Radiant Comics

Nine years ago. That’s how long ago it was that I bought a Polaroid Zink printer. I bring up the subject now because it’s January, as I write this, and I started a new sketchbook. I only draw in ink in this particular sketchbook so I call it an inkbook. I’ve written about them before over the years and I fill one of them a year. This is inkbook number 21 and is named “Bridgework.” I randomly chose that name from the dictionary. That’s how I name all my sketchbooks.

I bring up the Zink because it prints 2×3 inch stickers. I bought it back in 2011 on a whim. I like to try out new art supplies, gadgets, and gizmos so I’m always looking at the new technology that’s coming out. The Zink doesn’t use ink to print, It has some kind of special paper that the printer applies heat to in order to make a print. Polaroid still has printers like this one but doesn’t call them Zink any more. I think this product line was a failure because I bought mine on clearance for $30. At full price it retailed for about $100.

I never really found a good use for my Zink. It’s only about the size of a deck cards so it was meant to be portable. Plus it has a battery so you can make sticker prints without it being plugged in. It also has a Bluetooth connection. I think the idea was that a person could carry this with them to a party and then make stickers from any smartphone photos that you took. People would have fun hamming it up for the sticker photos like they did with an old Polaroid instant camera.

I’m not sure if when I bought this I ever had any intention of doing that but I certainly never did. As a matter of fact I don’t even remember why I bought it. But that’s not unusual with me. Sometimes I buy something I think I can make art with and figure out exactly what I’m doing with it later. But I never quite figured out what to do with this Zink printer. I can remember back in 2013 I made my family some stickers out of family photos for Christmas presents. But they liked them as photos better than as stickers. They never got stuck anywhere. So it was better to just give them photos.

The inkbook that I just started is a Strathmore 400 Series 5.5×8.5 inch spiral bound sketchbook. It has a hundred pages in it but I never draw on the first page. That page tends to get roughed up a little so I use it as endpaper and start drawing on page two. But sometime over the years I got bored looking at a blank page one so I started to put stickers on that page. Any stickers I happened to have.

I don’t know if you can see this problem coming since, if you’re an adult, you probably haven’t thought about it but usually only children have stickers. Occasionally I’d be given stickers as part of someone’s promo push for some product but not that often. I’d throw a couple of stickers in the side tray of my art desk if I got them but mostly I didn’t get any. So January would roll around and I’d have no stickers for my new inkbook..

In glancing back at my old inkbooks I can see that it was in 2014 I started to make my own stickers for the front of the books (though for some reason my 2017 inkbook has no stickers in it). I’d use my own photos or ones found on the internet and make 2×3 inch Zink stickers out of them. So that was what I was doing today.

When I first got the Zink printer I remember having to figure out how to format an image to get it to print properly. Though the print is 2×3 inches it’s not exactly 2×3 inches. The stickers are also full bleed which means there is no border around the image. It prints edge-to-edge. So it digitally trims off a small portion all around the photo. I eventually settled on an exact 2×3 inch 300DPI jpeg that loses some of the image around the edges. It works well enough for stickers.

I remember it taking some time to figure out the bluetooth connection too. I used to print them from my desktop computer. I’d have to open my bluetooth preferences, select the printer, pair it, and then a printer queue would come up and I’d have to drop the jpeg on that. It’s not like regular printing where I pick the printer from a list and then pick the paper and format.

Now the printer won’t even work with my computer anymore. I go to pair the computer and printer and the computer refuses to. I’ve never figure out why or how to fix it. Instead I figured out how to pair it with my phone (which is not very new either). So now I have to plug my phone into my computer, drop a photo on it, connect the phone to the Zink, and hit send. It actually took a bit a doing a few years ago to figure that out but it still works.

Since I only use the Zink printer once a year I forget it exists. Like I said it’s very small so I have it stuck in a box on a shelf. It was only in December as I was cleaning up that I said to myself, “What the heck is in that box?” and looked in it. Sure enough I had forgotten it existed until that very moment.

One thing I might do with the printer is make some stickers for sticking on the streets on NYC. It was only last year, as I was taking street photos, that I noticed a lot of stickers on signposts and such as I was walking down Seventh Avenue. I started taking pictures of them. There are are lot of creative and artistic ones. Maybe I’ll add one or two myself. Or maybe not. But at least my new sketchbook is ready to go. That counts for something.

Okay. Lets’s pop in “Friends” season two episode four and see what it’s all about. The name of the episode is “The One With Phoebe’s Husband” and it originally aired on October 12, 1995. I watched it first run and at that time in 1995 I had just turned 29 years old a couple of months before. I was right about the same age as the friends. I was only a year or two older than the characters.

In looking at my calendar from that time I can see that I worked at Marvel Comics that whole month except for the 12th and 13th of October. I wonder if I was sick those days? I wasn’t sick very often but I see no entrances on my calendar for the 12th-15th. Looks like I didn’t make it to the comic shop for my usual Saturday trip. I must have been under the weather. I can see earlier in the week I wrote two checks. One for a subscription to Archeology Magazine (which finally didn’t get renewed this very year – 2019) and another for a Time/Life book on the Ancient Persians. I’m a history fan. Now lets see what going on in the show.

In the opening scene we have Rachel in the apartment on the phone with her mom as a pigeon flies in. She pots the pigeon. Good Family Circus reference. As a surprise we get introduced to Phoebe’s previously unknown husband, Duncan. It’s a good and funny intro scene. I like it overall and even though I remember not liking this episode a whole lot It starts well. I always enjoy the theme song.

Next scene Phoebe tells everyone who Duncan is and we get all the set up we need for that plot line. Phoebe married him because he needed a green card to stay in the country. Phoebe was in love with him but he was gay. And he’s a Canadian ice dancer. His profession is a question in the “Friends 25th Anniversary Trivia Game” app. A nice “Phoebe eats meat” joke. Good gasps. Here is where we find out Chandler has a third nipple. That’s a classic bit of Friends lore. All sorts of secrets are revealed after that. This was a good scene. The ensemble was in full form. I’m liking the beginning.

Now we cut to Central Perk and Julie (Ross’s girlfriend) shows up. Rachel still doesn’t like her. I find it annoying how much Rachel is into Ross as soon as she found out she couldn’t have him. But I’ve always found Rachel a bit annoying. She was written that way so it’s no surprise that I do. Her mocking of Monica is funny. Phoebe shows up dressed all hot for Duncan who she hasn’t seen in ages. Plenty of Chandler’s third nipple jokes fly this scene too.

Now it’s a Ross and Rachel scene. Ross confesses he hasn’t had sex with Julie yet. This scene is awkward. Once again, it’s written that way but it still has a lot of cringes in it. It’s tough to take. Rachel’s gives bad advice but delivers it in a nice powder blue top. I can remember describing this show to my friends (back when I first watched it) as a “Jiggle Show” reminiscent of something like “Three’s Company.” Lot’s of hot women in tight tops. I’m okay with that.

New scene with Phoebe and Duncan in his dressing room at Madison Square Garden. They get along just fine. That scene was short and now we switch over to Ross and Julie kissing as the remaining friends drop by. Ross is not going to listen to Rachel’s bad advice. As a call back to an earlier scene they’re all going to watch a porno that Joey was almost in. He’s just the guy who stops by to fix the copier. Here is his big line. “You know that’s bad for the paper tray.” Another funny scene.

Back to Phoebe and Duncan who tells Phoebe that he needs a divorce. He then confesses the he’s discovered that he’s not really gay. I never found this scene funny. It just takes all the stereotypes of a person discovering he is gay and applies them to a person who discovers he is straight. I’m guessing that it’s supposed to be wacky and ironic but I find it predictable and unfunny. Phoebe being hurt and upset is the only part of this scene that rings true to me.

Monica coming out of Ross’s bedroom and saying “Y’know it still smells like monkey in there” is a good line. I never liked the monkey from season one and am okay with them mocking the whole monkey storyline. Rachel doesn’t want to leave Ross’s apartment because she doesn’t want Ross to have sex with Julie. Crazy Rachel is uncomfortable but funny.

Duncan gets his divorce papers signed and Phoebe leaves him never to see him again. It’s sad and touching but she throws a little bit of her own crazy in there to lighten things up.

Now back to Rachel being crazy. I still like her top though. That’s the story of Rachel. Annoying but her hotness makes you put up with her. She continues to try and sabotage Ross and he doesn’t even know it. In the end Rachel relents and gives Ross some good advice. The scene ends with Rachel all frustrated but she’s funny about it.

Final scene. “Singing in the Rain” is playings Ross skips down the street. They make it obvious and funny that he finally had sex with Julie. Nice goofy ending.

I just checked my 2012 ratings on this one and I gave it three out of five stars. That sounds about right. It was a pretty good episode. A bunch of good stuff but one of the storylines didn’t do it for me.

I just went and checked the site “The One With the Uncut Friends Scripts” to see what was in the extended episode that I watched that wasn’t in the broadcast version (current and past) and there wasn’t much cut out. Only a couple of Rachel’s lines when she was being sarcastic to Monica in the first Central Perk scene. They were a couple of good lines though so I’m glad I watched this version. Someday I’ll watch the HD ones on Netflix but not today.

What goes into my art bag? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself this week because I bought a new art bag. It’s really just a regular bag but I want to stock it with art supplies and such for when I’m commuting. Maybe I’ll carry it other times but I usually don’t carry a bag.

My old bag is an actual art bag. It’s a Just-Stow-It art bag and it’s served me well. It’s a big bag too. It was made to fit 14×17 inch pads of paper. Some days it’s a little too big. It’s also falling apart a bit. The nylon near where the shoulder straps attach is tearing. I already sewed them but they might need some reenforcing with canvas. They’re going to tear off eventually if I do nothing.

I packed and unpacked that bag every day when I commuted. In went my iPad, my sketchbook, maybe a book to read, my camera, food for the day, drawing utensils, thumb drive, phone, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting. That was a little too much packing and unpacking. I’m trying to eliminate some of it by having dedicated art bag stuff.

I think the easiest thing to do is use duplicates of my common tools. For instance I would put two sign pens and a mechanical pencil into my bag every day. And then take them out. I’ve got enough pens and pencils to keep some in the bag. I’ll use a smaller art supply bag and keep that in my new art bag. I’ve already got a couple of smaller bags to keep in my new bag so I have some choices. I’ll have to drop my sketchbook in and then take it out but that’s not hard. I’ve got spare erasers and art card paper to go in there too.

My art supply bags are also my photo bags too. When I go into the city to shoot my street photos I bring one of my art bags. I’m only shooting with a single camera with no extra lenses so I don’t need an official photo bag stuffed with photo equipment like I used to carry. I stick my Canon SX60 in the bottom of the bag. It’s clunky and bulky down there but as soon as I get into the city it’s always in my hand. I carried it every time I commuted in this past fall so I could shoot photos on my way to work. I also have a smaller pocket camera but that one is not a suitable for street photos. That one is a Canon Powershot S95. It’s nine years old now and I think I want to replace it with a pocket one with a larger zoom.

There are a lot of pockets in my new art bag and I’m looking to fill them up. With light stuff preferably. I’ve already stuck a couple of photo things in there that can stay there. One is a small tripod. I have a few small tripods and this one is an octopus tripod. I never use it because I always choose my slightly larger and heavier small tripod when I need one but I don’t carry that one with me. I figure I’ll use the octopus one if I have it with me.

The second photo thing I stuck in there is a handle/tripod mount for a smartphone. It just plastic that clamps around a phone and has a tripod mount on the bottom. It comes with a plastic handle to stick in the mount of you can attach it to a tripod. I figure I have a better chance of using it if I have it with me in my bag rather than if it’s sitting at home.

I’ve also been looking for tools to stick in my art bag too. Sometimes I get portable tools but I never use them because I’ve got full sized tools to use around the house. The first thing I stuck in was a small flashlight that I just got for Christmas. I put it on my wish list because there were a few times I was walking back to the unlit parking lot by the train station where I really could have used a flashlight. I stuck that one in the outside pocket meant for a phone. I want to be able to get to it quickly and I’m too wary of thieves to keep my phone in that easily accessible pocket.

In that same pocket I also stuck a small Swiss Army type knife. It’s a cheap giveaway knockoff with someone’s website on the side but it’s light and was getting no use sitting on a shelf. I also stuck a small bicycle multi-tool in that pocket. I’ve got a fancy bike multi-tool in a pouch on my bike so the unfancy one was getting no use. It’s got some screwdrivers and Allen wrenches on it so maybe it’ll come in handy. The knows when I’ll need an Allen wrench when I’m out.

I have a pretty nice Leatherman multi-tool but I actually use that one around the studio. Since I’m looking for stuff I can stick in the bag and not take out that one doesn’t make the cut. I don’t want to have to go into my bag every time I want to use it. So that one will still sit on its usual shelf.

My new art bag is a canvas bag so I’m going to have to get some waterproofing spray for it. Last November as I was walking to the Penn Station in NYC I got caught in the rain. It was a downpour I was out in for twenty minutes. I was carrying my big black nylon art bag which is as waterproof as it gets but still this downpour was too much for it. Nothing got soaked in the bag but my sketchbook that was in the outside pocket got a little bit wet. The book was only about one percent ruined but If I was caught in that rain with my non-waterproof canvas bag it would have been a disaster. I don’t want that to happen.

One thing I haven’t worked out yet is what sketchbooks or notebooks to keep in the bag if any. Usually it’s my inkbook sketchbook that I work in when commuting. This one I’ll move in and out of the bag but should I keep another there all the time. I’ve got plenty of unused sketchbooks but I’m not sure which one to keep in the bag if any. I’ll have to see.

For the next few days I’ll be looking around for more stuff to put in my new art bag. I don’t want to weigh it down too much but I also want to be prepared. You’ve always go to be prepared for art.

I’m a color guy. I love color. I love painting in color and I love making color art on the computer. I’ve been studying and working with color for the last 30 years so that I could master it. I also work in black and white. That’s mostly in my drawings and with ink drawings specifically. I don’t think I’ve painted in black and white very much. Nor have I done much black and white photography before. That is until this week. Now I’m doing some black and white photography and trying to figure out what is the point of it is.

I first did black and white photography when I was in college. I had my first and only photo class in the Spring of 1985. The point of black and white photography was easy back then. It was the type of photography that you could do on your own in your own (or the school’s) darkroom. It was just a camera, an enlarger, a negative can, and a few trays full of chemical. Not the easiest thing in the world but doable. It was much easier than trying to make color photos. Multiply all those chemical baths by three or four with color photos.

I liked working in the darkroom. It was fun to be able to enlarge and crop a photo anyway I wanted to. It was also a thrill to see the image come to life on a piece of paper before my eyes. I only had that one semester of photography but I continued to work in the darkroom for the following two semesters that I was there. After that I never worked in a darkroom again. I continued to take photos but they were color photos that I had processed at a regular drop off photo place. They were mostly snapshots of friends and events. On occasion I would shoot black and white film but that was kind of a gimmick. I shot color film 99% of the time.

When I hit the age of digital photography I adopted the technology early. I got my first digital camera in the year 2000 and by then I had been working regularly in Photoshop for about six years. I had a scanner and a printer too so even before the age of digital photography I could scan in my photos and print them out. So I continued to work in color. Why not? I didn’t need a darkroom.

I’ve had a few inkjet printers over the years but my current one is a Canon iP870. One of the reasons I bought it is because I could buy cheap ink for it. For a decade or more I used Epson printers and only genuine Epson ink. My Epson printer had eight ink cartridges and one of them was always running low. The “Low Ink” light was never off. To add insult to injury it cost about $90 to buy an eight pack of ink. That’s just one cartridge of each color. I used to ration out my printing for years. Then I couldn’t take it any more and bought the Canon.

My Canon printer has six ink cartridges. Red, yellow, blue, grey, black, and a second black. For a six pack of the genuine Canon inks it would cost me about $80. Instead I get off-brand which has three of each ink cartridges for $25. That’s a $215 difference.

As a result of cheap ink I print a lot more photos and such. But it turns out I use a lot more color ink than black ink. Recently I was printing out a lot of photos and had to order another $25 pack of ink. So I now have a fresh stock of color ink plus the black ink from the last two ink packages I bought. That’s nine cartridges of the two types of black. There is no end in sight of the extra black either. That’s what made me decide to do some black and white photography.

I take all my photos in color but it’s no big deal to turn them into black and white. Though that’s a technical assessment and not a creative one. I can actually turn them to black and white in any number of ways with any number of results so which should be my way?

That brings me to the question of “What is the point of black and white photography?” I’m not sure if I have been able to answer that question for myself just yet. I’ve made about eight photos at this point and I don’t think I’m closer to an answer. The photos look alright but I’m still not sure if they should exist in black and white. Wouldn’t color be better? I don’t know but I think so.

It’s my street photos that I’ve been using to make these black and white photos out of. I made the first one in Photoshop on my computer but then switched over to my iPad and an app called Snapseed. I like doing most of the work on the iPad and then switching over to Photoshop to put on some finishing touches an print it out. I’m very cognizant of my grey tones and I seem to be trying to make a black and white photo as rich and interesting as a color photo. I’m not sure if that’s the way I want to go but I’m also not sure if there is any other way. I’m so used to color.

A funny thing is that I have no problem seeing the point of other people’s black and white photos. I even collect photography and I have black and white prints and books of black and white prints. I never ask myself “What’s the point of black and white photography?” when it’s someone else’s work. So why am I so baffled by that question when it’s my own photos?

I even bought myself one of those inexpensive Itoya 8.5×11 portfolio cases just so I could flip through the black and white photos as I look at them. All my color photos are in individual sleeves stacked in boxes. I can take them out and thumb through them one by one. That’s generally how I like to look at photos. But with these back and white ones I wanted to look at them as a whole. Each one is part of a bigger thing. A search for why those photos exist. “Just to use up some ink” is a catalyst for them existing but not the answer to my question. I’m still looking for that answer.

One funny thing about this whole affair is that I decided to keep track of how much ink I was using to print these black and white photos. Sometimes printers use the color cartridges to print in black and white and I was trying to avoid that. I don’t think my printer was using color in that way but I discovered it wasn’t using much black ink either. It was using up a lot of the grey cartridge. I ended up having to buy four new grey cartridges on their own. Now I’m thinking of printing some mini comics with black and white with no grey in in at all. Will see if that ever exists.

It’s important to get things done. That’s my lesson for today. It was really emphasized to me this week when I caught a cold (or maybe a sinus infection) because for a week I got nothing done. It’s much easier to power through a 9 to 5 job when I’m sick. Other people around the office can pick up the slack. But getting any of my own stuff done is nearly impossible. It’s not easy being self motivated on a normal day but on a sick day it’s tough as nails. Those comic strips I had to finish could wait. I wanted to sit and rest.

After getting nothing done for a week I was feeling better and was ready to get something done. It was just in time too because I had posted my last “Drifting and Dreaming” comic strip of 2019 and I had none ready for 2020. But I did have the raw materials ready for about twenty new strips from work I did on my commute into NYC.

From September to December I was commuting into the city two days a week. It’s a long commute that takes two hours from door to door and it’s made even longer by the train schedule not matching up with my work schedule. As a result I’ve learned to work on stuff while waiting for the train.

For my “Drifting and Dreaming” strip I need to make three of my art cards. I make two cartoon art cards and one regular art card. The cartoon art cards are the ones where I draw a face and have that character saying something in a word balloon above his or her head. That means I have to write them and draw them. Usually I draw them first and then write them but I changed the order around this time because of my commute.

I had to catch a 10:50 AM train into the city from a station that was a 20 minute drive away. I don’t want to be late so I always left at 10:20 AM. That gave me ten minutes at the train station so I’d bring my cards and spend that ten minutes writing things for my characters to say. After catching the train I’d spend as long as it took to write the remaining cards so by the time I got to Secaucus Junction to catch my connecting train into Penn Station I was ready to draw.

I could have caught a train into NYC right away but that meant I would be into work early. Rather than do that I chose to sit in Secaucus and draw for half an hour. It’s a pretty nice station. It’s bright and airy. I’d grab a bench and pull out my cartoon art cards. I could pencil ten heads in that half an hour but it took some doing. I had to concentrate and work fast. It was no picnic but I got it done.

The next day when I was back home I would take the cards written and drawn in pencil and ink in the lettering and ink the pencils. After that I would take my markers out and color them and then scan them in. After four weeks of that I had forty cards done. It was a lot of work but it was important to get it done. No one else would do it for me.

That’s not the end of making these comic strips. At that point they’re just cards and have to be made into strips. That’s done on the computer. I have to write the “Middle Story” for each of the strips which is the short two sentence story that runs underneath the cards. It’s not the longest story in the world but it doesn’t write itself. I have a master document with ten blank strips in it. One morning I took it upon myself to get it done and so I wrote ten “Middle Stories” and was ready to go. I copied pasted the now digital art cards into the strip template. Two cartoon art cards and one visual art card. Then I save it as a finished strip.

As I was finishing those strips I was also getting something else done. I was scanning in the negatives of old family photos taken by my mother. I’d put two 120 negatives in to the holder, put the holder into the scanner, and then use the scanning software to scan them it. It takes about ten minutes per scan so in that time I when I’d work on the comic strips.

Scanning isn’t hard at all but it’s tedious. It’s the same movements over and over again. First off I have the handle the negatives with gloves on. So I’d slip on a cotton glove, pull a negative from a sleeve, look at it to see which way was up, down, back, and front, put the first negative in the holder, do it again for the second negative, take the gloves off, put the holder into the scanner, call up the scanner software, preview the negatives, hit a couple of settings, start the scan. Then I’d go back to working on “Drifting and Dreaming.”

I finished ten of the comics over the course of the morning so in the afternoon I switched to scanning and making my altered art Magic the Gathering cards. For those I had to use frisket to mask out the card borders and expose on the art I was going to replace, use acetone (nail polish remover) to strip the ink from the art area of the card, prepare the ground with varnish, medium, and inkjet medium, print a new image on the card, put spray varnish over the new art, remove the frisket, scan the card in to post on eBay. I’ve got lots of multi-step process going on.

I kept this up for two days. I got twenty comic strips finished, made twelve altered art Magic the Gathering cards, and scanned in about sixty medium format negatives. That’s not too bad. I got stuff done. But it was equally important that I got a lot of stuff done before hand so that I could get this stuff done. That ain’t easy.