Radiant Comics

Yet again I’m here to tell you that scanning a lot of stuff in is really boring. I’m usually good at scanning in my work as I go so as not to leave myself a big job later on but sometimes the system breaks down. As I finish a piece I’l scan it into my computer within a day or two if not immediately. With other things I have a system such as my sketchbook or art cards. I let the art cards pile up until I have twenty or thirty of them and then scan them all in. That’s about a half an hour’s worth of scanning and it’s not too bad. Same with the sketchbook. Every ten or maybe twenty pages I’ll scan the pages. It works and I don’t get overwhelmed with scanning.

For the past year or so I’ve been making some art cards that I’ve been calling ink cards. They all outside what my normal art cards are. My normal art cards are baseball card size finished pieces. They could be pencil, ink, or color but they’re finished. With them there is a beginning and an end. The ink cards are not that. Instead they are spontaneous brush drawings. I’ve made them just to make new images. They’re not finished pieces like my normal art cards are and as a consequence of that I’ve had no idea what to do with them. I’ve posted pictures of some of them on Instagram but that’s it. Since they’re not my normal art cards I also haven’t scanned them in with my art cards. I’ve put them their own separate pile. A pile I thought I had scanned in.

Yesterday an idea for what to do with these ink cards popped into my head. It’s in the beginning stages and a bit unformed but I thought I’d work on it. I had about thirty new ones sitting on my desk that I knew were unscanned so I thought I’d use some old ones. I looked all around on my computer for them and could find nothing. It took me fifteen minutes of looking before I came to the conclusion that I had never scanned any of my ink cards in. Frustrated with myself I decided I may as well start scanning. Once again I totally forgot how much work it would be.

I had about 160 old ink cards to scan in. That was a lot more than I thought. Things can really pile up when you’re not paying attention. Also I have a very meticulous method for scanning in such stuff. It saves time and work later on but it means I have to pay attention now. The good news is that I have an 11×17 inch scanner so I can put sixteen cards on it at a time. This takes a minute as I have to line them all up in a grid and try to keep them straight. The bad news it that my scanner doesn’t do batch scanning. If it did I’d use the software to put a little selection box around all the individual cards and then hit “Batch scan” and it would make sixteen scans all in a row. Instead I select one card, hit scan, it scans, I select another card, and repeat. Not a tremendous burden but it makes things a little more boring.

The software automatically numbers the cards as I scan them in and then I write than number on the back of the card after I scan them. I find this easier than numbering them first because then I’d have to make sure they were scanner in the right order so the file number could match the number on the cards. There is much less room for error if I number the card after the file number. It means I have to pay attention to the order I take the cards off the scanner in but that’s not too hard.

It’s usually at this point that I would make sure the cards were straight in their digital state and if not I’d straighten them out. Often they are off by a degree or three as I’m just placing them on the scanner by hand and so can’t get them machine straight. But with so many scans to do I skipped this step. I may very well pay for that latter but since I’ll only be using a small percentage of the scans right now I put that off.

I ended up scanning in a hundred and twenty eight cards in a little over an hour and a half. It seemed like much longer. Drop a sixteen card batch down, scan them in one by one, take them off the scanner, number them, and put another batch down. Repeat that eight times. It all turns into a blur.

It was interesting seeing the ink drawings scanned in though. My not yet complete idea has something to do with “Big from small”. I want to present the drawings larger than they are in real life so people can see the little nuances of the ink on the paper. That’s one of the interesting things about a brush and ink. They can make all sorts of shapes, lines, and general splatters that can either coalesce into a drawing or even be interesting on their own. I want to try and figure out a way to express this with a digital book. I want to try pair them with some of my street photos by I’m not sure how. I was trying to play around with such pairings when I went looking for my ink cards scans only to find none. Now I’m almost ready to get started on that. But first I still have fifty more cards to scan in. Let this be a lesson. Don’t let things pile up even if you can’t find a reason at the moment to not let them pile up. Avoiding two or three hours in a row worth of boring scanning is the reason.

I’m writing this about a piece moments after I finished that piece. That’s something I don’t think I’ve ever done before but I just want to capture some initial thoughts. First off I’m not terribly happy with it but I also have no distance from it yet. I recently saw a tweet by a well known cartoonist asking if any artist is ever happy with their work. I answered that with a yes. There are lots of artists who are happy with their work but I added a caveat. Those artists usually aren’t on deadlines.

I’ve known a lot of working comic book artists in my day and often they are dissatisfied with their own pages. This is because drawing a comic book take a lot of work in a short amount of time which necessitates compromise. It doesn’t matter if all the drawing on a page isn’t 100% to your liking because you have to move on to the next page. You have a lot more to do. The comic has to go to press on a certain day and that’s when it has to be finished. It doesn’t matter if you’re happy with it or not.

That’s how almost all commercial art is. You’re being paid to do the job and you have to do it on budget and on time. It’s like any other job. If your boss tells you to dig a hole and have it done by 5PM and you don’t have it done in time you’ve failed and your boss will be angry at you. That you were taking your time to make the hole meet your own specifications won’t help you with your boss. Fail too many times and you’ll be looking for another job.

Non-commercial art is different. An artist does that to please himself. Sure maybe selling it is in the back of an artist’s mind but that’s a dream. And since there is no sale there is no deadline. You can take as long as you’d like on a piece. I’ve had pieces sit around for years before I ever finish them. It’s not finished until I’m pleased with it. Sometimes I’m never pleased with it and it becomes an abandoned work. It’s actually pretty rare for me to finish something and not be happy with it. Since nobody is buying my work I can keep working on it until I like it.

That’s what makes this “Dreams of Things #7” cover different for me. I’m not sure I like it. It’s my own fault to because the process I’ve been using for these covers has emphasized speed more than I usually do. That means I wanted to get them done quickly. That’s not quite the same as a deadline but it means there is compromise involved. I’ve made a few of these covers using old drawings. Drawings I finished and scanned it but never made a finished piece of art with. I print out the drawing in blue line, ink it, and then color the drawing with markers.

Usually whenever I color something I first make a color sketch. That saves me from making mistakes. But with these “Dreams of Thing covers I wasn’t doing that for two reasons. One was that I wanted to get them done quickly and two was that I was using simple graphic drawings were the color would be simple. Of course then things got complicated.

The drawing I picked for number seven is filled with shapes. It’s a weirdly dressed man crouching on a rooftop with lots of geometric shapes around him. The drawing isn’t particularly complicated but the color is. Like all the covers of this sort before I came up with a basic color idea but didn’t really work it out before hand. I knew I wanted the figure to be primary colors and the background to be secondary ones but that’s all I had.

The first color that I put down was the dark blue in the background. I wanted a night sky look to the background but the dark blue necessitated a lighter blue in the figure. Though still one of the primary colors this blue is really a tint of a primary color. It has white in it. It works as I anticipated it would but the lighter blue is still not quite as red as the red is nor as yellow as the yellow is.

That brings us to the building. I knew I wanted neutral browns for this but I think the brown/yellow might be a little too yellow,. It’s fighting too much for attention with the yellow of the guy’s clothes. I can fix that by making it a little more brown but I’m not sure if I want to. That might make the browns too brown. This is where a color sketch would really have helped. Other than that I’m fine with the building.

I had the most struggle with the orange boxes in the background. At first I was unsure if they should even be orange. I was thinking maybe purple but I stuck with orange. The problem then was that I don’t have very many orange markers. I basically have two. A middle orange and a dark orange. Except the dark orange is close to a mid-tone. I ended up dulling down the darker orange with a purple. This lead to greater differentiation between the oranges which is what I was looking for. It still might be a little too monochrome for but there is not much I can do about that. Overall there is a nice contrast between the dark blue and the orange. That works. It’s just looks a little ugly to me.

As I sit back and look at it on my easel I’m a little happier with it than when I first finishes it. I can’t say it’s my best piece but it has a certain appeal to it. I like the composition and the quirky image. It also fits with the weird dream imagery of the rest of the series. Like but not love. Looks like I’ll have to settle.

Scanning a whole lot things is nowhere as easy as I always think it should be. Scanning one thing isn’t too much of a strain so I always think that scanning many things shouldn’t be too difficult. Wrong. It is difficult. Many years ago I scanned all of my film snapshots into my computer. I bought a dedicated film scanner and spent about a hundred hours scanning in thousands of photos. That was probably about the year 2005 and I’m glad I got it done. I’ve been using those photos for things and posting them on social media for years now. It was a lot of work but time well spent.

Cut to just a few weeks ago and my sister was asking me about film scanners. She wanted to scan in some of her old film snapshots. I said I’d leand her mine since it’s not something I use everyday plus I’ve got a backup non-dedicated film scanner that can do the job for me if I need it. I couldn’t locate all the parts and wires I’d need to give her right at that moment so it would be a few weeks until I could bring her the scanner. It was yesterday that I finally got everything unhooked from my machine and in one place. But then I decided to plug it in to make sure it was working. After all I had’t used it in a while.

I have a couple of binders that I keep my negatives in. They’re all in three ring archival plastic sleeves on a shelf. I knew I had one binder that had some negatives in it that I had never scanned in before. Odd and ends sort of stuff. I scanned in all my negatives that had people in them back in 2005 and the ones left were the stuff I didn’t care about as much and didn’t have the energy to scan in a decade ago. I thought there were a few sleeves worth of stuff in there that I could scan in now to make sure the scanner was in working order. An hour of my time at most. Boy was I wrong.

Turns out I had a lot of stuff in that binder. Stuff I wasn’t interested in ten years ago but I wanted to scan in now. First off there were a lot of my early street photos of NYC. I hadn’t done a ton of street photography in film but that is when I started doing it. I can see why I didn’t scan them in back them but they’re more interesting to me now. I think I can make something of the since I have a lot more experience with street photography now. Plus it’s fun to see some stuff from the 90s. Most of my street photos were made after I went digital in 2000.

The next cool thing I had was some multiple picture panoramas of some of my friends NYC apartments. Since even back then I was making my large cut together photo collages I would sometimes take panoramic pictures of places. There was no photo software in those days to automatically stitch the pieces together into one large photo so I never bothered to scan those ones in. In 2005 I’d have to put them all together in Photoshop myself and I had no interest. Nowadays Photoshop can do that automatically and so can a new (and cheaper) program called Affinity Photo. I think it even does that particular thing better than Photoshop. I tried it out on some apartment pictures and it worked well.

I also had a lot of old reference shots and assignments from back in my early college days. The mid 1980s. I had already scanned in the ones that had people in them so these were the less interesting ones. Still a few of them had potential so I just scanned them all in. That was easier than trying to figure out which ones were which. Maybe I can make something out of one or two of them.

The last category of photos is my still lifes. For a while there in the mid 1990s I was collecting little nicknacks and arranging them to make still life photos out of. That is where my dice collection started. I made a couple of cool photos this way but I found it very restraining. Since I was depending on your basic commercial photo lab to process my film and prints I mostly ended up with kinda lifeless little four by six inch prints. I had a couple of them printed larger and used some of them in my collages but they really went nowhere. They look much better on a big computer screen.

There really is one more category of unscanned photos and that is the miscellaneous category. I don’t know what they are. Odds and ends, whims, flukes, and whatever else. Back in the old days of film it was common to just snap a few photos to use up a roll of film so you could have it developed. I had a bunch of those in the sleeves. May as well scan them in now.

All totaled I ended up scanning in about six hundred photos. That is a lot. The scanner does most of the work but I have to pull a negative strip from the sleeve, put the strip in the holder, put the holder in the scanner, hit the scan button, and then wait five to seven minutes and repeat. About 175 times. I was doing things during the wait. That’s when I was making the panoramas, doing some inking, and even writing this. But all told it took about twelve hours. That’s a lot of hours of scanning. I’m tired now. I’m glad I got it done but is it ever a pain.

One more thing about scanning. Get organized. The only way I know these negatives have not been scanned is that over the years I’ve written “Scanned” on the negative sleeves after I’m done scanning them. I even wrote “Scanned bottom three” on some of them. That really helped. Now they all have “Scanned” on them.