Radiant Comics

I’m doing something a little unusual today in that I’m writing about a piece of art that I just finished. I literally finished it under five minutes ago as I sit down to write this. I think I’ve written about stuff that I’ve finished the day before or maybe even the same day but not five minutes later. It seems kind of strange to sit down and write with no contemplation time. I guess this is the contemplation time.

This piece is another in my series of “Covers to Comic Books That Don’t Exist.” It’s “Dreams of Things” number 165. I just finished the marker coloring on it. It finished the inking on it two weeks ago. It’s strange because last week I went to marker color a cover, picked this one up off the pile, realized I had skipped over cover 164, went to look for 165, and found that I had never inked #164.

It wasn’t any big deal that I had skipped #164 in that I could always marker color #165 and then get back to #164 but for some reason I felt the need to do them in order. I’ve done these covers out of order many times before but this time that seemed undoable. So last week I inked #164 and then marker colored it the same day.

With this one (#165), as I often do, I worked on the background first. In this case it was easy to start that way because there isn’t much background. I went literal with it too. Though there are two sections of sky, one on top of the other, I went with the color blue for both of them. Three stripes of color make up both skies.

After the sky I colored the pyramid and the ground. I kept them both close to reality. The pyramid is a brown that makes it look like some kind of sandstone and the ground looks brown like sand. The brown of the pyramid has a reddish tint to it but I gave the ground a greenish tint. They also both have lots of vertical lines in them to match the sky.

The next thing I colored was the flaming hair. I decided that it should be orange but I wanted some dark reds in there too. This part was probably the easiest part of coloring the piece. I used two sets of stripes of red, orange, and yellow and then blended them at the end. In terms of technique and color choice this part was easy. I wish everything was as easy to do as this was.

I had a problem after I did the hair in that I had no idea what I wanted the color of the face to be. Usually colors suggest themselves to me as I’m thinking about a piece but this one wasn’t giving me much. I finally settled on a dark purple and picked the darkest purple that you can see in the piece and started with that. I filled in where I thought the darkest purples should go. After that I dropped in two more purples.

One thing that I decided on when contemplating this drawing is that I would have sections of the face where color butts color with no black line between them. I don’t usually do this but within the wide open areas of the face I wanted a little more color variety than I would have if I stayed in the lines. Instead of having one flat color I ended up with two magentas and two greens making a really weird combination.

The first face color that I put down was the lighter green. I outlined the outside of the face and eyes with it and made some shapes that followed the general contours of the features. I don’t usually draw in color like this so I was flying by the seat of my pants. After the light green was in I drew in a darker green.

It was at this point that I decided to pair the greens with magentas. This is a weird choice for me and not a pairing that I’ve worked with a lot. Magenta and green are contrasting colors and stand apart from each other rather than blend together harmoniously. But it was a strange face with a lot of open space in it that didn’t lend itself to shading so contrast was my choice.

First I put in the light magenta much like I put in the light green and then I filled in what was left with the darker magenta. A little marker tip for you since it helped me lay down these face colors. When using markers use them like you would brushes loaded with paint. Think about your brush strokes and the direction of them. Follow the form of the drawing with your markers. Never scrub color in with the markers but instead fill areas by following the form and then hatching across the form if you want the color richer.

I added a little bit of shading around the edges of the form and colors but if was here when I decided to use stripes of color in the magenta. I thought that it needed a pattern to give it more visual interest and since the magenta ended up being the dominant color that’s where I put the pattern. I used a darker magenta and then a purple to make the side of the brush jagged stripes. I added a few stripes into the green where I thought it needed it.

At some point during all this I thought that the eyes should be grey. I rarely make grey eyes but here it made sense to me. I added light blues, reds, and yellows to the white of the eye to not have it be so glaringly white. The eyes were one of the last things I colored.

So there you have it. The one hundred and sixty fifth of these covers that I’ve made. That number is getting pretty big. I’m going to have to put them all in a book one day. We’ll see.

What am I doing today you ask? Well, I’m watching my NY Giants lose to the Philadelphia Eagles and scanning some old family negatives. But now I’m taking a break from scanning to write a little bit about… scanning. I’ve been writing about scanning quite a bit lately.

Earlier in the year I bought a new film scanner. A Plustek 8300i. I wrote about my thought process in deciding to buy it here (New Film Scanner) but now that I’ve really had a chance to use it and make multiple scans I wanted to mention it again. And mention that I like it. I like it a lot. It makes better scans than my old one and it makes them more quickly. I’m not sure of the exact time but it’s somewhere around a minute a scan rather than four minutes a scan.

The one drawback to the new scanner is that it doesn’t have a motor like the old one. I have to physically move the negative holder between scans. This means I have to hit the scan button four times to make four scans as compared to my old one where I pushed the scan button once and it made four scans. That seems a little bit primitive to me.

Of course, moving the film holder by hand might make the scanner last longer since what broke on my old scanner was it’s ability to line up the negatives correctly. I’d hit the button on the old scanner and it would make the first scan correctly but then it wouldn’t seat the film holder in the right place for the following three scans. They would all be off center. It wouldn’t scan only 80%-50% of negatives 2-4.

I had a friend say that probably the rubber belt in the scanner that moved the film holder got old and no longer fit correctly so that’s why it was off. If I could replace the belt it might work again. That sounds reasonable but when I opened up the old scanner I couldn’t even find a belt. All the electronics in there (and there are a lot of electronics) must have camouflaged it and kept it from view. But it’s a 20 year old scanner and I got a lot of scans out of it so I really don’t need to fix it. Especially since I got a new film scanner.

The best thing about the new film scanner is the infrared cleaning of the dust and scratches of the negative that it does. That works really well. One of the most time consuming things about scanning old negatives is cleaning them up after they are scanned. It takes forever. It takes so long that I only clean them if I’m making something of the scan. I scanned in all of my own negatives years ago but have only cleaned up a small percentage of them. Automatic infrared cleaning changes all that.

Photoshop has a “Dust and Scratches” filter that is supposed to clean things up but it does a mediocre job at best. It’s been in Photoshop since the mid 1990s and has never been improved. I’ve also tried out various pieces of software that were supposed to clean up scans but none of them have been very good. That’s why I’m loving this new infrared cleanup.

I’m not exactly sure how the infrared cleanup works but the scanner makes two scans. The first is regular and the second scans on the infrared spectrum (I assume). It then figures out what is supposed to not be there and fixes it. I’m very impressed with it.

The only thing the infrared cleanup doesn’t seem to fix is tiny horizontal scratches. Negatives are delicate things and the emulsion is prone to such scratches. I saw them in my own negatives which I took care of well and I see them in my mother’s negatives. Mine were in negative sleeves and hers were loose in envelopes. Both storage ways were vulnerable to those scratches but almost everything else is automatically cleaned up.

I liked the automatic cleanup so well that I ordered another new scanner. The Plustek 8300i is a 35mm film and slide scanner. A lot of my mother’s negatives were shot on medium format 120 film so the Plustek 8300i can’t scan those negatives. About 14 years ago I bought a flatbed Canon Canoscan 8800F and have been scanning in those 120 negatives on it. It’s not quite as good as a dedicated film scanner but it does a nice job. Except it has no automatic infrared cleanup.

Since I bought the Plustek 8300i I’ve also had my eye on an Epson Perfection V600. That’s a flatbed scanner that can also scan the 120 film like my Canon. The Plustek 8300i was $600 but I could buy the Epson refurbished for only $150. I didn’t get it before because why did I want to spend that money when I didn’t really need to? Then I got a taste of the automatic infrared cleanup.

The Epson uses something called Digital ICE to cleanup its scans. I’m not sure if that’s the same as the infrared cleanup but it’s been around for a long time. You used to be able to only get Digital ICE on high end scanners but that was in the early 2000s. I was willing to spend $150 to try it out so just yesterday I put in the order for the Epson. It should be here on Thursday. I’ll let you know how well it works.

I also want to get a couple of more things for the Plustek 8300i. When I bought it I wanted to order the version that came with two extra film holders but somehow picked the wrong one and ordered only one film and one slide holder. It’s not essential to have two but it might be helpful. It would have only cost me ten dollars extra packaged with the scanner but will cost me $25 on its own.

One other thing I want to get for the Plustek 8300i is a 110 film holder. That’s a really tiny type of film from the 1970s-1980s. My mother didn’t shoot a lot of photos on that film but there are some of them and I want to scan those ones in too. That holder will cost about $25 too.

As I wrote this the Giants continued to lose and now have lost. Oh, well, maybe I’ll do a little more scanning now.

Detail Number One

I’m used to getting things done. By “Things” I mean creative stuff. This blog, my art, and anything else that I feel moved to make. One of the reason for that is health. I’m a healthy person and I don’t take that good fortune for granted. Without good heath it’s tough to get anything done. Case in point is that on Thanksgiving morning I woke up with what I think was a sinus infection. My head was clogged a bit, I was dizzy, and I had general body weakness.

From the Thursday of Thanksgiving until the following Sunday I got nothing done. I sat in a chair for four days in a row. I watched a little TV but I couldn’t really concentrate much on it, I read maybe a comic book or three, I stared off into space, and I napped a bit. I wasn’t even felling particularly horrible. I never had that “I wish I could just die already” feeling that sometimes accompanies the flu. Instead I was just very tired and sat in my recliner.

I usually write one of these blogs a week and I am about a month ahead of my posting schedule. I’ve got a cushion of a few blogs already in the can and it’s a good thing I do because this week for the first time in a long time I wrote nothing. Over the years it’s varied when exactly I write these pieces but for 2022 I’ve mostly written them on Sundays. The Sunday of my sinus infection I wrote nothing. I thought about writing for a brief moment. I usually write sitting in my chair and that’s what I was doing so I though maybe I could write but I never even opened up my writing program. The energy wasn’t in me.

Besides some general fatigue I was feeling not too bad. At least as I sat in my chair that is. Whenever I got up I felt a little dizziness and could also feel how weak I was. I would think, “Yeah, I’m doing okay” and then I’d stand up and think, “Nope, I really am sick.”

Often I draw in my Inkbook as I’m sitting in my easy chair. I much prefer to stand at my drawing table when I’m working on art but sometimes I sit down. It’s not unheard of. So for another brief moment I thought maybe I could get some inkbook drawings done. It was never more than a fleeting thought because I couldn’t even concentrate enough to get the book and pen let alone concentrate enough to make drawings.

One of the things I have been getting done like clockwork over the last few months is my “Dreams of Things” covers. I showed a new one off in my comic book haul videos every week since the beginning of the summer. Some weeks I’d get two of them finished. The week of my sinus infection I didn’t finish any. I had no cover to show off in this past week’s video.

Though one of the first things I managed to do on the Monday after sitting in my chair for four days was to ink one of those covers. Sometimes, but not always, inking is easier to concentrate on than finishing a piece with color. In this case it was and I had just enough stamina and focus to get it done.

My Gatsby illustrations went by the wayside too. I wrote last week about my struggles to make an El Greco like drawing and my sinuses made that come to a complete stop. I don’t even think I thought about that one. It even lead to me misplacing a drawing.

This week as I got back to the Gatsby drawing I was looking for the finished drawing of the five figures. I did the landscape on a separate piece of paper from the figures and need to see the figures. I could find all the preliminary drawings but not the finished one. I had no idea where it went.

Cut to later on in the day I went out back to work on removing the cutting deck from my John Deere riding mower and putting on the snow plow. As I leaned down to inspect the cutting deck I saw my missing drawing underneath it. Right outside my back door is a table. I use that table to put pencil drawings on so I can spray them with workable fixative in order to keep the pencil from smearing. I usually leave them outside to dry for about 15 minutes. Just before I got sick I must have done that with the Gatsby drawing and forgot it was out there.

It was a wonder that the drawing wasn’t ruined. It was even raining out that day but the mower, table, and drawing were sheltered under the porch. If the drawing had blown in another direction and not got caught under the mower deck it would have been ruined for sure. It was out there for a week and a half!

One thing I was able to get done as I was felling unwell was a little bit of freelance paying work. That’s a bit easier to get done when I’m not feeling good because it’s not nearly as creative and demanding. That and it’s easier to be motivated by money than to be self motivated. We all need money to live so we have no choice about working. That makes it a necessity and so easy to get motivated for.

Making art for yourself is a whole different ballgame. Most people, even creative people, never make anything for themselves because it so hard to do. We’re expected to make money with our work and when we don’t we devalue the work to the point of not wanting to bother. I’ve seen it happen to a lot of people.

When I’m sick I no longer have the energy to motivate myself to make art. It’s tough enough when healthy so it’s nearly impossible when sick. I’m very glad that I got better.

I’ve got $250 worth of art supplies sitting in my basket at the Dick Blick website. I want to buy all that stuff but I haven’t pulled the trigger just yet. That’s because $250 is a lot of money to me and I’m not sure I 100% need all those art supplies right now. I want them, that’s not in doubt, but do I need them? That’s the question we artists are always asking ourselves. At least we artists who aren’t made of money.

I think I ought to buy the art supplies right now because I really do have the money. My bills are paid and I have two checks coming in this week. There is the rub. The checks aren’t here yet. I have no doubt that they will be but as a freelance artist there have been many times I haven’t known when the next check will come. That includes just a few years ago when I turned 50 and then went through the longest period of not being able to find work of my life.

All my adult life I’ve had to be cautious with money. Most people have to be but as a freelancer I often get paid when I finish a job and don’t always have a regularly scheduled check. So I don’t like to spend my money before I get it. And sometimes I don’t like to spend it even when I have it. I never know what the future is going to bring.

It’s weird to that sometimes I can buy bigger things, like computer stuff, but have a hard time buying art supplies. Last month I spent $600 on a new film scanner. I admit that it took me at least two months to pull the trigger on that one but there is something about buying a big thing that makes it easier. Art supplies being a collection of smaller things seems more frivolous. It’s thirty seven things that add up to $250 in my basket.

Adding to the decision is that I also have to save up for a new laptop. My current laptop is ten years old, won’t run the latest Apple operating system, and as of just this month won’t run the latest versions of the Adobe programs. I bought a new Mac Mini last year so I don’t have to immediately replace the laptop but maybe within the next year I’ll have to. That’ll cost me at least $1800. Putting this art supply money towards that would be a good sized chunk of it. But do I want to?

I like art supplies. I love making art and I love trying out new things. Some artists always buy the same stuff and do things the same way but I don’t. I work in watercolor, acrylic, gouache, markers, ink, pen, pencil, digital, and anything else I can get my hands on. That’s a lot of stuff and a lot of supplies. I’m used to stocking up during the good times so I have art supplies to use during the leaner times. I think these are the good times right now but it’s been a while so I really not 100% sure. Thus I hesitate.

One of the reasons I think this is the good times is because I bought something completely useless and silly yesterday. I bought a football card. I like football and watch the New York Giants every week but I don’t collect football cards. I paid $20 on eBay for and autographed card and I don’t even collect or care about autographs. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it. It was an impulse buy.

When times are lean I don’t make any impulse buys. I barely buy anything. That makes sense when I barely have any money. But I find that when I’m spending a lot of time working for money I will make impulse purchases. Not all the time and not expensive purchases but it seems like after working long hours for a paycheck I want to buy something with that paycheck. That’s the impulse. What is the point of working for pay if not to buy stuff? That’s the feeling that goes away when the work goes away.

I also have a bunch of comic books on my “mycomicshop.com” wishlist. I go the my local comic shop every week so I don’t have much of a desire to buy back issues but occasionally I do. They’re not expensive back issues and I don’t really need them so I end up making an order about once a year. I probably spend $50-60 a year at the website. I spend that much in 2-3 weeks at my local comic shop but somehow that seems like a lot more money at a comic book website. That is probably because I get my fill of comics from my local comic shop and collected editions that I buy off of Amazon.

Just this week I bought a collected edition from Amazon and one from my local comic shop. They ran me about $25 a piece so why does spending that much money on a website seem like more. It could be the $10 shipping. Any order I make turns out to be ten dollars more. Money not spent on the actual comics. I can get two or three extra comics at my local comic shop for that $10.

One more thing I saw this week that I want to buy is software. There is a company called Affinity that makes inexpensive graphics software. It’s made to compete with Adobe’s software. I don’t use the Affinity stuff much but I own the version one of their software. They just came out with version two and to buy all the different programs it will cost you $100. That’s not that expensive but it’s a big chunk of those art supplies. Especially for programs I don’t use a lot.

One more thing on my radar is a Nintendo Switch. I only want one to play the old NeoGeo Pocket game “Cardfighter Clash.” They run about $400 and the odds of me getting one are really slim. I’m not even sure if I’d ever really play it. I mostly want the game for nostalgia purposes. It’ll make me feel like it’s the late 1990s again. That was a pretty good time for me. Most times were really okay. But I can always use more times with impulse purchases. Maybe after those checks clear. I’ll have to see.

As I continue my quest to make my own illustrated version to “The Great Gatsby” I come to a point where I’ve made a couple of dozen finished illustrations so what I should do next isn’t and easy question to answer. One of the things I’ve wanted to do since the beginning but have avoided is dealing with the main character’s, Nick Caraway, description of a painting from his dream.

Here is the quote right from the book, “I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels.”

Despite all the illustrated versions of “The Great Gatsby” that I’ve seen in the last year I haven’t seen anyone try to tackle that vision of a painting. The reason why is easy to see. It’s a complex vision done in the style of a famous and idiosyncratic painter. El Greco has a unique style that is hard to get across in an illustration. It’s also not one of the grand images of the Jazz Age that the book is otherwise filled with.

Though I wished I could do an illustration of the scene I didn’t think I could do it justice so I ignored it and worked on other illustrations for the book that I could pull off. Or at least ones that I thought I could pull off. It’s taken a while to get things done and I didn’t succeed at everything. But since I did get a lot of illustrations done I thought now was the time to put some effort into the El Greco scene.

I started with the five figures. Four men carrying a woman on a stretcher. I started drawing the two men in the front. El Greco draws a lot of his figures tall and a little distorted so that was what I went for. I didn’t reference these figures and made them up out of my imagination. Long legs and arms dangled from the sides of these two men. They worked out pretty well for me.

When I went to draw the two men in the back I had much more of a problem. I couldn’t get them right. I wanted them distorted like the two in front but I could not get them in the correct perspective. Or at least a perspective that looked correct. Cheating at perspective to make something look right is common artistic practice. Sometimes something that is technically correct doesn’t look right.

After struggling with the two back figures I decided to reference them. I used an artists 3D modeling tool on my iPad. It’s real easy to use. They give you a 3D model of a person and you move it around and pose it until its in the position you want. So that’s what I did. I posed two 3D models, took screen shots of them, and then drew over top of the model in Procreate on my iPad.

With the basic drawing of the two back figure done I arranged all four figures in a composition in Photoshop and printed them out (with a stretcher between them) on a new piece of paper in blue line. I drew over that blue line drawing to make my finished pencil drawing. I had to adjust the legs and perspective on the two front figure but in the end it came out fine.

I still had no idea what I wanted to do with the background though. It was supposed to be an El Greco night time landscape so I looked some of those up on the internet. I found one I liked and decided to draw right over it. Using the painting as a guide I drew my own landscape basic composition. I drew some houses, hills, the sky, a road down in front, and some bushes here and there. Except it was very basic. There wasn’t any technique to it and I had no idea what technique would make it look good. I was stuck.

For a few days I thought I bit off more than I could chew. I had no ideas in what direction to take this El Greco dream painting. Then I remembered a technique that I tried out briefly about five years ago. It involves using a dark pencil, shading a drawing with the pencil, scanning in the pencil drawing, and then digitally coloring over the pencils drawing with flat color thus using the pencil shading for roundness. I never managed to pull off anything good with the technique but I thought it might work for this landscape.

I did the figure drawings on a separate piece of paper from the landscape so that I could concentrate on each. I got out my Wolff’s carbon pencil and drew the whole landscape, over half a day, with dark directional strokes. I was using the pencil strokes to imitate brush strokes. I think the landscape and houses came out well.

Next I worked on the figures. I printed out my finished figure drawings on an 11×14 inch piece of Bristol. For these I used my .7mm pencil with dark 2B graphite. I used the pencil line to imitate brush strokes and drew all five figure in this style. The problem is that’s not really how El Greco painted his figures but they still look interesting. I’m happy with them but I’m happier with the landscape.

Now I’m stuck at the digital coloring stage. As I wrote earlier I never pulled anything big off with this style so I’m not sure how to finish the coloring. I’ve been laying flat color over the figures so far and it doesn’t look anything like El Greco or how I want it to. I think my next step is to leave the figures alone and color the landscape. It came out better than the figures so I think that’s my way in. I’ll have to see. I’ll let you know how it turns out.