I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got six new comics.
Check them all out here:
When I make art I generally like to keep things simple. Over the years I’ve learned to be pretty good at simple but it’s not easy. Simple is usually hard. Simple is stripping things down to the basics. If a form can be defined with just one line than use that one line. The problem is finding that one line (that’s the story of art). It can’t be wrong in any way. After all there is only one of them. If I’m going to draw a form with all sorts of shading and hatching then I might use hundreds of lines. If some of them are off you can’t even notice. That’s the advantage of plenty. One or two mistakes are easily hidden in a haystack.
Another of my art philosophies is that complexity is simplicity multiplied. By this I mean both are achieved in the same way. With complexity there is more room for error but you’re still putting one line on the paper at a time and you want to make that line nice. So to draw one face on a page can be simple but start to add more simple faces and things get complex.
You can strip down one face into the basics but as soon as you put another face next to it the two faces start to relate to each other in new ways. That has to be take into account. For example if two faces are next to each other you generally don’t want them to be identical. So you need two sets of solutions for how to draw a simple set of eyes. And a third and a fourth face and you need more simple solutions. That can get complicated.
I bring up this topic because I just finished a complicated big ink drawing (20×28 inches). As a matter of fact I just finished two complicated big ink drawings in a row. I wanted that second one to be simple but missed the mark by a mile. The first one I knew was going to be complicated. That’s how I planned it. I picked a complicated sketch, made a complicated drawing from it, and then made a complicated big ink drawing from that. It was what I was in the mood for but it took a lot out of me. Complicated can be physically demanding because there are so many lines to draw. So after that one I decided to get simple.
Complicated my be physically demanding but simple is more observationally demanding. You really have to look at things and puzzle them out. Often the preliminary drawing of a simple subject takes more time than a complex one. With simple everything has to be figured out in advance but with complicated you can leave some stuff for later. I know I’m going to need half a dozen textures in certain areas but there is no need to lock them all down early. With simple I have to lock things down early. I don’t want any surprises at full size.
Simple can get away from me sometimes. That’s what happened with the second complex drawing. I had decided that I wanted to draw a giant face and that’s usually simple but I overlooked things in this case. I overlooked a lot of things. I picked a sketch to work on that had a giant face in it but the face was really a monster mask. Plus there were another half a dozen faces in the drawing. I tried to keep all the faces simple but I was somehow in denial about how complex a drawing I actually picked.
As I blew up the drawing and transferred it to the large paper I began to see how much work there was to it. I started to draw it in ink with a simple line. I often start these big drawings with the simplest lines first and then get complex with them. By simple line I mean with a marker and a straight edge or French curve. These are simple lines that I later go into with a brush and ink. The marker part is usually pretty easy. I follow the pencil lines. There isn’t a lot to think about because these aren’t the finished lines. But as I put more and more of those lines in I began to notice how many decisions I would have to make later on down the line. This drawing was a lot more complicated than I initially thought it was.
To begin with the space in the drawing is bizarre. It isn’t a face with a background behind it. The top of the drawing had some clouds and the bottom some mountains as it if was a normal background but everything else was filled with faces and shapes like a modernist painting. That and the main face was a positive shape but it had another face in its neck that created a negative space within the positive space. It was strange, complex, and would not work properly until I figured it out. The problem was that figuring out the space meant figuring out about nine other things first.
I did it all a little bit at a time. I put down all my simple lines and then concentrated on one area. The eye in the bottom right corner, the clouds on top, the face under the chin, or anything else. I approached it one piece at a time. The hardest part was that I knew nothing was going to be finished until all of it was near completion. I would add textures and shapes to one area, then a second, then a third, and then I had to go back to revisit the first area. No place would be finished until it was all finished. That can be a frustrating way to work and takes a lot of trust in the process.
In the end this turned out to be one of my most complicated big ink drawings. I count seven small faces, one big face, a faceless figure, and a lone eye. Plus there are about seven different background textures. I like the way it came out but I don’t know how in the world I ever thought this would be a simple drawing. I can really fool myself some days.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics.
Check them all out here:
Sometimes as I contemplate things little thoughts come to me. I like little thoughts and observations. The things that get lost among the big things of life. My street photos are often about fleeting moments in life. That’s why I like candid photography. Unposed photos. Sometimes by choosing what unposed photos to work on they become posed by the very process but that’s okay. In order to examine the unexamined you have to have to look at it. I like examining and writing about small moments and things right on this very blog. That’s why I’m writing about this thought that came into my head recently: I used to be thirsty all the time.
We all have strange quirks and odd tastes. That’s something human beings share. One of my strange tastes is that I don’t like anything to drink but water and milk. I don’t know why but it’s been that way all my life. Even as a kid I would never drink soda, fruit juice, or any kind or sugar water. Believe me that made me a weird kid because I was the only one who always turned down soda.
My taste in food has changed since I was a child. There are plenty of things I like as an adult that I wouldn’t eat as a child. That’s normal. But my taste in drinks has never changed. I can’t stand carbonation and I can’t stand sweet drinks. That’s strange because I like sweets. I like cake, cookies, ice cream, and especially chocolate. But put that same sugar into a liquid and I don’t want it. I think sweet drinks taste terrible and leave a horrible coating on my mouth. I don’t like any flavor in my water. Even a lemon wedge turns me off.
As a consequence of not liking stuff to drink I was thirsty a lot. But I didn’t realize it. I only started to notice it when I was in my early 20s. Young people today probably don’t know it but there was a time before there was bottled water everywhere. If you were out running around town and stopped to buy a drink at a local newsstand, deli, or convenience store it was always a soda or maybe a fruit juice. A soft drink of some kind. It was the rare store that had a pint of milk and none of them had a bottled water. Maybe carbonated water but I couldn’t stand that stuff either.
Whenever I was out with friends and they stopped to get a soft drink I would get nothing. I just wouldn’t drink. The was nothing for me to drink so I didn’t. I can even remember what a hassle it was to get a glass of water at a fast food place. It wasn’t something that happened often so the workers had no idea how to handle it. At most places they kept track of soft drink sales by counting the cups they used so they had to find me some cup that wouldn’t be counted. I lot of times I just didn’t bother and drank nothing. That was normal for me.
Most of this being thirsty took place in the 1980s when I was in college and for a couple of years afterwards. It was about 1990 when bottled water started to make it’s way into a lot of stores. I remember because of the Port Authority Bus Station in NYC. I used to go out with my friends in the city and eventually make my way home on a bus so I was often at the bus station. Despite my home being only about 40 miles from the bus station it was often a two hour ride. That’s public transportation for you. And there is also no bathroom on the busses.
Sometimes I’d be leaving straight from whatever gathering I was at and sometimes I’d crash in the city and leave the next day. If I was leaving that evening I was usually especially thirsty. I never liked drinking alcohol so I wouldn’t drink all night as my friends were drinking. Getting a glass of water at a bar isn’t always easy either so I’d just go thirsty. Like I said it was normal for me to be thirsty. If I was leaving the next day I would want to drink too much before getting on the bus for fear of getting stuck with a full bladder and no bathroom around. So usually I’d arrive at Port Authority a little thirsty.
The bus is burned into my mind with being thirsty because more than once I’d be catching the bus and be really thirsty. The whole ride I’d be thinking about getting a big tall glass of water after I got home. Sometimes I was so thirsty that I drank from the tap in the bathroom with cupped hands before I got on the bus (the water fountains never worked at that time). But I didn’t want to drink too much because with bad traffic I could be trapped on that bus for a long time.
Then the bottled water craze hit. Poland Spring water was the first one that I remember. I had actually been around since the early to mid 1980s but it wasn’t everywhere like it is today. It probably was around 1990 or so that all the little newsstands and stores at the bus station started stocking water. Bottles were everywhere. Suddenly I could hit the bus station, buy a bottle of water and maybe some cookies, and then head for my bus. I didn’t have to drink all the water then. I could sip it. It was in a bottle after all. The danger of having to use the bathroom when there was no bathroom was gone. I was a normal person just like everyone else who rode the bus with a drink in hand. I wasn’t thirsty.
That thought came to me back in 1992 or so. “I’m not thirsty.” And I hadn’t really been thirsty in a long time. Sure we all get thirsty every now and then but thirsty was how I lived my life when I was out running around back before bottled water. I haven’t been thirsty like I used to be in decades. Now, like so many other people, I carry a water bottle with me to places. It’s hard to believe that being thirsty was something I took for granted. I never even gave it a thought until one day I realized I wasn’t thirsty anymore. What a strange day.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’ve been reading my usual comic books these days. I go to the comic shop every week, pick up whatever comics they have reserved for me, check the shelves for anything interesting, and go home and read them over the course of the week. I haven’t been getting a lot of comics lately. Just three or four new ones a week. With comics costing four bucks a pop that’s plenty.
Some people prefer trade paperback or hardcover collections of comics rather than the individual issues but not me. I like the periodical nature of individual comics. I like the read the story as it’s new and discuss it as a current event. I can always read a whole six issue story arc at a later date but here is only one chance to read it as it comes out. I like that chance and I like that moment.
The other thing I like about individual issues is having a choice of comics to read. If I was to read a collected edition of “Invincible” (which I have collected in hardcover by the way) I’d have twelve issues in a row of it to read. That’s cool but I prefer to look over ten or twelve different recent comics and pick one to read. I say ten or twelve rather than three or four because I like to read my new issues twice before I file them away. So I keep them within an arm’s length for a couple of weeks to have more than just this week’s new comics to choose from.
I haven’t bought any Marvel comics in a few years. I used to buy them a lot as a kid and bought them intermittently as an adult but recently they’ve had nothing to offer me. Marvel comics aren’t terrible or anything like that. I just don’t find them very interesting. I’m mostly an indie comics reader anyway. The one exception to that this past year has been Marvel’s “True Believers” line of comics. That’s their line of dollar reprint comics.
I’ve recently discovered that I really enjoy reprint comics. I think that’s because they are so cheap that there is a purity to them. You only want a cheap reprint if you are going to read it. A lot of people buy comics because they think they will be valuable. They never even read them. It’s even better for the value if you never read it. These days a comic can rise in value just because of the cover. The contents don’t even matter. But a reprint comic is all about the contents. A dollar reprint comic is never going to be worth fifty dollars so you had better want to read it or leave it on the shelf. Plus who want to read a fifty dollar comic if there is a chance you can accidentally turn it into a five dollar comic by slightly mishandling it?
This week I bought three Fantastic Four “True Believers” comics. All three are early issues from the 1960s. You can get all of these issues in collected editions but they don’t interest me enough to get them that way. The Jack Kirby and Stan Lee issues of the Fantastic Four are considered to be classics but they were never my favorites. I still like them though and I am enjoying them as dollar reprints. I like that I can pick a random one up and read it as an individual issue.
In general 1960s comic books are different than today’s comic books. 1960s comic books are meant to be read as individual issues. Today’s comic books are meant to be read in six issue chunks. Each individual issue is only one part of a longer story. There are rarely “Done in one” stories in today’s comics but that was the norm in the 1960s.
Sure a lot of 1960s comics made one big story but you didn’t have to read them that way. Every issue had a beginning, middle , and end. There might be a “To be continued” but the individual issue was still a satisfying read. That’s often not true with today’s comics. A “To be continued” can leave you wanting more but in a good way or a bad way. The good way is like having a meal, feeling full, yet still wanting more because it tasted so good. The bad way is like eating a meal that didn’t fill you up. You’re frustrated because you’re still hungry and you want more but there is no more. I find a lot of modern comics tend more towards the bad way.
I know some younger comic book collectors through YouTube who have gotten into old comic books but they were having a problem with them. They enjoyed reading them but couldn’t get all the way through a big collected edition. They’d start to get bored and stop. With ten or twenty issues of some 1960s comic in a collected edition that’s a long haul. I learned to read those big books one issue at a time just like it was the 1960s. By that I mean one issue a day. Read an issue and then put the book down until tomorrow. Some of them took this advice and liked it. They enjoyed the old comics better once they read them one at a time.
I even bought a few dollar reprints of “What If?” this year. Comics that I already had the originals of. I used to collect the series as a kid and I have a lot of the issues still on my shelf. I hadn’t looked at the issues in a long time but seeing a fresh new reprint of them for a dollar made me want to read them again. I could have read my originals but wanted the bright new copies. Somehow throwaway dollar copies appealed to me more than the already not very expensive originals.
I also bought a reprint of a “What If?” volume two comic that I wasn’t even interested in when it first came out long ago. It was a fun read even though it was a mediocre comic. There is something about it only costing a dollar, with no hope of it becoming valuable, that makes it less precious and therefor more fun.
There are actually lots of dollar comics out in the world. A lot of comic shops have what are called “Dollar Bins.” There are boxes upon boxes of comics all for sale at a dollar a piece. There is a difference between these dollar comics and dollar reprints. The reprints are generally comics people want. First appearances, the start of famous stories, or special issues in general. They fill a need for cheap copies of comics that have become expensive.
The comics in the dollar bins are comics that no one wants. They’re the leftovers. Endless rows of comics that have been printed in the last thirty years that will probably never be sold. Of course one of the good things about dollar bin comics is that there is always a chance one of them will become a twenty to fifty dollar comic overnight. It happens all the time. Of course that’s one comic in a thousand and you never know which one. But there are collectors who love to thumb through dollar bins to try and find treasure.
So as I sit and write this I can look over to my right and see about ten comics in my reading pile. I’ve got some new ones for this week, ones I will reread from the last two weeks, and a couple of reprints. That’s how I like to read ‘em.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got seven new comics.
Check them all out here:
Big paper. I’ve been making so many of my big ink drawings lately I had to order some more big paper this week. It’s funny because I last ordered some of this 22×30 inch watercolor paper back in 2014 and it then sat there for nearly four years as I stopped doing big ink drawings. I can’t remember why I stopped but I did.
I looked back at my order from 2014 and the paper was a lot cheaper then too. It’s still pretty cheap at $15 for ten sheets but on my old order I got twenty sheets for $17. Maybe it was on sale back then. Watercolor paper that size can go for $8-$10 a sheet so it’s still cheap even at twice the price.
Paper is sold by size, surface, and weight. The size part is obvious. You can get it in 5×7 pieces at the smallest up to 22×30 inches at the largest. The surface has to do with smoothness. You can get your watercolor paper “Cold Press” which has a rough surface or “Hot Press” which has a smooth surface. Other types of paper are just labeled “Smooth” or “Rough.” Sometimes they’re labeled “Kid Finish” which is smooth. Weight refers to how thick the paper is. A 300 pound sheet of paper is a lot thicker than a 90 pound sheet of paper. The heavier the weight the thicker the paper.
300 pound watercolor paper is my favorite. That stuff is thick and doesn’t buckle under the application of water like thinner paper does. That’s the stuff that can go for $10 a sheet. I haven’t used any of it in a while but when I did I usually cut the big sheets down into smaller pieces to paint on. It’s fun to paint on paper that is sturdy and has a good presence.
The three ways that paper is sold is by the sheet, by the pad, or in watercolor blocks. Of course it’s watercolor paper that’s sold in blocks and that’s my least favorite way to buy paper. A block is a pile of about ten or twenty sheets of paper held together with some sort of binder. The ten sheets form one big thick sheet of paper and you’re supposed to use watercolor on the top sheet and as you add more and more water it eventually detaches itself from the block. I’ve never seen an advantage to this but lots of watercolorists swear by blocks. It could also be that I’m not a watercolorist.
The paper I just bought is “Blick Studio Watercolor Paper by Fabriano.” It’s 140 pound cold press 22×30 inch watercolor paper. I’m not going to tell you it’s the best paper because it’s not. It says in the product description that it doesn’t handle wet abrasion well and I’d go even further than that and say it doesn’t even handle erasing well. If I draw on it with a pencil I then have a hard time erasing the pencil marks. But it is the best for my purposes because I’m mostly using marker and ink on it.
Ink is an unforgiving medium. Especially full strength black ink. If I make a mistake in ink, and I have, there is no way to take it back. Even covering it up is way to obvious to be effective. So if I make a mistake I have to call it a happy accident and make it work. On its own this paper also has an unforgiving nature but it’s still not as unforgiving as working in black ink. So if I was to work on better and more expensive watercolor paper it wouldn’t matter. In the end the price makes this watercolor paper the best choice for my big ink drawings.
The other type of paper I buy is Bristol board. That’s a heavy stock paper that’s not only measured in pounds but in one-ply, two-ply, and three-ply. The stuff I get is 100 pound Bristol but it’s also two-ply. I buy it in pads of different sizes. I get 9×12 inches, 10×14 inches, 14×17 inches, and occasionally 16×20 inches. Since I mostly work “Comic book original art size” which is 10×15 inches on an 11×17 piece of paper I use a lot of the 14×17 inch pads. I use my Dahl paper cutter to trim three inches off one side and then cut that 3×17 inch piece of paper up into art card sized 2.5×3.5 inch pieces of paper.
The brand of Bristol paper doesn’t matter to me a whole lot since I buy on the cheaper end of paper. I work in a comic book method of drawing a lot. That means first I make a drawing in pencil and them I finish the drawing in ink. Since the advent of the digital age in about 1995 I do those two steps on separate pieces of paper. I pencil, scan the drawing, make the drawing the size I want, and print the drawing out in blue line onto a new piece of Bristol.
The type and brand of Bristol board was way more important when the pencil and inking steps are done on the same piece of paper. A lot of the cheaper papers don’t hold up to erasing well and that makes them tough to ink on. Lots of artists insist on using the better paper and I can see why.
Though I often get the Dick Blick house brand of Bristol I also get a lot of Strathmore 300 Bristol. That’s the stuff you can find in any big arts and craft store. The next step up is Strathmore 400. I know a bunch of artists who only use that because it hold up to erasing much better than the 300. The 400 smooth is also smoother than the 300 smooth. Oddly the 400 is a bit thinner than the 300. I bet that’s because it’s smoothed down more. The fibers are smaller and can be compressed more. Both of these papers are two-ply.
I have a friend who for a while was hooked on Strathmore 500 paper. That’s a three-ply Bristol and can’t even be bought in pads. You have to order it by the sheet and cut it to size on your own. It’s really good paper that can hold up to a lot of abrasion. That stuff runs $5.15 per 22×30 inch sheet so it’s not cheap. It’s way more forgiving than my cheap Blick Fabriano paper but my ink drawings aren’t looking for forgiveness. So I’ll stick to cheap.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got seven new comics.
Check them all out here:
Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things. Case in point is that I finally finished some EC Comics sketch covers this week. I got the idea to do them months ago and they’ve been sitting around since then. One day when I was at my local comic shop I was looking around their dollar bins for anything interesting. I ran across these 1970’s reprints of old 1950’s comics. EC Comics is famous for their horror, crime, and mystery comics. The HBO show “Tales From the Crypt” is based on them. I bought three of them for three dollars and decided to make my own sketch covers for them.
The first part of making a hand bound sketch cover out of a random comic is to make the logos. Though it can be time consuming this is the easy part for me. I remake the logos as vector drawings in Adobe Illustrator with the original logo as my guide. I find this to be a fairly mindless endeavor sort of like putting a puzzle together or putting a piece of furniture together from a kit. I got this part done right away. I think I rebuilt all three logos within a week after I got the there comics. Then they sat there.
The problem was that I had no idea what to do. First of all “Sketch Covers” is a bit of a misnomer for me. I don’t really sketch on them. I make finished drawings out of them. That takes more time so I need a good idea of what I’m going to do. I had none. Second of all EC Comics had excellent artists and those artists did excellent covers. It would be hard to come up with something that was anywhere near as interesting. I had nothing so the comics just sat there as time passed.
I hadn’t made many sketch covers in a while so I was thinking up any ideas I could. One idea was to mix them with my Super Hero Cartoon Art Cards. Those are the drawings I do at art card size of a super hero saying something. It’s a head and shoulders shot with a word balloon above it. I enjoy those little faces and pithy sayings. I wanted to make them bigger and put them on a sketch cover. I looked around for a sketch cover to draw on and there were the EC ones.
The EC Comics line didn’t have stories with continuing
characters in them. They didn’t have a Spider-Man or a Superman. The comics were all anthologies of short stories that shared a horror or crime theme. But what EC Comics did have was horror hosts for their tales. A host would introduce the story and then wrap it up at the end. The most famous one is the Crypt Keeper but there were others too. The comic I had feature the host “The Old Witch” so that’s who I went with for my sketch cover.
My Old Witch cover is pretty straight forward. I drew her ugly old face and gave her a world balloon. It came out okay but in the end it was just a B rather than an A. As I was contemplating how to improve with the next one I thumbed through the crime one I had. The EC Crime comics had no hosts so I was wondering what to do with it when a panel caught my eye. It was a drawing by Bernie Krigstein and it was beautiful. It was a panel of a guy smoking a cigarette and looking over his shoulder.
A few years ago I did a series of sketch covers where I took a 1980s comic, picked a panel with a head in it, and redrew that panel for the sketch cover. The problem I had was that the art inside wasn’t always that good and I often had trouble picking a panel to work from. As a result only one in three of them was really any good. But this Krigstein panel in the EC comic was beautiful. So I decided to use that for the sketch cover.
I’ve written before about my digital drawing process with my iPad and iPencil and that’s what I used here. I didn’t even scan the panel in as I normally would do. Instead I took a photo of the panel with the iPad, opened it up in Procreate, created a new layer, and drew on the new layer right over the panel. Then I took that digital drawing put it into my Photoshop sketch cover template and printed it out to be inked. After I inked inked the drawing I colored it with markers. With all the creative work done all that was left was to pull the staples out of the comic and put the new cover on. It all went smoothly for this issue.
For the third cover I did I picked a panel drawn by Wallace Wood (I’m going with Wallace rather than Wally, as he was often credited, because I’m told by people who knew him that he never went by Wally. He went by Woody to his friends). I found it a bit tougher going that the Krigstein one. Or at least it was more time consuming. The Krigstein one was more up my alley. His type of simplicity is my type of simplicity so I understood it well. Woody’s drawing looked simple at first glance but as I was redrawing it I realized how complex his simplicity was. Or maybe it was just that is was such a different simplicity from mine that I had to pay attention a lot.
Woody put a harsh lighting effect on the face that was masterful. He broke the shadows down into black shapes that reflected the forms of the face. All of his simplicity was based upon observed light where my and Krigstein’s simplicity was based more on the shapes of objects. It was interesting to me as I worked on the Woody one how much more attention I had to pay it since it wasn’t my usual way of thinking. It took me about twice as long to make as the Krigstein one. I didn’t think that would be the case when I started it.
One last thing of note was that the Woody one was easier to color than the Krigstein one. Since it had a lot of lighting effects in the drawing there was no need for me to put any into the color. It was a simple matter of putting in flat color and letting the ink drawing do the rest.