Radiant Comics

It never ceases to amaze me how I (and probably others too) need just the right tools to get the art job done. Not in a “Right tool for the right job and so you don’t drive screws with a hammer” carpentry kind of way but in a “I need a certain kind, brand, or style of pencil in order to create what I want” kind of way.

I can draw with any kind of pencil at hand but it took me years to discover that I draw best with a soft 4B or 6B pencil. I used plenty of different pencils back in my art school years, including soft ones, but out of school I used a lot of harder leads that were common among the illustrators and cartoonists that were my peers. Why not? They were the ones everyone else used. And I never had any particular affinity for the softer leads in my school days anyway. Soft leaded pencils can be messy and hard to work with. Especially for the beginner that I was. Now I use them every day and hardly ever touch a hard leaded pencil.

The subject of the importance of tools was raised in my mind this week because I began work on a new one panel comic strip called “Message Tee”. The idea is just a drawing of a person in a T-Shirt with a message on it and I wanted to draw some people in T-Shirts. Simple enough stuff but I had a hard time getting it done. Mostly because of paper.

Paper is another interesting tool. There are lots of different kinds. Generally I like paper that’s a little thick. Two ply bristol or 140 lb watercolor paper (300 lb if I’m painting on it) are my usual choices. Sometimes I use smooth paper and sometimes I like a little tooth to it. Paper can be tricky but normally I know what suits me. Most often I use paper in sheets but sometimes I like to work in a book.

That’s another artist’s tool. The sketchbook. It took me a long time to find a sketchbook I really like. All through art school and maybe for ten years afterwards I used a black hard bound sketchbook. Lots of my friends used them and they were always pretty cool. They were durable and easy to carry. I still like those sketchbooks as objects. I just don’t like them as sketchbooks anymore. I don’t think I ever really did.

It turns out that a spiral bound sketchbook suits me much better. It’s uglier and less rugged but has other advantages. The spiral bound book lays flatter and stays in place better that a hard bound one. I was always struggling to keep the hard bound book out of my way as I drew. My left (non-drawing) arm was often twisted at an odd angle just to keep the book open. And a hard bound book takes up twice as much space as a spiral bound one as you’re drawing. It needed a lot of room.

The twice as much space of the hard bound book, i.e. the back of the previous page as you draw on the next one, also messed with my sense of composition without me realizing it. I only discovered that when I switched to the spiral bound one where the pages fold underneath one and other. There was no longer a giant white space above or to the side of the drawing I was working on and I got a greater sense of clarity as I composed. I never realized I was lacking that clarity in the hard bound sketchbook.

So there I was this week looking to draw some characters standing around in T-shirts. I started in a small 5×7 inch book but that turned out to be too small to be comfortable. Then I switched to sheets of paper and photo referenced the people but that turned out too dull. After that I tried a small hard bound sketch book that I had lying around but that was too small and too annoying. Eventually I got one drawing done using a piece of 8.5×11 inch printer paper. Not a paper I usually draw on but sometimes it can get me going.

All this took place over a few days. There was lots of frustration and false starts. Finally after the one drawing on printer paper I went out and got a pad of 9×12 inch drawing paper. I had never used a sketchbook that particular size before. It was spiral bound pad because I wanted to draw in a book. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know but sometimes only a sketchbook will do.

Once I got the book I was off and running. I made four drawings in pretty short order and another four the next day. After half a week of getting nowhere on the project it was pretty amazing getting somewhere all because of having they type of paper/sketchbook that suited me for that project. Why was that the right tool for the right job? I don’t know. But that’s why I’m always trying out new tools, mediums, and subject matter. Who knows what might suit me next that I know nothing about? Gotta keep searching.

Since I got this laptop going again I can’t seen to stop checking eBay for prices on Apple Powerbook G4s from 2005-2006. Twelve inch screen, 1.5 Ghz processor, and whatever sized hard drive. I’m not really sure why I’m even checking since I don’t need another but maybe it’s because I now have a second, broken, laptop that I can fix. Y’know the one I used to fix mine.

Fixing things is fun but with that laptop it’s all a rather silly endless loop. Get another to fix this one and I’ll need a fourth to fix the third. And so on endlessly. I think it’s that old human thing of wanting things even though we don’t need them at all. What would two laptops get me? I can only use one of them at a time. But still it would be cool to fix that second one. Oh, the imponderables of life.

And yet another piece of equipment broke on me this week. My printer. It was an Epson Stylus R1800. It, like my laptop, was also from 2005. But unlike my laptop it could not be fixed. It had to be replaced. It was not a cheap printer either. It’s a photo printer that prints on paper up to 13×19 inches. Those don’t come free with the purchase of some other piece of equipment.

Being that a printer has become an integral part of my artistic process I had to replace it right away. Whenever I draw I am always building a drawing by scanning in a drawing, blowing up its size, printing it out in blue line, and redrawing to my satisfaction. It beats erasing and gridding things up. I can manipulate the drawing and change sizes easily. I’m almost lost without a printer.

I decided against getting another Epson because for the last two years the one I’ve had has been twitchy. I’ve spent way too much time and money (in ink) trying to get it to print correctly. When it did print correctly it could make spectacular prints but too many times I had to deal with lines in my prints from clogged print heads. The R1800 doesn’t have too good a reputation for reliability and I can see why.

That’s why this time I went with a Canon. The Canon Pro 9000 Mark II to be exact. From what I could learn of it it made nice prints and was less prone to clogged print heads than the Epson. The print heads could even be replaced unlike my Epson.

Another thing that I read about and liked was that the Canon printed well on a wide variety of different papers. For some reason the R1800 was bad at this. Sure it made great prints on Epson papers but as soon as you went to another brand problems developed. As a consequence I have a whole bunch of Epson paper lying around and it’s a good thing the Canon can print well on them. I’d hate to have to replace my expensive paper too.

Ink is a pain in the ass expense with all inkjet printers. It costs a lot. The Canon ink is a little cheaper than the Epson but I really have no idea how much is in either cartridge. I do know that I wasted a too large percentage of my ink trying to get my Epson to work. Years ago I tried using a Continuous Ink System (CIS) with my first Epson (a Stylus 1270) and that ended up a disaster.

A CIS is when you hook up bottles of ink to the printer rather than use ink cartridges. Not buying expensive ink cartridges sounds like a great idea but I never could get the thing to work. It leaked ink everywhere and nearly ruined my printer. The tech support at the company I bought it from was no help, blamed me for the problem, and wanted to know why I wouldn’t let them help me. Jerks. I even had to dispute the charge on my credit card because they wouldn’t let me return it. That’s the only time I’ve ever had to do that.

The new Canon works great so far and I’m looking forward to having a reliable printer again. Of course I need to get some more ink for it because I have no Canon backup ink cartridges. Uggg… more money on inkjet ink. The world’s most expensive fluid.

Do you know what I want to learn to do one of these days? Of course you don’t. I haven’t told you yet (boy I’m witty today). I want to learn to sculpt. Nothing complicated. I don’t want to make a statue of David or anything. Just a sculpture of something or other. Of course that has always been my problem with making sculpture. I have never had any idea of what I want to make. I only have had a vague notion of wanting to sculpt something. Vague notions are not a recipe for action.

In all my years of art school I never took a sculpture class. Probably because I was more interested in learning drawing and painting but considering that I had to take bowling, macro economics, and volleyball I question the curriculum in hindsight. I don’t regret not having a sculpture class either because, like I said, I really don’t have much of an idea of what I want to do sculpture-wise.

So why do I want to sculpt something? I’m not sure why. Maybe because it’s the one area of art that I have never dabbled in. A “Grass is always greener” sort of thing. But I also think it has something to do with toys and action figures. Not that I think toys and action figures are sculpture. Sure they employ sculpture to their own ends but it is their own ends that define them. Some people believe art is a perception. I don’t. Art is an object. But I digress.

Still toys remind me of sculpture. And I have some toys sitting around so there is a connection in my mind. I also have a few pieces of actual sculpture lying around. Most of them are really statues rather than sculpture as their point in not artistic but to capture a fictional character in the solidity of three dimensions. It’s the license that is important not the finished product. Once again I digress by getting into the nature of art and commerce but I’m a digresser.

With all this talk of toys maybe that is what I really want to make. I don’t know. It’s a question in my mind. I’ve only ever made one piece in my life that I would consider sculpture. And it’s barely sculpture at that. It’s a bent piece of thick plastic coated white wire that is twisted into the shape of a person’s head and shoulders. It only rises beyond the two dimensional by an eighth of an inch or so and is hardly impressive yet I’ve kept it around for a couple of decades. Why? I guess I kinda like it despite it’s inadequacies as art.

I think my drawing also lends itself to toys. I draw a lot of strange little whimsical characters. They might look good as small toy like sculptures but I’m not sure. I only make them in two dimensions. Three dimensions is a whole different ball game. Maybe that’s why I never got into making sculpture. It’s too defined by what is real. Even if it’s fantastical. My work tends towards the unreal.

No matter what my motivations are for these thoughts going through my head today I’m pretty sure I won’t be making any toys, sculpture, or any thing else three dimensional. It interests me enough to think about it but it doesn’t interest me enough to do it. Very few things exist in that category for me. It’s a strange sort of cranny in my mind. I think I I just like the idea of sculpting something.

The same week my laptop (now fixed) went down so did my XBox 360. Quite the annoyance. I got the “Red Ring of Death” that is now so familiar to XBox 360 owners. I though they had fixed the problem by the time I bought my Halo 3 Special Edition XBox 360 (back in 2007) but clearly they hadn’t.

For those not familiar with the red ring of death it’s when three of the four lights that are aligned in a circle on the front of the machine glow red and the thing stops working. It’s a known manufacturing defect but Microsoft kept churning them out anyway. Some plant in China wanted to save a nickel a console and we all got shafted. Or so the story goes because getting to the truth of all this has not been easy for anyone to find out. I only know what I read on the internet.

Regardless, Microsoft eventually had to extend the warranty that covers that defect to three years because consumer confidence in the XBox 360 was headed into the toilet. And that was after they said the fixed their manufacturing problem. From what I read red rings of death keep showing up anyway.

Every other game console I have ever owned has run flawlessly. And I’ve owned a lot of them. I still have my Sega Dreamcast from 1999 hooked up and it runs great. I don’t have it on often but when I do I don’t worry about it malfunctioning or breaking down. It’s built to last, like most video game consoles have been, and they should be at the price that they cost.

This past weekend I even pulled my Nintendo 64 console from 1996 out of the closet where it had been sitting for over half a decade. I hooked it up, cleaned off some old cartridges, and had 1080º Snowboarding up and running in mere minutes. It’s still a great game too. So you can see why my game console from 2007 breaking down really annoyed me. Before now such a thing wasn’t even a thought.

I had to pack up the XBox 360 and send it off to Texas to be be repaired. That was a hassle in it’s own right. You have to go to the XBox website, register the repair, print out a UPS label, box up the XBox, and get it to UPS. And you can’t box up the XBox in it’s original packaging either, they warn you, because they throw away any packaging they receive.

The UPS label part was the biggest pain. The part of the XBox website where that was allegedly taken care of wasn’t working. I filled out all the forms and when the label was supposed to appear I just got a question mark and notice that it couldn’t connect with the UPS website. It was late Friday night so I e-mailed support and went to bed.

The next morning I got an e-mail back that said they couldn’t help me with that label and I should cancel the repair, call tech support when it opened, and maybe they could help me then. Yeah, maybe. I had no desire to talk to them so I cancelled the repair and tried again. Same result. No label to print.

After that I decided to go with the “We’ll mail you a label” choice. That was another check box on the menu and it said it would take four or so days for the label to get to me. Better than never getting the label, I thought, and set that in motion.

This all happened on a Saturday morning and then Saturday afternoon I got an e-mail from UPS with a label in it from the second time I tried it online. I had already cancelled that repair request so that label was useless to me. I went back to the XBox website and check to make sure my “Mail me the label” was the only one active and the other two were cancelled. Everything looked fine.

I waited a week and never got the label in the mail. The repair status always said “Mailing label” or some such. I cancelled the repair and tried again. This time I got a label to print and all was good. I guess a week makes the difference. I still haven’t received a label in the mail by the way.

And now came the UPS problems. I never ship things through UPS so I wasn’t sure where a drop point was near me. I decided to try and use the UPS website to get a pick up but that was a failure. There was no place to indicate it was a prepaid package. I needed a check or someone’s UPS account number in order to schedule a pick up. It was a bit baffling. A couple of days later I finally got the chance to track down a local checkpoint and dropped off my package. It all seemed so easy in the end.

It’s a week later and the XBox website still hasn’t indicated it has my XBox. The website states that I should have it back in two to three weeks but I think that blizzard may have slowed it down. That and I haven’t seen much to fill me with confidence before now.

The irony is that I hardly play any video games on my Xbox 360. I mostly use it for streaming video from my computer. That’s why I miss it most. It connects with my computer over my network and any videos I have on my computer I can play on my TV via the Xbox.

Without the XBox I have been using my DVD player. What’s cool about the player is that it reads digital files off of a hard drive or SD card. I can’t network it with my computer but I can copy the files over to an SD card. It’s kind of neat playing video on my TV off of the same card that goes into my camera. How futuristic.

All in all I want my XBox up and running again. I’d like to stream things again. Plus I still want to find a good game to play on it. We’ll see if that happens anytime soon.

I am a bit tired today but have quite the sense of accomplishment as I am typing this on my newly restored laptop. Last week I regaled you with the tale of my laptop going down and the choices I faced in buying a new one, fixing the old one, or buying a used one. Turns out I did both of those last two.

First off I decided not to drop fifteen hundred dollars on a new one. Mainly because whenever I decide to get a new computer I spend at least a year saving up for it. I just spent all my money on a new car in October and therefore had none saved for a new laptop. I don’t like to spend money I don’t have.

I also wanted to see if I could get away cheaper than the $400+ it would take to fix mine at the Apple store. That also seemed like a large chunk of money. I also considered that the price of the logic board I needed to replace was about $300. I think that was even for a used logic board. After all, they don’t make them new anymore.

I then checked on Ebay and watched some auctions for a few days. My model (2005 12” G4 Powerbook Aluminum 1.5 GHz) was going for about $350 give or take fifty bucks. Some were souped up with programs (which I don’t need), RAM, and bigger hard drives and those were the more expensive ones. I bid on a couple of nice ones but they went over my $300 limit.

After that I decided to go for a crappier, cheaper one and strip the logic board out of it. A bold decision that I hoped I wouldn’t regret since I had never done anything like that before. But I had walkthroughs of the process on YouTube to help me. I got one for $236 with the shipping included. The screen was a little battered, the battery useless, and there was a problem with a speaker but I didn’t need any of those parts.

I hate to complain about the Post Office since they generally do a good job. I’ve mailed things Priority Mail to California that got there in two days and another package that got to Hawaii in three days. That is amazing. But what is also amazing is that it took the same Priority Mail three or four days (I’m not positive which) to get the package from Danbury CT to my house in Rockland County NY which is only 50 miles away. It went from Danbury CT to Kearney NJ to Bethpage NY (on Long Island!?) back to Kearney NJ and finally to me. Aren’t tracking numbers great?

I got the package, opened it up, and turned the computer on. The speaker made a weird buzzing sound like the seller said and then muted itself like the seller said. I went in and messed with the sound settings and then the buzzing sound came back on and wouldn’t stop. Any thought about using this battered one and not rebuilding mine was driven out of my head by that loud buzzing noise. Time for action!

I decided to take mine apart first so I got a whole bunch of little containers to keep track of the screws. There are a lot of little screws. I had to remove about 30 screws just to get the case off and have access to the insides. I wouldn’t call the whole process hard but it takes concentration and in generally annoying. So many little screws of all different sizes to keep track off. They don’t make it easy.

I followed the YouTube videos step by step. Once I got the case open I removed the hard drive, DC-DC board, the modem, the heat sink, the rib cage, and finally the logic board (remove the Airport card first! They didn’t tell me this and it caused me trouble). Each part involved unscrewing screws and unhooking cables. It took a a steady hand, quite a bit of concentration, and repression of the fear of breaking things.

After I got mine apart I went to work on the second one. Since the screws were so confusing I took a different approach. This time after I took out a screw I taped it to a piece of paper and wrote a description on where it came from next to it. I’m glad I did this because with the first laptop even with the screws in separate containers I was getting mixed up. I was having a have a hard time telling exactly where they came from.

So I got both the laptops apart, grabbed the good logic board, put it in my laptop, and then put it back together again. Cables, screws, and my head spinning. I now had either one working laptop or two broken ones. I fired it up and nothing happened. Then I put in my original OS install disc and tried booting from that. Oddly enough the machine then booted from the hard drive and told me the disc was unreadable. Plus the track pad didn’t work nor did the airport card.

I decided to shut down and check my connections. I opened it up again and made sure all the cables were properly connected and everything was seated in place. I fired it up again. The disc could be read, the wireless card worked, but still no trackpad. I booted from the CD and used Apple hardware test to check things out. All the parts were good. Phew. I opened it up one more time to check things out and when I put it back together the keyboard didn’t work. Turns out I forgot to attach its cable. Whoops. But an easy fix.

This whole process took about three to three and a half hours. There were times when I had just wished I bought a new/used laptop and never started messing around with this one but when everything, except the track pad, was up and running I called it a night with a nice sense of satisfaction.

The next morning I reinstalled and updated my software and then decided to try and get the track pad working. I did a safe boot, zapped my PRAM and even reset my PMU (power management unit). This is what worked years ago when I had track pad problems but it didn’t work now. With everything else running fine I decided to remove the keyboard (only seven screws) one more time to check my track pad cable connection. I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Forcefully. Upon restarting the laptop the track pad worked! Huzzah! Everything was up and running again.

My biggest complaint about the whole process is the keyboard keys. In order to remove the keyboard you have to pop off four keys. The problem is that the “Popping off” process can easily break the thin plastic mechanisms that hold the keys on. Two of the mechanisms were already broken as I took them off. Now two keys aren’t properly attached. It’s annoying.

But anyway it took some doing and $236 but I have my machine back, some spare parts in case I need them, and a sense of satisfaction that I got it done myself. I hope it keeps running for a while. I’ll let you know.