten hours to copy the 500 gig drive. I’ve used Carbon Copy Cloner before and I don’t think it took that long but I guess the failing hard drive made things go slower but at least they went. Everything was saved. I wasn’t sure if that was going to happen.

My two external drives are my Backup drive and my Stuff drive. The Stuff drive was the failing one. The new drive I bought was a two terabyte drive that I wanted to use as a backup drive since I didn’t actually need more room on the 500 gig Stuff drive. After I copied the failing Stuff drive onto the new 2T drive I had to back up the Backup drive and copy the stuff from the Stuff drive onto the old Backup drive which would become the new Stuff drive leaving the new 2T drive available to become the new Backup drive. It’s all a little confusing. Let’s just say that I spent a lot of Monday and Tuesday copying files. Oh, the excitement.

After all that was done my Stuff drive was back to normal and I had a large new Backup drive. I decided to finally tryout Apple’s Time Machine program that automatically backs files up. I’ve always backed up files without a program’s help. To backup I would periodically drag and drop important files onto my Backup drive. That worked for me.

I’m not sure how Time Machine is going to help me. I’ve never really lost any files and had to go retrieve them. I’ve had hard drive failures but have always managed to get the data off of the drives before they went. And the only hard drive that I have Time Machine backing up right now is my main internal drive that my system runs off of and holds all of my artwork. I guess that’s good for peace of mind but I’ve never had an internal drive fail or had any need for returning a document to the state it was in a week ago. But I guess not needing a back up is a good thing. Time Machine runs in the background anyway and, hopefully, won’t ever bother me.

Oh, and after that old failing drive was unplugged from my computer my USB problems went away. I guess even though it was a Firewire drive it was messing with something in my USB chain. I still have those unrepairable disc permissions but since they don’t seem to be causing any trouble I’ll just let them be. I don’t want to have to install the system again. So I won’t.

So far I’ve managed to keep on cycling all throughout this winter. Despite December being exceptionally cold and January being exceptionally snowy I’ve managed to get in three or four days a week out on the roads on my bike. I have to say it really helps keep the winter blues away. The winters get blue because I don’t get outside and do anything. Cabin fever can set in. Getting out and cycling blows up that cabin fever. Especially if the sun is shining.

The snow has been more of a problem than the cold this month because there has been so much of it. And because I’ve learned how to dress to cycle in the cold the temperature hasn’t been a problem. Of course I can’t ride in the middle of a storm but the residential roads I ride on have been pretty well cleared of in the day or two following snowfall. Except for this last storm. I think there is just no place to put the snow anymore so it’s creeping out onto the road surface. I need another day of sunshine and above freezing temperatures to clear the road a little better but that might not come right away.

The main problem after this last storm was people cleaning off their cars and driveways into the road long after the plows were gone. A lot of people just didn’t bother to dig out until a day after the snow. And then a lot of it ends up in the road. People just drive their snow covered car out into the street and then clean it off but leave the snow where it fell. It saves them from having to clean up but it puts snow and ice in my path. Of course they’re not thinking about cyclists since it’s the middle of winter and I think I’m the only cyclist out on those particular roads.

The only warm-ish week we’ve had this winter was the first week of January. In the afternoons it even reached up into the forties a few times. Since there wasn’t the snow there is now I even switched back to my warm weather route for that week. It was fun to have all my big hills back and do one big loop instead of three laps. It made me think that I might be able to ride that route at other times this winter. Maybe I still will be able to but after a snow storm per week and about two to three feet of snow on the ground at this moment I doubt it.

I’ve run out of room to put the snow in my driveway. It’s become much narrower than three weeks ago. After the first or second storm I commented on Facebook at how the geometry of the piles of snow looked cool in my driveway. I had all the edges neat and straight. Not anymore. Now the snow is piled up anywhere it can fit.

I have a John Deere LT155 lawn tractor that in the winter gets a snow plow put on its front. That’s what I clear the driveway with. It sure beats shoveling. My driveway is also a hill and when the snow is deep it takes a while for the tractor to be able to make it to the top. I usually push the snow to the left and the right of the driveway as I make my way to the top but this last time there was little room to the left and right to put the snow. So, of course, I couldn’t put it there.

After a whole lot of banging against the snow with the tractor and plow and moving it little by little I made it to the top of my driveway. I then had to push all the snow down to the back of the driveway. That was the only place left with any room. There was already plenty of snow there but a shorter driveway was better than a narrower one. It’s also tough to see at the top of the driveway and I didn’t want to add to that problem.

There is a fence across the back of my driveway that separates it from the back yard. I push the snow up against the fence and usually after a snowfall or two the snow builds up until piles up about three feet off of the fence. Right now the snow is piled out at least seven feet from the fence. And it’s two to three feet deep. Another couple of feet and the snow bank will be parallel with the edge of my garage. That has never happened before and I hope we get some melting before it does. But it looks like more snow is on the way.

I think it’s actually easier to cycle out there than to walk right now. Since I’m riding on purely residential roads there are very few cars and I can ride out in the middle of the street most of the time. It’s pretty clear out there. But the sidewalks are a bit different.

I live across the street from a church and school so the sidewalk across the street from my house is generally well kept. Usually they have a plow clear it off but there has been so much snow this month that a whole team of guys with snow blowers, shovels, and this small front-loader-thing have been on the job clearing the sidewalk. I can walk down my street, which is maybe a third of a mile, but then there is no place to go.

I could turn up and walk the streets that I bicycle but there are no sidewalks up there. The snow and ice on the side of the road plus the fact that in winter I often walk after dark means that I don’t walk up there. Usually I turn the other way onto a main road that has a sidewalk but that thing is not always well kept. I walked that way a couple of days after the first big storm and it was tough going. And that was in the daylight. It’s three storms later and I haven’t been back that way since. I’l stick with bicycling. Here’s to the spring thaw.

It’s weird. I’m back in one of my non-finishing stages again. By that I mean that I haven’t had the level of concentration necessary to decide on what piece of art I want to make and then make it. Start from the beginning and do all of the steps necessary to get to the end. It’s tough to finish things sometimes. And do you know what gets in the way the most? Thinking about how to make money. Of course. That’s why people get steady jobs. To not have to ever worry about how to make money. That’s why people stay at the same job forever even if it makes them miserable. To not have to think about how they will make money.

I’m not even in any kind of money trouble right now. No more than my semi-broke self ever is. I just go through periods where I think about how to make money off of my artistic skills. Every artist does. I’m just really bad at creating art when I’m thinking about money. Because that requires thinking about what other people want or like. I can do the thinking but not the executing.

It’s strange but if you want to get my creative process to totally short circuit then just get me thinking about creating something to be popular. I know some people can do it. They have their finger on the pulse of what people like. I don’t. Even when I think I do, when I think I have an idea that could be embraced by the masses, my execution is flawed. I’m just not a populist. I prefer going places with my art that not many people go to. I like images that no one has seen before. Odd off kilter things. Things that may make you vaguely uncomfortable. Unfortunately that’s not the path to fame and glory. People really aren’t fond of uncomfortable.

In pondering what makes thinks popular and profitable I’ve run into one main conclusion. Besides the conclusion that there is no formula for popularity and success. If there were then everyone would be doing it. No, the main thing I noticed is that if you want to be popular then make your comic/blog/movie/whatever about something that is already popular. A “Star Wars” parody is going to get a lot more interest than jokes with no pop culture tie-in. People like what they already like. Give them more of what they like and even if they don’t like it they’d rather have that then something unfamiliar. It’s a tough nut to crack.

If only I had any interest in pop culture. But I don’t. I’ve tried to. I have some interest in pop culture in that I watch TV, read books, and watch movies but I have no interest in creating art based on someone else’s stuff. I’ve dabbled a little in it but it ended up seeming pointless to me. I love comics but every time I’ve tried to draw Batman or some such character I get bored with it halfway through. I get a little disappointed when I see artists whose quirky stuff I like draw Spider-Man or whoever. It’s never very interesting. I know they’re doing it for the money and I don’t begrudge them but I’m a little tired of pop culture dominating everything.

So all week I’ve been distracted dreaming up my get-rich-not-so-quick-schemes. I haven’t finished a thing. The key to finishing anything is deciding on finishing it. That can be tough because I have to see the value in finishing it. A work has to have some meaning and sometimes things just don’t have any meaning. That’s what keeps a lot of tasks from being accomplished in this world. Someone ceases to see the reason in accomplishing it.

I have been making some drawings though. For some reason, even when I can’t finish anything, I can work on drawings. It’s, in part, because they are, by their nature, not finished pieces. A drawing is a road map to a finished piece. It can be just a piece of the map too. A drawing doesn’t have to be thought about from end to end because that’s not it’s nature. It’s just a glimpse into what might become a piece of art. There’s no pressure to it. Sometimes this part of the process can be more of a craft than an art so I can just get lost in the building of a drawing. I just have to make it interesting. I don’t have to make it good.

My drawing process also has something to do with why I can work on drawings even when I am distracted. I do a lot of small spontaneous ink drawings in my sketchbook and then I mine them for ideas. When I can’t concentrate on coming up with something finished I can still see the spark in an old sketch and fans the flames a bit with some new drawing. It’s reaction rather than action but sometimes it’s easier to just react.

So that’s been my week in the world of creativity. There wasn’t a whole lot of it but I still managed to get a bunch of drawings done. Maybe they’ll even get their chance to be turned into something finished. Someday.

I think I may have it. After a previous blog about drawing badly I may have figured out how to draw well with markers. Or at least figured out a finished marker technique that I like. It’s the same technique I was using last week but it seems to be working out better now. I know what I’m doing with the markers a bit more. That and I think I’ve finally reached a critical mass of markers. I’ve got enough variety of types to make a variety of marks.

I’ve always been one to try out new pens and pen sets. I don’t always find anything real to do with them but I find it fun to try new things. It’s strange because sometimes I don’t really “Get” a tool until years after I’ve bought it. I can remember when an art store near where I worked at the time was going out of business. The store had a sale on pen nibs. That’s the kind of pen that you dip into ink and draw with. I think the nibs were a nickel a piece and I bough about twenty different types. I tested them out a bit but it wasn’t until years later that I discovered I really liked one on the pen nibs. Of course the store was long gone, the nib some strange brand, and I never found one again. They were only a nickel so maybe I should have bought a couple of each. Oh well.

I’ve been buying marker sets for the last year or so. Some cheap ones like Bics and Sharpies and some more expensive professional ones like a set of Faber-Castell Pitt pens, Blick markers, ShinHan Touch markers, and a couple of Copic and Chartpaks. I also have a set of Koh-I-Noor ball point color sketching pens that I’ve never done much with. All of these pens have combined into a finished drawing technique that I mostly described last week. Except now I’m using the Koh-I-Noor pens to add a hard edge where I want one. Marker in layers, hatching with color, white charcoal to work back to lighter tones, and ink pen for a small bit of hard edging. There you go.

I still only have that technique worked out in blue. I don’t have the necessary amount of markers to go full color just yet but I want to buy some Copic Sketch markers soon. I like the brush tip on the Copic Sketch markers more than any other brush tip I’ve tried. I also like the brush tip on the Faber-Castell Pitt Big Brush markers too. I might get a few more of them. I’m now into expensive marker territory but I think I’ll actually use them.

I want to do some cartoons in marker. I was working on a, sort of, gag a day cartoon but it’s been on the back burner. It’s my “Message Tee” strip which is really just drawings of people with strange sayings on their shirts. I might do some of them in marker. The problem I’ve been having with the cartoon is finishing the color. I enjoy drawing, inking, and coming up with slogans but did not enjoy coloring them. I colored them on the computer in a basic sort of way but I wasn’t happy with the strip so I shelved it.

After doing a few marker drawings at five by seven inches I decided to test if I could scale up the size. I grabbed a couple of my Message Tee drawings and printed them out at about eight by ten inches to see what I could do. Even though the size of the paper was bigger I kept the scale similar to the five by seven inch size and so was able to do a nice job with the markers on the larger drawings. It wasn’t, as I feared, scaled up too far.

It’s when I tried to integrate type that things went sour. The type wouldn’t integrate. It stood out as too mechanical. I did a few of the usual tricks to make the type look less mechanical but nothing quite worked. I thought of drawing the type on the person’s t-shirt but the letters are too small for nice hand lettering. At least mine. As a test I ended up drawing short sayings onto the shirts. That worked fine but I want longer sayings. I’m still unsure of that solution.

A funny thing happened when looking back at the color I’d done for the Message Tee drawings. I’d grown to like it. It wasn’t bad. It was basic but I’d done a nice job of making things interesting with some color design. So now where am I? Good question. I found a technique I like for doing finished drawings in marker and thought it would be a good solution to a gag a day strip that left me unsatisfied but it turns out the marker technique doesn’t integrate well with type but the original color solution for the strip works better than I thought. Hmmm. Well I guess it all beats the heck out of feeling frustrated because I made some bad drawings. Either way I think I’m going to start posting “Message Tee”. Sometimes you just have to stop being a perfectionist and start doing things.

One of the things I do want to do is sit in a park and draw with my markers. I think they will make good drawing-in-the-park tools. I have painted in the park with my gouache set before but that requires water and water bottles. Plus a rag for wiping the brushes on. A marker I can just uncap and have instant color. I think that will be cool. Of course I have to wait until the Spring to find out.