Glib and Glamour

I just don't care about this blog today. I'm all blogged out. Y'see, I've been working on a site for my new web comic and for the last two days it's been a pain in the ass. But at least I've made some progress and that's better than when I tried before.

I decided, a few of months ago, to use something called "WordPress" to make my new site. It's blogging software that's widely used and seems to work fine for everybody else. A plugin for WordPress called "ComicPress" is specifically made for web comic sites. With the two I could combine my blog and web comic. I could also upload comics ahead of time and it would load them day by day. Easy to update is what I'm after.

That's why I rarely update my jaredosborn.com site. It's an html site that I made in a program called "Freeway" and it's just too much of a pain to update. The site is graphics heavy which makes it cumbersome to change things all the time. I want a different solution for my web comic.

When I first started implementing WordPress I knew I was getting off on the wrong foot by messing with it too close to bedtime. Never start doing work that gets your mind racing close to bedtime. You'll be too tired to work effectively plus won't be able to shut your mind down to sleep. But I messed around anyway. Couldn't get anything done. Couldn't sleep. Just as I suspected but I thought I could sneak one in.

The next time I tried it to get WordPress installed correctly I was full of confidence that things would be up and running shortly. And after a little while they were. Then I tried to get ComicPress up and running. Oh boy. Error after error. I had no idea what was going wrong.

I went on every help site, read lots of forum posts, scoured FAQs, and tried everything they said but I still couldn't get things to work properly. I must have tried to get ComicPress to work at least three different times. I just never could. Other people had sites up using it so it must work but I couldn't make it go. So I just left it for a month or two. I couldn't face it. I continued to make comic strips but I stopped figuring out how to post them.

On Friday I decided to start designing the site in Freeway. It would take more work to keep it running but at least I knew I could do it. I worked on some logos, basic designs, and got things going. Things went fine but at the end of the day I came to the conclusion that if I wanted the site to run smoothly I'd better give ComicPress another try. So I did.

Saturday morning bright and early (I'm a morning person, another reason I shouldn't have started near bedtime) I wiped everything clean from my server and database, downloaded the things I needed, and started again. A couple of hours later and much to my surprise I had ComicPress up and running. Shock of shocks.

The site still looks awful since I have to modify the basic design and haven't figured out how to do that properly yet but now I can upload and schedule strips and blogs. That's what I want to be able to do. Ugly and functional I can live with.

I haven't done much web design in my time but I finally figure out why there is so much bad web design out there. The "Web Safe" color palette that web designers work with has almost no neutral colors in it. Maybe just a couple.

Neutral colors are they key to color. They're not too bright, not to dull, not too white, and not too dark. They put all the other colors in context. The world has lots of neutral colors in it and they make bright colors brighter and dark colors darker. Web colors are mostly too bright or too dark. The reason half the web is designed with grey gunmetal and light blue colors are that they are as close to neutrals as you're going to get with web safe color. Who ever designed the web safe color palette was no artist.

So anyway that's why I'm tired of this whole blog thing. It's much easier to deal with when there is only creative work to do.

Comics I Bought This Week: November 25, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got one new comic plus a trade paperback collection:

Usagi Yojimbo -124

Incognito by Brubaker and Phillips

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"The Lone Ranger Volume 3" by Brett Mathews and Sergio Cariello

This is the third volume of the Lone Ranger from Dynamite Entertainment and I've bought them all so obviously I like the series. That being said I think this is the strongest volume in the series. It kind of ended in the middle of a story but that didn't affect my enjoyment of it.

The origin part of the Lone Ranger's story is over and I find that a good thing because I'm tired of origin stories in general. Not that they can't be well done but they're all nearly the same. Now we move on to a story of the Lone Ranger and Tonto helping a lawman to track down a killer.

That's pretty much all there is to the plot because this book is more about the characters, who they are, and how they play off each other. The writer, Brett Mathews, did a nice job with this interplay. It was the peppiest script so far.

Sergio Cariello, once again, did a fine job on the artwork. His storytelling is good and his drawing is nice. He was helped out by a good coloring job by Marcelo Pinto. Both the color and the drawing set the mood very well.

Not much more to say other than I liked it. All three volumes of "The Lone Ranger" are solid tales of the western hero. Whether you like comics in general or westerns specifically "The Lone Ranger" is a good read.

Bending the Ending

I'm always coming up with ideas of things to do. It's not easy but I like to. That's because I like to do things. But if there is one thing I've learned over the years it's that the rest of the world's idea of "Doing something" is not the same as mine.

To nutshell it: what most of the world thinks of as doing something I think of as having someone else do something to entertain you. Going to a concert is not doing anything in my eyes. Playing a guitar yourself would be doing something. Going out for diner is not doing anything to me. Cooking a meal would be doing something. Going to see a movie would not be doing something. Making your own movie would. And on and on.

This has always been a problem for me. Whenever someone says, "Hey, do you want to do something?" they mean a totally different thing than I do. Usually people don't like my idea of doing something because it takes effort. But to me the effort is what makes the doing. Let's pay some money, sit there, and enjoy the fruits of somebody else's effort has it's place but not when I actually want to do something. Yeah, yeah, I'm misunderstood.

But anyway that leads me into my latest idea for doing something. I occasionally make art cards. I occasionally buy them too. An art card is a small baseball card sized original piece of art. A sketch, a drawing, a painting, or whatever your medium is you make art on a 2.5 x 3.5 inch piece of paper. It's kind of neat and kind of fun.

What I want to do now is make a writing card. Instead of a piece of art it has a piece of writing on it. A sentence or two. Each card would be an original piece of writing as that would make each card distinct. An individual piece of writing art. This appeals to me because I've been writing short slogan-like pieces in conjunction with my artwork for years. I've always put words and pictures together. Writing an art card the slogan/sentence would be fun for me.

Except I'm not sure what form the writing card would take. I think it would be best if it was hand written by the writer but that immediately brings up questions of aesthetics. Should it be hand written neatly? Should one use calligraphy? Or maybe just nice script? All questions of design and soon I'm pretty far away from a writing card and back to an art card. So I'm a little stuck at this stage.

I think I'm going to have to try and design something for the cards. It might have to be something that looks undesigned so as to emphasize the writing. Unfortunately this is the hardest kind of design to do and not really a lot of fun. Fancy and elaborate is much more fun than stripped down and unobtrusive. That's why there is so much bad fancy and elaborate design out there.

The writing is actually the easy part for me. I like the micro writing form of just a couple of sentences. I wonder though if other people have ever made writing art cards. I can picture writers dashing off a few interesting sentences here and there to make cards but what would those sentences be about? I ask that question because a lot art cards feature famous characters. Batman, Superman, Darth Vader, Spider-Man, The Hulk, and just about every other pop culture character is who collectors want art cards of.

Would writers make a writing art card about Batman? I don't know. I don't think so. I think most writers can find something interesting to say in a few sentences but who could find something interesting to say about Luke Skywalker in two sentences? I'm not sure. And would fans care about a two sentence card about Superman?

I think fans of, say, Steven King would love a couple of sentence hand written card by him. He's famous for his writing so that's what people want from him. But writers of movies, comics, and TV are famous because of the characters they write. Their writing isn't famous; the pop culture character they write about is. Would anyone care if the current X-Men writer wrote a few lines about the X-Men on an art card? I don't know.

These thoughts have nothing to do with me making some writing art cards but they pop into my head. Anyway, I'm going to try and do something now.

Comics I Bought This Week: November 19, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics plus a hard cover collection:

Echo - 16

Dr. Horrible - 1

Hercules "Full Circle"

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"The Invincible Iron Man: World's Most Wanted: Book 1" by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larrroca

This Iron Man volume can be summed up like I summed up "The Ultimates". It's alternately good and a train wreck. I blame Warren Ellis's writing for bringing "real" geo-politics to super hero comics. Except in Ellis's comics the geo-politics usually hinder things. It's tough to get things done in the real world. In Ellis-land the heroes were often thwarted by bureaucracy and politics.

In the current Marvel Universe Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, is in charge of the US's national security. It defies believability and takes me out of the story sometimes. That and as the guy in charge Norman Osborn has no checks and balances on him. He just does whatever he wants even though if these were "real" geo-political stories he would lose his job in a day. At one point Norman Osborn decides to test a super hero's power so he orders an airliner shot down. It is shot down and he has to explain himself to no one. It's this kind of stuff that makes me put the book down in disbelief.

The rest of the story is pretty good. It's an "Us Against the World" tale as Tony Stark (Iron Man) has to go on the run because Norman Osborn has made him an outlaw. The "Us" refers to Tony Stark, his co-worker Pepper Potts, and Tony's ex-secuity chief Maria Hill. All sorts of chase scenes, fight scenes, and strategies go by at an entertaining pace.

The art was only so-so for me. It's that photo realistic type artwork that's been popular in mainstream super hero comics for a while now. It comes off as a little dead to me. Well executed by lifeless at times.

So there you go. When it was good it was good but when it was bad I had to put the book down out of sheer disbelief. But at least sometimes it was good. That's more than I can say about a lot of comics.

Not Bored But Board

I bought a new drawing board this week. I think it might be the only drawing board that I've ever purchased in my entire life. That's quite odd when I think about it.

I've had two drawing boards that I've used for years and years. Decades and decades even. The first one is an actual board. It's about twenty two by fourteen inches and is a scrap piece of one inch plywood that I first used as a drawing board in junior high. I finally retired it this year as it has gotten too chipped and splintered over the last thirty years to be very useful. A long life for a piece of scrap wood.

The second drawing board I've had since High School. My mother got it for me. At a garage sale I think. At twenty four by twenty inches it's the bigger of the two and is still in use. It also came with a T-square and has slots underneath for storing the T-square. It always just got in the way and wasn't a very good T-square so it was tossed long ago. I don't think I own a T-square anymore since I've had a parallel rule on my drawing table since college. So much for T-squares.

I don't use a drawing board much these days for drawing. I generally prefer to stand and draw and do so at my drawing table most of the time. I use the drawing board mainly as a place to put my laptop as I sit and type or surf the internet. Sometimes I'll sit and draw but not too often. That's probably why I haven't gotten a new one in decades.

Over the years I have also had a couple of those ubiquitous art school twenty two by twenty six inch Masonite type drawing boards with the built in clips. I barely count those because I've never liked them and they don't stick around for long. They are way too thin to be used on anything but a table and have too much bounce back if put on an easel or across the arms of a chair. That and the die cut handle and top clips always manages to get in the way. Since they're cheap and every one semester art student has one there are plenty of them tucked away in closets and every so often someone gives me one.

My new drawing board is one of those white, super heavy, laminated, particle board drawing boards. It's not very portable. But that's okay because it will serve a totally different role than my old one. It's a big twenty four by thirty six inches and is going to be used on my easel. Y'see, I've got it in my head to do some big drawings. I have big paper. I've always had big paper. I buy it in twenty two by thirty inch sheets but I've rarely done drawings that big. Usually I cut the paper down to a smaller size before drawing on it.

I'm not even exactly sure what I want to draw. I just know I want it to be big. I could have cleared off my drawing table and dropped a big piece of paper on that but it's kind of hard to draw that way. An easel is definitely the way to go if you want to draw big. You can approach the drawing from better angles, literally, and see things a whole lot better.

When making one of my large paintings I've always drawn on the canvases which were on my easel so this really won't be new for me but it will be different. An underdrawing for a painting is preliminary. This will be a finished drawing. At least I think so. I haven't actually finished anything yet.

I'm may have to replace my easel one of these years because it's not very convenient when I have to move a painting up or down. It's an easel that I built myself right after I graduated college because I had no money for a store bought one. It has served me well since 1989 when I built it out of scrap wood. I designed it myself in a fit of inspiration and it is solid but a nice crank handle for moving a painting sitting on it up and down would be good.

This new heavy drawing will probably be more a pain to move up and down. The way I built the easel means that I have to loosen two wing nuts on the bottom beam that the painting sits on, move the beam and the painting up and then tighten the wing nuts. Not the most difficult thing in the world but not as easy as a crank handle that most professional store bought easels have. Turn the crank and the painting raises or lowers.

So there it is. My first new drawing board in a long time. Now I wonder when and what I'm going to draw.

Comics I Bought This Week: November 12, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics plus a magazine:

The Walking Dead - 67

Grim Jack "The Manx Cat" - 4

"Draw" #18 Fall 2009

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

Young Liars: Volume 2 "Maestro" by David Lapham

I'm a fan of David Lapham's work in general and liked volume one of "Young Liars" but this volume left me dazed and confused. Volume one was a complete self contained story that I thought didn't leave a whole lot of room for a sequel. But the series continues and here is the sequel.

Volume one started out with all the characters being fairly normal and then Lapham took them and us on a crazy ride. Volume two ups the ante by making things even crazier. For the first chapter it pretty much turned from a rock and roll crime story into an alien invasion sci-fi book. It was all a little bizarre.

"All a little confusing", is what sums up this volume for me. I'm still not even sure who the narrator was in the beginning of the book. And that's just one point. We have the same cast of rock and roll outcasts from the first volume but there are a lot of flashbacks and subterfuge going on. The plot changed focus/direction at least three times. I couldn't always get my bearings.

This volume is just plain crazy. Invading spider aliens, gunfights, and sexual betrayal, it has them all. I couldn't even mention all the strange goings on because I couldn't begin to describe them. What they all mean I'm not sure. If you're a fan of far out weird stuff check out this volume. I liked volume one better because it had a more coherent story but for sheer craziness this one wins.

Halloween Once Again

Another year and another Halloween has passed us by. For the fifth year in a row I made my way into Manhattan for a photo journey around the Halloween parade. Me and a million other people.

I don't actually go to the parade because Sixth Avenue, the parade route, is way too crowded to move around on let alone take pictures. My friend Bunche and I usually walk down Seventh Avenue to Christopher Street taking photos as we go. Then we set up on the cross street and get our own parade as everyone in costume walks by us to get to Sixth Avenue.

This year is was a washout photo-wise. It was pouring rain most of the time we were out which made photography especially difficult. Of course most Halloweens have been bad for me photographicly. On a nice night, which the last four Halloweens were, photography is difficult at best. I wasn't really too disappointed that that I didn't get to take many photos. Almost all of my Halloween parade photos have been awful and useless.

I've taken many street photos in Manhattan over the years. Most of them just sit on my hard drive but some of them I make into finished photos. More of them get used as reference material for drawings. But in looking back at four years of Halloween parade photos I realized I never once made anything out of any of them. I have not one finished photo that involves any of my Halloween pics.

It's just a tough situation in which to take photos. Since it's dark out and I'm on a crowded street I have two choices. Use a flash or hand hold and get blurs from long exposures. Neither is a great choice as my results show. I tend to like the blurry hand held photos better but I don't need Halloween to take those. Halloween should be about taking interesting pictures of people in interesting costumes. Instead I get boring pictures. That's life. Everything can't be a critical success.

Aside from the photographic aspects of the trip I had a good time. I walked down Seventh Avenue with a few friends and we chatted and enjoyed the night. We were lucky that despite the rain it was an exceptionally warm night. It was in the high 50's and at that time of year it could have easily have been in the low 40's. That would have made for a miserable time. As it was I was quite warm despite being wet.

I was amazed at how crowded it was that night. It has gotten more crowded year by year but this year it was exceptional. Probably because Halloween fell on a Saturday night but I also think because of tourism. A lot of foreign languages can be heard in New York City on any given day but I hear more on Halloween than any other day. It could just be because everyone is on the streets that day but I think more and more people have been coming to New York from overseas just for Halloween. Lots of people like to play dress-up and Halloween in NYC affords them that opportunity.

The streets were so crowded that we couldn't even make it to our usual spot. The parade was on Sixth Avenue but Seventh Avenue was so crowded that people filled up the sidewalks and we couldn't get by onto the cross street. It was crazy crowded scene. Of course it didn't matter because it was pouring rain and I couldn't take picture anyway but, wow, that was a lot of people.

So there you go. Fun but no photos. Life is like that sometimes.

Comics I Bought This Week: November 5, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics plus a hard cover collection:

Buffy: Season 8 - 30

North 40 - 5

Savage Dragon - 154

Age of Bronze - 29

Marvel Premiere Classic: Hercules: Prince of Power

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"The Goon: Fancy Pants Edition Volume 2 by Eric Powell

This volume collects a bunch of stories from "The Goon" comic that star the villain Dr. Alloy. I though it was going to be volume two of the Goon's collected comic but it's not. It's issues 2, 6, and 11-13. This is only the second Goon story I have read the first being the stand alone graphic novel "Chinatown".

I enjoyed "Chinatown" and I also enjoyed this volume. "The Goon" takes place in a strange 1930's type world populated by people and some monsters. The Goon is a big tough guy who runs some local rackets.

This volume is all about his run-ins with Dr. Alloy who is a mad scientist. He might be a villain or maybe just misunderstood but either way he creates problems for the Goon.

There is really not much too the stories they are just a bit of fun. The Goon runs around with his right hand man who is also a comedic side kick and solves his problems with his fists. The stories are kind of the day to day life of the Goon. He fights off some rivals, kicks zombies out of the neighborhood, and keeps old ladies safe from monsters. And puts up with Dr. Alloy's nonsense.

It's the art that makes "The Goon". Powell is a pretty good story teller and has an interesting art style. It's a half cartoony half "Realistic" style that relies on pencil shading and ink. The later issued have more pencil shading in them and he rightly keeps the color subdued so everything is clear. It's not an easy technique to pull off but he does.

So if you're looking for a light fun read that's pretty to look at give "The Goon" a try.

Red and Green

As I write this Halloween isn't quite here yet. I've been working on my "Costume" today but it isn't done. I put costume in quotes because I'm not dressing up like anyone or anything. I'm just dressing up.

It all started two years ago when I decided to buy a zoot suit for Halloween. A real one too and not one of these Halloween zoot suits. I wore it on my annual photo safari down in Manhattan but it really didn't fit the bill. It looked too much like an actual suit. It wasn't outrageous enough. It's fairly well made and the color isn't crazy. It's a pleasant dark green. I almost went for the lime green one but thought that it screamed "Gag suit" too much.

So last year I decided to paint some designs on my zoot suit. I've painted coats before. It's nothing new to me but it was a real pain to paint on the fabric this suit was made of. This stuff is thin and stretchy. Especially compared to denim or canvas which are the two coat fabrics I'm used to painting on. It took a while.

Coming up with a design wasn't easy either. I ended up painting a large eye on the back, two small eyes on the front, a strange lightning bolt/swirl on one arm and an even stranger arm/eye combo on the other. I was happy with the paintings but the coat still didn't pull together like I wanted it to. It was a disjointed series of images instead of a complete visual package.

The coat only came together when I added some decorative elements. I painted about a one inch purple trim around the hem, sleeves, and up the front buttons and also added some flames coming up from the bottom of the coat and the end of the sleeves. That's what made it into something. After that it looked like I knew what I was doing.

It took me a better part of a week to paint the coat and I ran out of time and energy to do anything with the pants. I ended up wearing not the zoot suit pants but a pair of black pants that I decorated with rings of white tape running up from the ankles to the knee. It wasn't quite what I wanted but it had to do.

Today I finally did what I wanted to do last year and painted the zoot suit pants. I painted the purple trim around the cuff and then flames coming up to almost the knee. It's still drying so I haven't tried it on but I'm happy with it and it should pull the outfit together a little bit more.

It's still not quite complete though. I'd like to put a couple of large paintings of some kind on the front of the coat above the pockets but have no time to this year.

Instead I might look for some things to hang from it. I'll get some safety pins and put them across the front of the suit and hang some things from them. Only I don't know what. Ribbons, feathers, flowers, string, beads or whatever else I can find I guess.

Like I said the costume isn't anyone or anything in particular so when people ask me who I am I didn't have an answer for them. Boy does that make people uncomfortable so I started going with "I'm the all seeing Osiris" as my stock answer. It usually didn't help much but it beat having no answer at all. It's really more like how I'd dress everyday if I good. Ahhh, if only everyday were Halloween.