Banana Glove Game

The game goes like this: a referee throws you a banana from a fixed distance. If you catch it, you have to eat it, and then put on a pair of gloves. For every banana you catch and eat, another pair of gloves. Thus: it not only becomes more difficult to catch and peel the fruit, but to stomach each additional banana.

This game was invented as an insignificant joke over four years ago, but its mechanics were so ridiculous that it stuck with me. At one point, I envisioned a Super 8 film about a transgender friend of mine traveling through an interdimensional portal to arrive at a gaggle of octogenarians picnicking in an inner city oasis (I envisioned the empty lots between Paulina and Wolcott, between 13th and 14th streets - former housing projects, I've been told, now vacant grassy areas littered with copses, teeming with lightning bugs in the young summer, surrounded on all sides by rows of abandoned parking meters) while one man in his late 30's tossed bananas to children in the background. Later, I reimagined the game as a comic strip, drawing three quarters of one page before abandoning it.

The banana glove game would occasionally reoccur to me, always making me laugh, never attractive enough to actually materialize. Then, Joe Tallarico sent out a call for short, experimental comics to be published in the upcoming, all-comics issue of Lumpen (he also interviewed me about Brain Frame for this issue). Lacking a better idea, I decided to finally lay Banana Glove Game to rest, as it were. I revisited my truncated attempt and sketched the characters again.

As with every comic I make, now, I knew I would be reading BGG at Brain Frame. So, my focus in the creation of the comic needed to synchronize with my idea for its performance. Anyone who knows me, or knows my art, is aware of my obsession with color separation. It's my favorite way to break apart the structure of an image, regardless of the medium used in its creation, and the resulting product is always beautiful and self-evident, primary parts laid bare. So, what better focal point than color separation for BGG?

I knew that Lumpen would be printed on newsprint, and because Joe offered the possibility of full bleeds, I knew it would have full bleeds. (Never pass up an opportunity for full bleed.) I also know that standard color printing is CMYK. Carl Baratta once told me, in the only college-level painting course I ever took, that using black paint is a cop-out. A rich black, one that makes sense given the surrounding colors, will be created from the sum and opposite of those colors. In this sense, true black pigment can only be used in surrealistic images. While this is clearly a subjective opinion, it's one I admire, perhaps because it demands more work from its believer. So, in choosing the colors for BGG, I opted for C, M, and Y, sans K. This, I felt, would yield the purest, most pleasurable newsprint viewing experience.

I often exclude black from my palette, but it was particularly important in this instance due to the method by which I planned to project the comic. I wanted to use analog slide projectors, each assigned to a color, to project simultaneously, combining on screen to form the complete panels. But first, I had to draw the comic.

I knew from my ancient sketch that I wanted the sister and brother character to look almost identical. I also wanted to remove any evidence of location from the comic - no perspective, no background information, minimal clues as to where the characters are standing in relation to one another. So, I formatted the pages as almost identical grids, with a few larger panels. I used my circle template to draw perfect circles in the exact middle of every panel featuring the brother or sister, raising the circle by 1/8" in each panel where the boy catches a banana (he's jumping). For the other heads, I cut templates of my own so as to mimic exactly the characters' head shapes - this was especially important considering none of the other characters are fixed centrally in the panel like the brother and sister.

Not only had I restricted myself solely to the use of cyan, magenta, and yellow, I'd also decided that I must use those colors in full, or not at all. No gradients, no intermediate shades, unless they were the combination of two full coats of color. By this rule, I now had at my disposal: cyan, magenta, yellow; purple, orange, green. Because I was also forsaking panel borders, I needed background colors for each character to demarcate the panels' boundaries.

I chose cyan for Walter, since he needed to appear in the most natural setting, and I could add yellow to indicate grass. This left magenta and yellow; I gave yellow to the twins, since yellow is easier to look at and they have the most panels. The referee got magenta, which worked out for his sense of flushed flamboyancy.

I tried, at first, to work out in my head the color scheme for each character's clothing, hair, and props, but it was too difficult to tell what would be successful without viewing the options. I knew concretely, however, the way I wanted the colors to sit. I would keep the linework, coloring it in opposition to the character's background, and underneath those tight lines my color fields would be loose and sloppy. I wanted it to be obvious, for example, when I was overlaying magenta to turn the yellow red-orange. So instead of making transparencies for each color layer, as I would normally, I made transparencies for each type of field: flesh, clothing, and objects.

I also drew a transparency to designate the panel borders. This step would have been relatively easy to do on the computer, but I preferred to do it by hand, minimizing my hours spent staring at the screen. Besides, drawing by hand guarantees just the degree of geometric imprecision necessary to achieve perfection, IMHO. That's four transparencies per page: 12 sheets of tracing paper in all.

After scanning all of these pages into Photoshop and lining them up with one another, cleaning up specks, and filling in my various masks (the shapes you see outlined on the pages shown above), I was ready to test out different clothing/flesh/object color schemes. Here's what my final layering system looks like, next to the completed page:

Before I filled in the colors, the document was just a series of image masks in layers. Like this:

See how the masks don't quite meet at the edges, or sometimes overlap? Like where the referee's glasses don't quite touch his face? That's so I get these beautiful misaligned overlays once the masks are assigned to colors:

When I was filling in everything with 100% hues, I ran into another problem. Not only was the image kind of garish, but I used up all my available tones in coloring the character, and had no color left over to distinguish the linework. So I separated them: I set all of the fill-in hues at 65% opacity, and created separate layers at 100% opacity for the linework and other items I wanted to highlight (mostly the bananas). Here's all the 100% layers, and all the 65% layers, isolated:

To make the banana pattern that gives the page its full bleed, and which I have also made available as computer desktop wallpaper, first I drew out a banana pattern in a gridded sketchbook, then scanned it and isolated the lines.

I copied and pasted, with small, periodic adjustments to randomize the grid, expanding the pattern, then made a second layer, a mask of the positive space of the bananas. Bringing the pattern into the gutters of the finished page, I attributed the banana pattern linework and masking to the 100% cyan layer and the 65% yellow layer, respectively.

Structuring the color layers as well as the mask layers this way was absolutely necessary for producing from them full-color jpegs for industrial offset printing, greyscale plates for risograph printing, and three color slides for every panel.

The slides were hard. I found it was cheaper to buy film and shoot my own slides than have them made digitally. BGG contains 94 panels, so I needed just under 300 slides. I borrowed a camera and tripod from Nate Beaty and shot a practice roll, trying different combinations of black lines, white lines, adjustments in color, etc. I was worried about the yellow and cyan combining to make green. The primary colors of light are RGB - green being a primary color, no other colors combine to make it.

I also learned that instead of negative white space, I needed negative black space. Finished with the test, I shot three and a half rolls of film in which I forgot that, despite the negative space adjustment, I still needed some white in the panels: the children's shirts, the whites of eyes, the gloves, etc. I bought three more rolls of film and reshot from the beginning. I added the white areas to the line layer in each panel (either the cyan or magenta layer), and, those areas on the yellow slides that were intended to combine with the cyan light, I preemptively turned green, to get around the difficulty of mixing green on screen. Everything worked out.

When dealing with pigment, layering multiple colors on top of one another yields a darker composite shade. Dealing with light, the combination of colors yields a similar hue, but one that's brighter than its parts. So, when Banana Glove Game debuted as a multiple slide projection, the colors on display were more ethereal and varied than in the printed version, and lent the presentation a hallucinogenic quality.

Whatever hypnosis BGG exercised over the audience was enhanced by the rhythm of the projectors and the incredible sound design developed by myself and Tyson Torstensen, which Tyson played live at the show. We prerecorded me saying all the lines in the comic, then altered each character's voice slightly to give them different pitches. Tyson added compression, delay, and noise to the tracks. For the performance, we miked the slide projectors and Tyson played glacial, unnerving synthesizer background music over infinite loops of gentle breeze and summer bird sounds, steeping everything in reverb and breaking into ragtime harmonium music when I started flashing the tiki-letter credits. I advanced each slide projector in turn, with a steady 'chunka-chunka-chunka' rhythm.

The instant after the first and before the last projectors had been advanced was an effect I anticipated long before completing the comic and a huge inspiration in my decision-making process. In between each complete panel, the audience saw abstract amalgamations of the two transitioning images. Like this:

With many of the panels so similar to their neighbors, this effect was like a slow moving cross-dissolve animation punctuated by one of the most satisfying analog equipment sounds in existence, over and over and over. I needed two carousels for each projector in order to hold all the slides, so I timed that change over for the panel where Walter slips and falls. I had Grant Reynolds dress up in a fuzzy purple suit and run onstage to slip on a banana peel at that moment.

I'll be performing this comic again next month, on March 9th at Township, as part of the third afterparty for the Chicago Underground Film Festival. I'm planning on sprucing it up a bit with some gloved actors under black lights and a more acrobatic Walter performance. I was calmer presenting Banana Glove Game on stage than I have been debuting any other comic at Brain Frame, which is a testament both to my preparedness and the confidence I have in this piece.

Screen Printing Prep (BF8)

Becoming a screen printer was an accident. I learned how as one among many skills during an introductory fibers class. I started out with stencils, printing on fabric. All I knew about paper screen printing was the difference in mesh count; regardless, I ended my days in the fibers department making excuses to print books, on paper.

I've always liked screen printing. I spent an entire holiday vacation scrapping together two screen printed gifts (one fabric, one paper), completing one step of the process at each home-state vacation-spot. I even got paid by some company, one time, to screen print bulk shirts at an event at the House of Blues. On my way home I passed a woman in a fancy dress lying on the sidewalk and vomiting. I learned the rest of my screen printing skills in Offset class.

An offset printer, just like a screen printing human, lays down one color at a time. It can print with any kind of ink: metallic, fluorescent, opaque, transparent, matte, glossy, etc. Unlike most screen printing humans, it easily handles a high volume of paper with maximum precision. Most contemporary books of color, especially professionally printed comics, are offset. Generally, these jobs are printed CMYK:  Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK being four standardized tones (or 'process' colors) that combine to depict a full spectrum of color.

The best way to combine process colors is to utilize halftones. Halftone dots are little spots of one color, organized in a grid, which are bigger or smaller depending on what percentages of that tone are needed in different areas of the image to make up the many-colored whole.

Taking advantage of CMYK yields a full spectrum of color, sure, but what if you only want to do three color layers? Or you want your print to look weird? Then, you can do what I do.

These are the color files for screen printing the Brain Frame 8 poster. From the left: the file for a dark magenta; a warm, goldenseal yellow; and a bright turquoise-cyan. Click on 'em to see all the itty-bitty halftone dots.

Very early in the BF poster process, I decide which 'spot' colors (any non-process color, which is to be combined in the manner of process colors) will be used for the final screen print. Simon Allen and I agreed that we needed rich tones for the sand and the water. Choosing a dark magenta as our third ink made sense for a few reasons: being the darkest color, it would effectively emphasize the line work (acting as a stand in for traditional black outlines) and, in combination with the blue and yellow, it would yield a near-full range of purples, oranges, and pinks.

Keeping our spot colors in mind, my collaborator and I then begin drawing all the different pieces of the image.

This is the original draft of the BF8 poster, penciled and inked by Simon (who took all the screen printing photos in this post) and myself. Very little of this draft remains in the finished image.

Each successive draft of the poster was drawn on thick transparent vellum. Simon inked the page above to give me cleaner, more precise character outlines. I ended up subtracting his drawings of the dunes, preferring to leave the divisions between sky, water, and land to the color fields from which they would be composed.

I asked Simon to pencil another transparency with shading. Unlike the BF5 poster, which otherwise bears a similar creation story, I wanted every object separate from the background to have organic dimension, instead of flat color fields for shadows. Because the contents of the objects would be printed in different colors than the outlines, I needed them on a separate sheet of paper.

The purpose of this page was not line work, but shape separation. Very few of the lines drawn above are in the finished piece. They exist, rather, to define the boundaries of sky, sand, wet sand, and water; and to more easily identify those areas occupied by foreground objects. Drawing these borders saved me from tracing the outline of every character and every piece of trash on the beach in Photoshop. Instead, I was able to quickly select these areas and save them on a separate layer. This freed me to draw the background without having to avoid all the stuff on top of it.

Another advantage to making all these transparencies is the ability to draw a certain part of the image over and over without having to erase it - you just pick which version you like best. On this page, obviously, I drew all of the background textures. You can see an early version of the clouds, which was rejected for the version on the following, and final, transparency:

You may also observe that I was vastly unsatisfied with my rendering of folds on the giant dead sea-raisin. I think there are four different pages with sea-raisin folds on them. I ended up compositing a few different versions in Photoshop.

Those squiggles are more sea-texture that I ended up not using. The blobbly shapes on the left are the shadows beneath larger objects on the beach, and the black wavy shapes at the top are the shadows which define the dunes.

After scanning in all of those transparencies, cleaning up the layers, isolating objects and choosing colors for everything; after figuring out what percentages of which spot colors are necessary to amalgamate the rainbow of hues I desire; after compiling those percentages into three greyscale files and converting them into halftone dots, resulting in the three B&W images near the top of this post: that's when I put the B&W files back together, replacing the black in each file with its respective spot color, to test my work. The image above looks different than the web version of the poster (visible here). That's because it is a digital mockup of the screen printed version of the poster. It's really worth looking at up close.

That's me and Andrew Ghrist. We are an unstoppable screen printing team. We are both fast, strong, obsessive, and neurotic, with painfully high standards.

I've only been screen printing in earnest, using this method, since Brain Frame 5, in March. That was seven months ago. In that time, I've screen printed seven posters: BF5, BF6, BF7, BF8, Go Down, Mr. Square, and CUFF. I'm better at mixing inks and pulling prints than I have ever been. With every new project, I succeed in simplifying my techniques without sacrificing an anal retentive attention to detail. I love screen printing for the precision and physical strength it requires, as well as the unavoidable imperfections which result.

Are You Lonesome Tonight (Color)

 

Hey, remember this comic? I recently tabled the second annual Chicago Zine Fest, and I wanted Are You Lonesome Tonight? to be one of the comics available. (I also sold a considerable number of Dock Ellis comics, bike accident comics, and Motion Sickness posters.)

But, since I hadn't yet produced a nice run of Lonesome Tonight, I thought I'd add some color before doing so. Furthering my intimate relationship with color copier color separation, I experimented with paper towels, a pencil, and a light table to create textured, two-tone washes in the background of the comic.

The whole comic fits on two sides of one page (I drew it on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, but printed this run on a 11 x 17 sheet). I wanted to have two overlaid, misregistered washes of color on each side of the original B&W sheet, so I had to color in four different paper towel overlays, two for each side. I laid the original sheet (not seen above) on the light table with a clean towel on top, and used a soft graphite pencil to color around the Elvis impersonators and their word bubbles. While I was drawing each two overlays for the same side, I didn't compare, preferring to create the shapes from memory, and contributing to the inexactness of the shaded areas once the overlays were combined. You can see in the second picture above that the drawings do not perfectly match.

The other advantage of drawing this way on paper towels was the texture from the quilted pattern.

After I finished shading the paper towels, I took them to the color copier and made a photocopy of each, setting the printer to 'single color.'

You can see how the texture of the graphite and the quilted towels made its way through the copying process, ending up looking a lot like crayon drawings.

 

Finally, I copied these differently colored overlays onto my original B&W photocopied pages of line drawings. I placed the blue and green layers together, and the red and magenta layers together as well. Because I couldn't decide whether I liked the combination of red and magenta or red and yellow better, I made half of the comics one way and half the other.

A lot of people at Zine Fest told me they were impressed with my crayon drawings. I didn't know it would turn out with that identifiable of a texture, but I think it's pretty cool and it works well with the weird, melancholy attitude of the comic.