Radiant Comics

It’s a Tuesday night and I’m finally almost over being tired. At least I think I am. How is that for a definitive statement? It comes from the fact that I’m not very good at staying up late anymore. Maybe I never was but at least when I was younger I recovered more quickly. I generally sleep from about eleven thirty at night to about six thirty in the morning. Plus I’m a morning person. That means I’m up at the same time (sometimes a little earlier much to my annoyance) even if I go to bed late. This past Saturday I didn’t fall asleep until after two in the morning which means I only got four and a half hours of sleep.

It doesn’t usually hit me hard the next day though. On Sunday I got some things done even though I had to take a nap in the afternoon. It was Monday that I couldn’t concentrate. I find that very frustrating. I like to get things done. I usually have very good powers of concentration. I can move in and out of focus on stuff with relative ease which allows me to keep a few balls in the air. Not getting enough sleep makes all these balls come crashing down. I pace, I sit down, I pace some more, and then I sit some more. I get nothing done and it drives me crazy. That’s why I usually like to get to bed at the same time every night.

So where was I? I was out having fun. I drove into Brooklyn for a friend’s birthday. We hung out on his rooftop that has a spectacular view of NYC, ate some food, and had a good time in the company of good friends. It’s how every day should be.

Driving in New York City can be quite the chore. There is a lot of traffic. My trip down to Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon traffic was, thankfully, uneventful but it did take me about an hour and forty-five minutes to make the forty five mile trip. That’s how much traffic there is in NYC. That and there were two bridges involved in getting to Brooklyn. They’re never as fast as highways.

Driving home was a bit more of an adventure. I dropped a friend off at his apartment in nearby Brooklyn and then had to turn around and try to find the Brooklyn Bridge. That was a lot trickier than I thought it would be. I had another friend with me in the car who was using her phone and its GPS and maps to navigate but the old saying “The map is not the territory” came into play. I think it was Flatbush Avenue that we were on and we were looking to make a left onto Atlantic Avenue but no such left was allowed. Neither were any other lefts for quite a while. And the roads were as full of traffic as you’d expect. Which is a lot of traffic. This part of downtown Brooklyn in mostly highway traffic with little pedestrian traffic. A ton of traffic lights too.

Eventually we made it onto the bridge but not before driving on a road that really made us nervous for a moment. I made a right turn onto the bridge entrance ramp and suddenly there were no cars around us. No street lights either. Just concrete barriers and barrel cones. It is really strange to go from driving in crowded traffic to no one. I was really questioning if we somehow made a wrong turn. But then were joined other cars on the bridge and all was okay.

After getting off the bridge we had to drive through lower Manhattan. That wasn’t too hard since it’s difficult to get lost in Manhattan. But we did end up somehow going north when we wanted west. A couple of times. It was easy enough to make a left though. Manhattan is much easier than Brooklyn.

As we drove through the sometimes large and sometimes remarkably small Manhattan streets I had the realization that driving through Manhattan was a completely different experience than walking through it. Usually I’m on foot when I’m in NYC. I take the train in when I go down there to take my street photos and I walk all around. When I’m on foot I’m part of the crowd. We all walk the streets together. Sure there are cars all around us but they are separate. They’re not part of the crowd. Besides knowing that I have to watch for traffic when I cross the street and don’t trust the cars to always do what they’re supposed to I mostly ignore them.

When I was in the car driving I couldn’t ignore anything. There were all sorts of things I had to look out for. Other cars, traffic lights, people on bicycles (despite it being midnight), and lots of pedestrians were all sharing the road with me. I felt like I was part of some giant machine. A vast machine with giant buildings, bright lights, and lots of moving parts. On foot I felt part of a crowd but in the car there was no crowd. There was the machine.

That is probably among the reasons that it took me an hour and a half or so to fall asleep that night. To play my part in the machine correctly I really had to pay attention. On foot I can wander, meander, and do as I pleased as long as I pay attention at the cross walks. I’d watch out for cars and bikes there. When driving I have to always pay attention. There is no other way. The running of the whole machine depends on it.

So I’m writing this late Tuesday night just before I go to bed. I almost never work this late but it took me until this afternoon to be able to concentrate on anything. I managed to get a street photo done despite crashing hard in the middle of it. I sat down for a minute before dinner and found myself drifting off to sleep. It wasn’t for long and wasn’t refreshing but I managed to get a second wind after dinner. Then ten thirty rolled around and I decided to write this. Now it’s time to see if I can get some sleep. G’night all.

I’m a tools guy. I like equipment. It doesn’t matter what for. It matters that I have the right tool for the right job. I’ll improvise if I have to. I’m no stranger to that. But there is nothing like the satisfaction of having just the right tool to help out in a situation. The exception to this is my specialized bike tools. They are annoying. Instead of being able to take my bike apart and put it back together with regular tools it seems I need a specialty tool for each part on my bike. I get no satisfaction from that.

I’m thinking of this because sometimes I’ve been known to come up with my own tool for a given situation. Just modifying something to make it more useful to me in a given situation. I’ve built a few things in my day. My easel comes to mind as it is sitting next to me but usually it’s smaller stuff. I’m not much of a craftsman though. I’m pretty good at figuring out how to build something but it doesn’t end up being very pretty. You’d think that would be the easy part for me since I’m an artist but I often have little patience for craft.

It’s funny what a person can have patience for and what not. I always think back to my youth and my complete impatience for model building. I have all the patience in the world for drawing and painting. I can spend hours getting those things done. Taking care of all the small steps and details is okay with me. But ask me to put together a model of a spaceship and I can’t do it. I don’t have the patience for that.

What I’ve been thinking about building lately is a tool for photography. Or maybe it’s videography. Either way it’s a better monopod. For those who don’t know a monopod is basically one leg of a tripod. A tripod is what you can put your camera on to keep it steady and in place instead of holding it. A tripod has three legs that spread out for stability and the camera screws into a small platform on top of and in the center of the three legs. A tripod has been a standard piece of photographers equipment for a hundred years.

Though I’ve had a tripod, the same one, since my college days back in the mid 1980s I only recently got a monopod. A monopod only has one leg with the platform on top that the camera screws onto. It’s there to help you steady the camera a little bit in situations where a tripod isn’t practical. I decided to get one a few years ago to help me with some low light street photos and to help with holding the camera steady while taking video. Especially if I was using the big zoom on my camera. The further out you are zoomed the more the camera shaking is noticeable. That’s the way of cameras.

The monopod I got is pretty cool. It goes from a foot and a half to nearly six feet tall. It has cool telescoping legs and a nice loop handle. As an object I really like it. As a tool not so much. The problem I have with it is that it seemed to make my problem of keeping the camera steady worse and not better.

I know how to hold a camera to keep it as steady as possible. I shoot from the waist looking down at the swivel LCD and hold the camera close to my body. Much like carrying a bowl of liquid your body will automatically try to hold the camera level and steady. And by using your whole body it will act as a bit of a shock absorber for the camera shake.

The problem I had with the monopod was that though it kept the camera from moving up and down it didn’t keep the camera from drifting left, right, backwards, and forwards. Unlike a tripod you have to hold a monopod with your hand and any small movement of your hand gets passed on to the camera. I couldn’t keep the camera as still on the monopod as off. That made it useless. I carried it on three or four street shooting occasions and it never proved useful once. So lately I’ve been thinking up some ways to make it useful.

First off it would be nice if it could stand on its own. I don’t want it to be a tripod but if I could put a small tripod or foot on the bottom of it that would be cool. I thought about a bunch of things to use as a foot but the best one to come to mind is the base of my bicycle pump. It’s made to stand on its own and even put your feet on as you pump. If I put something like that on the bottom of the monopod maybe it can stand on its own. Then I’d like it to rotate.

Turning the camera on the tripod is quite clumsy. That’s when it shakes left and right and turns too fast and not smoothly. That’s when it struck me that I might use a bike part to help out with that. I could use the axel from the front wheel of a bike. That turns smoothly with small ball bearings and can easily be turned vertical to match the monopod. Plus it’s solid with no top to bottom movement. That might work.

Of course this is all conjecture right now. It’s all in my head. I have no plans worked out nor have I gotten all the parts I need. Though I have an old bike tire I could use I don’t have an old bike pump to steal the foot from. Plus neither of those things may work so I’ll have to gather a bunch of parts.

But that’s what I’m thinking about. I want a new tool. And since it doesn’t exist I’ll have to come up with my own.

I was moving some stuff around today and I found a street photo I made back in January 2010. Hard to believe that was over five years ago now. This was one of the first 10×15 inch street photos that I made and it’s done in my classic cut and paste different photos into one big photo style. No words to go along with the image but it does have a title. “Subject Unknown”.

“Subject Unknown”

I’ve always face a little problem with my street photos in that none of these people had asked to be my models. They have no idea these photos even exist. They were all taken in public places but I still feel protective of people who didn’t volunteer or get paid to be my muses. So I’m always trying to find ways to work around their identities. It also helps me be creative. Plenty of other photographers make photos all about the model and the model’s identity or the model’s pretend identity so nobody will miss out if I make mine about obscuring the model’s identity. That trail eventually lead me down the path I use now with many filter recipes that give me different looks and effects over my photos. But before I developed those I did a few photos with this mask technique.

The rest of this photo follows an anonymous model technique too but that’s by giving the viewer little glimpses of a persons face and not the whole face. We see a nose and lips, pieces of arms, the back of a shoulder, and a figure off in the distance. I also uses blurry out of focus figures. I’m big on blurriness as one of the words in my photography vocabulary. Sometimes things need to be out of focus. It adds to the visual variety of a photo. I’ve actually made photos where everything is in sharp focus and they don’t turn out well. They lack a certain depth that the eye can move into. So blurry is as important as sharp. But I couldn’t make the main figures blurry to obscure their identities. Blurry can’t be the main flavor of the dish.

So I came up with masks. I draw masks all the time. I draw odd faces all the time. It was natural that I reach the conclusion that I should draw masks on the main people in the photos. I even thought it was an easy solution in that good old way where I think things will take way less time then they eventually do.

At first I thought I could draw the masks digitally. I opened the photo in Photoshop and proceeded to use my Wacom pen to try and draw the mask over the person’s face. It didn’t turn out as I’d hoped it would. I thought maybe if I drew it at a larger size it would be better but that didn’t work either. I just plain don’t have enough time in drawing digitally to get a real feel for it. I find the whole process clumsy. Drawing on a piece of glass with a tool that won’t do exactly what I want it too is frustrating to me. I’m sure if it was my job and I was doing it all day every day I’d get the hang of it soon enough but that was never my job. So I decided, once again, it would be faster to draw on paper and scan in.

Now the first thing I had to do was draw all those faces. This is easy enough to do digitally since it wouldn’t be a finished drawing. I just trace over the faces and then print that out in blue line to draw over. Though the faces are only an inch or so tall in the final photo I drew them at four to six inches tall. Each was drawn on a different piece of paper and then I scanned them in to be colored on the computer. Coloring a drawing on the computer is something I do all the time and am very comfortable with. It’s totally different than drawing on the computer. It took some doing to get the masks to fit just right though. If I remember correctly I had to warp and bend them ever so slightly in Photoshop to get them to look the way I wanted. They had to be in the right place compared to the hairline and ears while bending slightly around the jaw. That took more fiddling than I thought it would.

The last thing I remember doing to the masks is knocking back their layer opacity to 90%. That means the color is not quite solid. Ten percent of the face behind it shows through. That’s really not enough to notice any features or such but it makes the masks slightly less stark. They sure do stand out against their photo backdrops but a little less so with the 90% opacity. I went back and forth with that trying to figure out exactly how much if any of the background face I wanted showing through the mask but eventually I settled on very little.

Overall I like how this photo came out. I like the boldness of the masks paired with the boldness of the figures walking towards us. Plus it makes some sort of statement about our faces and the masks we wear on them. “My mask is my true face” are the words that go with one of my old prints and they can be used here too. What is real the mask or the face underneath? I don’t have the answers just the questions.

Either way I only did two or three of these masked photos. They ended up taking a lot of time to do. One of the reasons I like working with photos is that it’s a faster way of working with images than drawing or painting. I can get more done in the same amount of time. If the photo is going to take the same amount of time then it has lost its advantage. But looking at this on makes me want to do more. Maybe I’ll figure out a way to speed things up. Sure I will.

Here I go again with another trip to Bryant Park in NYC. This time I’m taking a different way in. Instead of taking a train into Penn Station from Nanuet I’m taking a train into Grand Central Station from Tarrytown. That means a little more driving an a more expensive trip. First off Tarrytown is across the Hudson River from me. That means taking the Tapan Zee Bridge. Any bridge means a solid chance of a traffic jam but on a Saturday morning at 9AM I didn’t run into one of those. Right now they are building a new Tapan Zee Bridge next to the old one. There are lots of big cranes along the span and a bunch of pylons have been sunk with cross pieces on them. Most of it was fenced off for safety and I was driving so I didn’t really get more than a glimpse.

It took about half an hour to get to the Tarrytown train station as compared to twenty minutes for the Nanuet one. The cost of a train ticket is more from here too. I just spent $20.50 on an off peak round trip ticket as compared to $16.50 from Nanuet. Plus there is the six dollar bridge toll. And you have to watch the Yankees schedule because Tarrytown has a pay parking lot that’s free on nights and weekends except when there is a Yankee game going on in the Bronx. Then it’s an extra six dollars to park. That’s why even with the inconvenience of having to change trains on the Nanuet line I usually take that one. The train also run more often in Tarrytown.

I’m on the train now. The good thing about this line is that the trains run a lot more often. There are two or three an hour as compared to one an hour over on the Nanuet line. This train also ends up at Grand Central Station which is a great building. It’s wonderful to travel through as compared to Penn Station which is a confusing ugly nightmare. It’s like it wasn’t even designed with humans in mind. What kind of crazy person designs the doors that a thousand people have to go through all at the same time to be two people wide? Penn is nuts. I was looking at some photos I took in Grand Central in 2013 that made me want to take this train again. So I did.

It’s also a very pretty ride along the Hudson River. I haven’t taken this line in a couple of years so I haven’t seen this view in ages. I think I’ll stare out the window for a while. Look the Palisades!

Now I’m in Bryant park. I made it in time to catch the last twenty minutes of the Saturday morning dance class in the park. It goes from 9AM until 11AM. That was my plan. I haven’t had a chance to shoot any of the dancers since last year so I’m glad I got the chance today. Now I’m resting for a moment because the sun is hot today. It’s in the low 80s so it’s not super hot but it’s not cool out there in that sun. I had some back pain yesterday but I rested up and am feeling much better today. Still I’ve got some twinges so I might have to take it easy. I wanted to walk down to 14th Street but I’m a little unsure right now. I’ll see how it goes.

I’m back on the train. Only one break to write in the park today. I kept busy but took breaks so I wouldn’t wear down my back held up well. I felt some dull pain early on as I walked around with me camera bag on my shoulder but it went away quickly. My camera bag isn’t even a real camera bag. I’ve had plenty of those before buy I find for me a day bag works best. I don’t really have a lot of camera equipment to carry but I do have other stuff. I don’t always carry my iPad but I have on my last two trips so the bag has to fit that. Plus I got one with a place to carry my water bottle. I have to stay hydrated on these hot July days so I carry my water. Then I also need room for my food.

My camera doesn’t even fit in the bag very well. I just kinda push the camera to the bottom. It distends the bag but is surrounded by padding so it’ll be okay for short trips. The camera is in my hand all day so it doesn’t matter that much if it doesn’t fit in the bag well.

I stuck to Bryant park today. I didn’t make it out of the area at all. The park was crowded and full of things to shoot. The library steps at the back of the park was especially full of people. I made a few laps of the park but I think I was enjoying taking photos of all the people on the library steps best. There seemed to be a wide variety of people all full of life.

I saved a little time to shoot some pictures in Grand Central but it was less than I planned. On my final pass at the library steps as I was leaving there were two weddings being photographed there. Lots of dressed up people posing. I was taking a few shots of the first wedding. They seemed to be Japanese hipsters. Japanese Americans I guess because who else would be taking wedding picture in NYC except the locals? Hipsters is only guess too because that’s how the bride and groom seemed to be dressed. I think someone was dressed as Elvis too. Hipster Elvis though. Not Vegas Elvis.

After shooting a few photos I turned around and was startled to see a dozen pink bridesmaid dresses. That was a lot of pink. The hipsters were more my style but I took some pink dress photos too. Finally dragging myself away I walked the couple of avenues east and caught my train.

I am a bit tired this evening as I write this. Just normal life tired but also tired from doing a lot of coloring on my “Ghost of Fifth Street” comic project. I had mentioned before that I was having trouble starting the coloring because I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do until I decided to keep it simple. That and it was a daunting forty two pages of coloring work.

I’m not a huge fan of coloring on the computer. Sure I do it all the time and once I start can get into it but I’d still rather paint and draw with real three dimensional tools. But often the computer is the most efficient and effective way to add color to something. Especially if that something is a digital project.

Normally it takes me a long time to color a piece on the computer. Always longer than I think it will. It’s mostly my art prints that I color on the computer and that could be why it takes so long. They’re not like coloring a sketch or a comic. An art print is a single image that’s got to stand on it’s own. That usually means that the color has to be just so. It has to say something in conjunction with the drawing and often the color is what holds the whole drawing together. It’s not uncommon for me to color a piece half a dozen different ways to get the one I want. And then I often do more drawing in the color. I build the color up as shapes and those shapes have to be drawn just right. I’ve had many prints that I wanted to color in a day take three or four days. It can really be a pain.

That’s why this forty two pages of coloring seemed really daunting. Was this really going to take me eighty days? That would be crazy. That’s when I finally figured out how to keep it simple. I just started adding flat color in Photoshop. No drawing with the color. That isn’t really needed either. My comic is not about the color like one of my prints is. I like it pretty well in black and white but wanted a color version too for some reason. Probably because more people will read it if it’s in color.

Keeping it simple means a lot of thinking though. It means I have to make the color work right here and right now and not leave anything to be decided in the future. Sure I can add technique over it later on if I want to but that’s not a necessity. I’ve got to find the right colors to define the drawing’s space right now. That was my task.

I fell back on the very old technique of doing the background first. That’s how paintings have been done since the beginning of painting. Work from the deep space forward. And lots and lots of neutrals. That was key. Neutral colors are earth tones. Browns and greys of every hue. They are what you have to set up so that all the bright colors can stand apart from them in the way you want. It’s essential to learn how to work with neutrals. They are also very safe and if you overdo it with them can make things boring. I’ve seen a lot of boring pictures where the artist was too timid with color.

I started with the skies. Somehow that was the key to me getting things done. I figured out what color the sky was going to be in each panel it appeared. Turns out I had a lot of skies in my drawings for this comic. I didn’t want them to all be the same color blue so I mixed it up. I had a few different shades of blue, some more blue/greens, oranges, and some occasional pinks. Clouded skies were done in shades of those colors. Once I had the skies all colored things didn’t seem so bad.

After the skies I moved on to the other background objects. That was where I did most of my work with the neutrals. Sometimes it was objects, buildings, and landscapes and sometimes it was design elements. I had a few pages that were full image splash pages made up of lots of figures and design elements. Not so much a real space but more like one of my art prints. I kept it simple and didn’t do any drawing with color on these pages so they went along fine like the rest.

But what is the reason I’m tired you ask? Because I have been knocking out these pages like a crazy person. It seems that once I make my mind up to do something I have to put everything else aside and get it done. Every spare moment for the last three weeks has gone into getting this coloring done. At first I was getting a page a day done. It was taking about two hours a page. Then as the pages pilled up I could see that there was an end down the road. Some days I was able to get two pages done and on the weekends three pages a day. All my other art got pushed to the side as I did more and more coloring. It was a little frustrating because I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I wasn’t even trying to get three pages a day done on the weekend but couldn’t get anything else done so I kept going back to it. I’d call it obsessive but I’m really not a very obsessive person. It was a little annoying though since I couldn’t switch from project to project as I often do but once I settled down and got more and more done I was okay with it.

I’m especially okay with it now since I only have two pages to go. It’s hard to believe I’ll be finished soon. Another stage down.