Radiant Comics

I don’t think there is a single word to describe what I’m feeling right now but it’s being very aware of the passage of time. Nostalgia is the closest word I can think of to describe this feeling but it’s not quite accurate. Nostalgia is looking back at the past with longing and reverence. Nostalgia is remembering the good times and forgetting the bad times. This isn’t that but it’s something like it.

It started with art; as a lot of things in my life do. Back in 2016 I drew my first “Dreams of Things” cover in my “Covers to Comic Books That Don’t Exist” series. I have other titles in that series but that is the one I’ve done the most of. I’m up to cover number 173 at the moment. That’s a lot. I’m coming close to the number 200 and I might get there this year. Approaching number 200 made me contemplate what to do with all these covers.

The first thing that came to mind was to make a digital or print on demand book of them. The main problem with that is demand is zero. But still I contemplate it. That brought me to the thought of how to look at the physical art of all these covers. They were in a pile in a cabinet just sitting there. A pile of 173 pieces of 11×17 inch paper isn’t easy to look through.

As I was looking for a solution to this problem online I ran across some 11×17 sleeve portfolios. These are the portfolios that have 30 plastic pages in them that each fits two piece of paper front and back. That makes a book of 60 pages. Normally these portfolios go for at least $15 a piece but these ones were four for $32. I decided to order a four pack.

When I got them I used three out of the four to put all 173 “Dreams of Things” covers in. That was easy enough. Now I could flip through the pages and watch time pass by as I went from 2016 until the present as the covers went by. Mission accomplished. But I still had one more book. I thought I may as well fill it. But with what?

I actually have four more of these portfolio books that I bought over the years. One for 11×17 inch photos of mine and three for art prints that I’ve made over the last 20 years. Two of the art print ones were filled up but the third was not nor was the photo one. So I dug through my files for prints and photos that never made it into those books.

I also have a new way that I’ve been storing art over the last couple of years. That is in big plastic 11×17 inch envelopes. I found them for a good price a while ago and filled them up with art but bought some more big plastic envelopes just a couple of months ago. The new ones didn’t have anything in them yet so I decided to use them, plus the 11×17 inch portfolios, to organize a lot of the drawings on paper that are hanging around my studio. This lead me down the memory path.

All last year I was working on my illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby.” That means that I have a lot of working drawings piled around the place. They all went into the envelopes. Being that the drawings were all different sizes up to 11×17 inches the envelopes worked better for storing my Gatsby stuff than the portfolios.

With the Gatsby and Dreams drawings out of the way that cleared the way for every other type drawing that I have. And there are a lot of them. I have “Swirl World” drawings and prints, “Painted Lady” covers, “Deep Space” covers, all the drawings from my prints, Message Tee drawings, and tons of other stuff with no big theme. I had to decide which of these were going into that fourth portfolio. Plus I had a bunch of prints and photos to put into those portfolios. I was digging though piles of drawings and finished prints.

Besides 11×17 inches my two main sizes of drawing paper are 9×12 inches and 6×9 inches. I have a lot of working drawings those two sizes. So as I’m going through the 11×17 inch drawings I naturally want to put the 9×12 ones in portfolios too. So I orders four of those for about $24. They arrived in a few days and I started filling them up too. More drawings to go through.

I learned back in my late 20s (in the 1990s) to put dates on my work. Before then I could just remember when I did things but time passes and memories become blurry so I found it best to write dates on things. But that dating didn’t extend to all my working drawings. At least not until about ten years later. So tons of my drawings from before about 2007 have no dates on them. Just memories. I could cross reference them with the finishes pieces (or their scans) but that’s something for the future.

So I’m sitting there going through piles of drawings and they are stirring up memories. When did I draw this one? What was this one for? I remember this drawing! I don’t remember this one at all. This one is from 2008. This one is from 2002 I think. Here is a whole series of drawings that I spent months on. Here are drawings from my comic that has been going on for a decade.

All the drawing tied to their own time. All of these drawings reminding me of the passage of time. They were once all in my present but now they’re in the past. Where did that time go?

I also chose to do all of this organizing of the past during the week leading up to the Super Bowl. As a football fan the Super Bowl is an event that always makes me aware of the passage of time. It’s the end of the football season and another year has gone by. I always get a little sentimental about time at the end of football season but I didn’t even realize that organizing my “Dreams of Things” drawing would lead me down that same path too.

So now I write this and wonder where all that time went. All these drawings were new once and now they’re sitting in unlooked at piles in a cabinet. At least some of them still are. I ordered four more 11×17 inch and four more 9×12 inch portfolios. At least if I can get them into those and they become books on shelves then I can look at them more easily. That might make the past come a little more alive. I’ll have to see.

I finally did it. After a few months of hemming, hawing, and going back and forth I finally bought a new laptop to replace my eleven year old 2012 MacBook Pro. I bought a M2 13 inch MacBook Air. I write “Finally” because I really didn’t want to buy a new one. The old one worked just fine but it could no longer be upgraded. The operating system was stuck two OSXes ago and it could not run any of the Adobe 2023 programs. I’d be stuck forever with the 2022 versions if I stuck with that laptop. That isn’t a problem right now but it will be some day.

The machine alone cost me about $1900 tax included. That’s not a small amount of money to me so that’s why I was hesitant to buy it. Plus is turns out there are lots of little things to be bought with a new computer because cables and connectors have changed over the last decade. The new laptop only comes with four connector ports. One port is for the power cord, one port is for an old school 1/8 inch audio jack (headphones and speakers), and then there are two USB-C ports. That’s it. Nothing else.

All the peripherals (except one) I own are old school USB and won’t fit into the new USB-C ports. So I had to buy some adaptors. I skipped the $60 Apple versions and picked up some smaller three for ten dollar adaptors. I also decided to drop another $21 on a USB-C hub for the laptop. That way I can turn one port into four ports if I need to. I don’t need that hub at the moment but wanted to have it on hand for when I did need it.

I then dropped $15 on a USB-C to Ethernet adaptor. That’s for when I want to hard wire the laptop into the internet rather than using my wireless network. Usually my wireless network is pretty solid but there have been times when doing my Friday night YouTube show (6-9PM every Friday on my YouTube channel) that I’ve had problems and dropped out of the live stream. Plugging my old laptop right in to the router with an Ethernet cable always solved that problem. So I figured I may as well set up that option too with the new laptop.

A peripheral that I bought last year is a TourBox. That’s a little (but heavy) box that has knobs and buttons on it. You can hook it up to your computer and assign macros to the buttons. A task can get done with a button press rather than three button presses. Plus the nobs can be used to control things in Photoshop or any other program. You can turn a knob left or right for fine adjustments.

I have the TourBox hooked up to my desktop and it’s the one USB-C peripheral that I own. I wanted to be able to hook it up to my laptop in case I needed to but it’s inconvenient to unplug the cable from the computer. So I dropped $11 on a new USB-C cable. So now I can unplug the TourBox from the cable, which is easy to get to, and plug in a new cable to hook it up to my new laptop.

Before I bought the TourBox last year I was deciding between it and a Stream Deck. They’re both trying to increase workflow efficiency but the Stream Deck has programable buttons rather than knobs. I went with the TourBox but always liked the Stream Deck too. So, since I was already buying all this computer stuff, I decided to get one. It’s normally $150 but Amazon had an open box one for $90. Plus I had an $8 credit and Amazon would give me a $6 if I bought the Stream Deck. So I did.

One last cable I had to buy for the new laptop took me by surprise. Whenever I’m streaming on Zoom or on Streamyard I use my Yeti microphone and a separate speaker. The speaker is a small Bluetooth one but I hardwire it to the laptop. Otherwise I get interference over the speaker and can’t hear it. I keep the mic and the speaker six feet apart to eliminate echo. My old laptop has the speaker port on the left and the new laptop has it on the right. So my speaker cable is about a foot too short for my new laptop. I had to drop about $9 on a new 1/8 inch jack speaker cable. I wasn’t expecting that.

So far the new MacBook Air is a terrific machine. It’s small and light. It’s about half of the thickness of my 2012 laptop and weighs a lot less. Sometimes I fear that it’s going to slip out of my hands and go flying across the room as I pick it up.

A strange thing about getting a new computer these days is that you can set it up to look exactly like your old one. I used Apple Migration Assistant to copy over all my preferences, apps, info, and files and it’s a great thing. I took about five hours to copy everything over but then my new computer looked exactly like my old one. That’s a little weird. I expect the new computer to look new as it runs but it doesn’t. All my stuff is in the exact place it’s supposed to be. There is almost no set up once Migration Assistant is done. That why I ended up changing all my usual desktop wallpapers. I wanted the laptop to look new.

One final thing that I have to get used to is that my new laptop is black while all the other ones I’ve ever had have been metallic silver. As the new laptop sits on the table next to my chair it looks like a shadow or hole on top of the table. Rather than a reflective object sitting there it’s a light absorbing shape on top of my table. And it shows off fingerprints more than the silver one did. Sometimes all I can see are smudges on a shadow. That’s when I wipe it down and see only the shadow. It’s neater that way.

I’m tired of new things. Especially expensive new things. I say that because I have to buy a new laptop. My old one is still working perfectly fine but it’s over ten years old and won’t update or run the latest stuff anymore. So I have to buy a new one just to keep up. That annoys me.

Before I buy an expensive new piece of equipment I like to ask myself, “What new thing can I do with this new equipment?”. In recent years that question has gotten harder and harder to answer. In part that has to do with how well things have been made over the last ten to twenty years. Gone are the days of computers, phones, tablets, and whatever else we’ve got making improvements on existing technology in leaps and bounds. Now everything is in small increments if at all.

Just last year I bought two new scanners to replace two old scanners. What new things do they do? Well, they do come with nice new cleanup software, so that’s a good thing, but they mostly do the same old thing. The scanners scan art, photos, and negatives. Since the one scanner was broken it was good that I got a replacement but it really just maintained what I was already able to do.

I also just bought a new digital camera. It was one I was planning on buying pre-Covid but then never got around to until January of 2023. Even though I like the new camera it’s really just a convenience. It’s smaller than my old one and is good for carrying when I have to commute to NYC. I did carry my old one and it did take up too much room in my bag so I’m glad I have the smaller one but it really offers me no new options in taking photos. Digital cameras plateaued a while ago.

I’m not the least bit excited about getting a new laptop but it’s a forgone conclusion that I am getting one. As I was thinking about that today my mind drifted to all the old Apple stuff that I still have that is no longer compatible with my current setup. I have a first generation iPod, a couple of old iPads, an old mac Tower, and even an old iPod shuffle. I’ve been meaning to bring a bunch of that stuff to the Apple store to be recycled but haven’t. It’s still sitting around. But it did give me an idea.

I’m probably going to be buying a new laptop in the next month. When I do I might see if I can load an old version of the Mac OS on this laptop I’m using right now. It’s running Catalina at the moment but I want to see if I can load something even older. The laptop was made back in 2012 and I think it came with Mountain Lion. I’m not sure if I can still get that OS but if I can I’ll install it. That way I can run all of that old stuff I’ve got. Imagine that. The new thing I can do when I get a new laptop is to run a bunch of old stuff again.

One of the things I want to buy with my new laptop is an Apple Watch. I haven’t worn a watch in years. With everybody carrying a phone that has the time on it hardly anyone wears a watch anymore. I used to wear one all the time. At least all the time that I was out of the house. But then in 2005 I started mostly working from home so I had almost no reason to wear a watch. Plus the watch I bought in the early 2000s was beginning to give me trouble. It was a white faced watched with white hands and as my close up reading vision started to fail me I couldn’t read the time as easily as I could before. So I stopped wearing that watch all together.

Since I started teaching I’m back to commuting into the city a couple of days a week. I’ve got to catch a train so I have to know the time. I’ve got my phone on me, there is a clock in my car, clocks at the train stations, and clocks on the computers at school. There is no shortage of places for me to check the time and it’s not like I’m ever late because I lost track of time. Yet, I still find myself wanting to just be able to check my wrist for the time. It is still the way that takes the least effort.

The only reason I want an Apple Watch in particular is that it’s large and has an easy to read digital face. I don’t want to have to put on reading glass to tell the time. With the Apple Watch I won’t. Being that the watch is expensive at $250 for the cheapest one I really don’t want to spend the money on one, and probably won’t, yet I still want one.

I was even looking online for regular watches to see if there was one I liked. I’d be perfectly willing to pay $20 for a cheap watch that had some big numbers on it but none of them seem like they can do that. All the watches seem to have small numbers in fonts with terrible legibility. The faces on the Apple Watches look a lot more stylish.

As I contemplate watches I also came to a strange conclusion. Was the only reason that I wanted an Apple Watch because I was disappointed in having to buy a new laptop? After all the laptop offered me nothing new but keeping current but with a new watch I could, once again, tell the time just by glancing at my write. What a strange world I’m living in where telling time with a wrist watch if the hot new thing I’ll be able to do. Weird.

Waiting around for inspiration to hit before you make some art is a bad idea. It’s great to be inspired. Something gets in your head, makes you excited, and then carries you through to making something. Everybody likes when then happens. It makes you feel good and it can also give you great confidence. It can make you feel unstoppable. It’s also rare. Any given morning that I wake up I can be fairly sure that inspiration isn’t going to hit me at 8AM when I head to the drawing board.

More often the opposite happens. After I wake up and hit the drawing board I have no inspiration and no idea what I want to do. Plenty of days even if I’m not inspired I know what I want to do and can eventually get into it as I’m working. But some days it’s hard to do anything.

I also find it hard to do nothing. I’ve got a lot of energy in general so to just sit in a chair and do nothing makes me bored and restless. I know that if I can just get something started I’ll feel a lot better than if I get nothing started. That’s on a typical day. There are some days that I know I need to rest and so I do. I can’t go all day every day without relaxing every now and then.

Today was one of those days when I had no drive and no inspiration. I wanted to do something but I was bored and uninterested in everything. I can still get stuff done on days like that because I always have stuff to do that is in various states of finish. So I decided to marker color one of my “Dreams of Things” covers. It is number 170.

The problem was that I was completely bored by how I usually do things. Just the idea of deciding what colors to put down put me off. I always color these pieces with my Copic markers but I started to think of other things to color them with. For a brief moment I flirted with the idea of coloring them with Sharpie markers but then that seemed like it would make the task even harder. I’ve got a few other marker options but none of those were a good idea either.

I often think of making some of these covers with watercolors but the problem is that I print out the logos of the colors right on the Bristol paper that I use and the printer ink isn’t waterproof. It will smear if I get it wet. The Copic markers that I use are alcohol based so there is not that problem. If I switch to gouache or watercolor I have to figure out a new method of handling the logos.

So there I was staring at the inked cover and wondering what I was going to do with it. Normally at this point I would think about the color, the technique to apply the color, and how to organize the color. Maybe I would want some reds on top, blues in back, and purple and green for the main figure. That’s the sort of stuff I’d think about. In thinking about how to apply the color I’d decide if I wanted smooth color, side of the brush texture, or some dappled color and texture. Once I figured out what I wanted where I’d start working. This time I didn’t even want to think about it. I was that uninspired.

That’s when I got the idea to go with that lack of inspiration and try to create some chaotic color. I usually work towards order with my color but this time I wasn’t going to. There would be no thinking about harmony and defining the space in an organized way through the application of color. I was going to put color down in a chunky way with all the Copic markers in my set.

I started with the red stripe in the bottom third of the background. I used three red markers and put the color in with big chunky side of the brush marks. After that I did the same with the green across the top third in the background. Next I put down the big yellow swirls in the background right above the green. None of that stuff worked together harmoniously but that was okay.

I decided to continue with the background before I bothered thinking about the foreground at all. Right in the middle I decided on a rainbow. I started with red and didn’t even care that it ran right into the red section that was already there. Plus it was barely a rainbow as the blue and violet sections were short. But that added to the chaos.

I added blue dots on the left, blue chunky stripes on top, light violet and pink on top, green and brown on the bottom, and some more yellow on the right bottom. I went with whatever came into my mind without thinking about color harmony and there is no color harmony in that background. It’s all disordered and that’s what I set out to do.

The only idea I had for the foreground figure was that they should be the, sort of, primary colors red, yellow, and blue. Usually when I do that I keep those colors out of the background. But I didn’t’t do that this time. There are reds, blues, and yellows all over this piece. It’s tough to tell the foreground from the background. But that’s what you get with chunky and chaotic color. So that was fine with me.

Usually I use color to arrange the space of one of these colors and that brings order to the dream-like image. I didn’t in this case. My eye finds it hard to move around the image and see it. As a matter of fact I didn’t notice until this very moment that I left the little figure near the top in black and white. That’s chaos for you. I think I’ll keep it that way.

What purchase am I contemplating now? A new laptop. That’s a big purchase and therefor comes with a lot of contemplating. It was about 16 months ago that I bought a new desktop (a Mac Mini) to replace my thirteen year old MacPro Tower. That ran me about two grand and has been money well spent so far. The laptop is a little trickier to decide on.

Right now I am writing this on my 2012 MacBook Pro. It’s working fine except that I can no longer update the operating system. I also can’t update my Adobe programs. That’s really not a huge problem since this is mostly a writing machine and only an art/graphics machine as a backup to my Mac Mini but the lack up being able to update it may be a problem soon.

Already TurboTax has warned me that this years version won’t run on this old laptop and the website of the school that I work at also warned my that my operating system is old enough to be considered a security risk. They must have updated something since I just got that message this week. Taxes and school based stuff are also things that I usually handle from this laptop. It’s not critical that I do that but it is convenient.

I’m getting an Apple laptop because that’s what I know and like. They last a long time too. Ten years later and I’m still using this one. They say Apple laptops are expensive, and they are, but I’ve also priced out Windows machines over the years and if you price one that’s made for art and graphics then it’s around the same price. That’s something a lot of people don’t realize.

I’ve thought about getting a used Mac laptop but I’m unsure if that’s the way to go. I was looking at them on eBay and I found a 2019 model that I liked for about a thousand dollars. That’s about half the price of a new one but it doesn’t have the latest M1 or M2 processor on it. It’s running an older Intel processor and that might limit how long it’s updatable.

If I base my purchase on the idea that the laptop is going to last me from eight to ten years then in doing the math a four year old computer for half the price isn’t that much of a bargain. If it lasts me another six years then how much money did I really save? It turns out that only saves me about $35 a year for six years. That doesn’t look like much of a bargain.

One of the annoying things about buying a current Apple laptop is that they are not upgradable. I can’t take it apart and add more RAM or a bigger hard drive. That used to be one of the things I did. I’d buy a new computer and then upgrade it over the years to make it better. Those days are in the past. Now you’ve got one chance to decide how powerful you want your computer and then it’s set. So choose wisely.

I am also deciding between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. It used to be that the Air was lighter and less powerful than the Pro but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. At least not on the thirteen inch model that I was looking at. These days they’re almost the same machine except the Air has a better camera and the Pro had the Touch Bar and a better battery. I care more about the camera so I’m leaning towards the Air.

The toughest part is deciding on how much RAM I want and how big a hard drive I should buy. The base model has eight GBs of RAM. If you want sixteen GBs then add $200 or if you want twenty four GBs then add $400. This is the only chance you’ll have to add more RAM. The more RAM you have the more programs you can have open and the snappier they will run. I might have to max out the RAM. That makes the price go from $1500 to $1900.

Then we have the hard drive. That’s a tough decision. First of all I have lots of hard drives hooked up to my Mac Mini. Being that I have all of my art and photos scanned I need a lot of space. I have eight external hard drives and about 20 TBs worth of room. Hard drives aren’t expensive these days so it’s good to have the room. They aren’t expensive unless you are buying a Mac.

The base model laptop comes with 512 GBs worth of space on it. That’s half a TB. If I want to upgrade to the 1 TB hard drive that’s another $200. If I want to upgrade to the 2 TB hard drive that’s another $400 on top of the $200. $600 for 1.5 TBs of space is a lot of money. The hard drives inside the laptop are Solid State HDs which are the most expensive of hard drive but still $600 is way above what I could buy one for on my own.

If I could upgrade the machine myself I could buy a 2 TB SSD for between $100 and $200 dollars. That’s what I did with this very laptop I’m writing this on. I actually got this one used from a friend years ago and it came with a 256 GB HD that I immediately upgraded to a 512 GB HD.

I’ve gotten by with only 512 GBs worth of space on this laptop for years but the key phrase is “Gotten by.” That means I have to think about what I put on it and how much space it takes up. I prefer to have so much space that I don’t have to think about that. I just bought another 4 TB external drive for $70 (refurbished) so that I don’t have to think about space as I dump video on it.

I think I might upgrade to just the 1 TB hard drive for $200. That will make the total price $2100. I think I can afford that eventually. I don’t have all the money saved yet so I’m not exactly sure when but I’m going to get the new laptop sometime in 2023. Hopefully early in 2023. I just have to save money and think about it some more.