I was all ready to get my you tube vinyl community introduction video going. I was thinking of having my own channel to talk about record collecting but I wanted to talk about my art too. Maybe I felt like I was joining a club. I'm already commenting on some of the sites I follow there. I just don't think I am ready to deal with peoples comments yet. I do have much to share but I can do this here on my site and blog like I have been for awhile. Journaling has become important to me. I think I have decided to get back to making comic books again. I really want to make something you can hold in your hand. I'm not really big on the digital world thing and where everything is headed. The thing I like about records is you can hold them. you can feel the texture or gloss on the cover and sometimes they have good liner notes and a cracker jack like prize now and then or a die cut window or foil embossing. I love album cover art. Maybe more than playing the music at times. That's the kind of thing I want to share. Maybe it's enough for now just to be a fan of other people's you tube VC channels? I have a few art jobs that came my way this last week. I am grateful for that. It's good to be back at some kind of art again. I have not got back to my own personal art in awhile so this is a first step back to that. I got some input on a comic book idea from my wife today which was unusual. It got me thinking about making comics. We have this little print shop in town here. I worked in print shops growing up so I'm going to go talk to them about printing and see if they can make what I have in mind. I did see they offer offset printing that I want. All my years in those print shops I kept my sketch pad near me everyday at work. What I wanted back then was to be what I thought was a real artist. I already was an artist though since I was 5 years old. I got those dream jobs later on. Working as an Illustrator like I wanted but I had to learn along the way to get there. I had limitations too. Like being partly colorblind. When I was young I would only draw in black and white. When I got into professional production art they gave me a pms color matching book and it was up to me to match colors exactly before they went to print. My boss got plenty pissed with me at times. I thought I would never need math but in my job I had to size things with a proportion wheel and ruler. I had to know stat cameras and how to maintain them. I cut rubylyth which was a red film with a gel layer you peeled away to place a color on the image you wanted printed. The reason it was such a good and fun job was it took skill and effort to get it right. If you made mistakes the whole company looked bad so I got better as I went. I did bindery too. Cut down paper stock with a huge cutter that was really scary to operate. I did boring work like collating papers into books then binding them. The smell of the rubber based ink from the presses. The ink looked like pudding. Checking the dot patterns on negatives with a loop lens. T squares to set up type in paste up before the stat cameras. That golden pee like wax roller machine to wax your lines of type you needed to cut and paste to blue lined boards. The routine and the discipline. The main shop I worked at was run by old Beatles loving hippies. I was a punker at the time. We learned about each others eras. They let me get away with a few things like growing my hair long because I did not really see the public. I had a goatee then. Bleached my hair once. It turned orange at first and I wore my jeans cuffed at the bottom at that time. One guy said I looked like Chucky from the movie child's play and would yell Chucky! at me every morning. The thing you learned to ignore but never forget was the sound of the presses. One guy that worked there became a famous rock star later on and wrote a lyric in one of his songs about the sound of the pretty machines. I used to bug him about doing flyers for his band at the time back then before he got famous. He always said no but one day he gave me a demo tape of his band on a new wave bright color cassette with basic shapes like circles and triangles printed on it. A TDK blank tape with his band name hand written on it. I think I still have it someplace. I am grateful for that time. That someone would hire me with my limited schooling (I did have some vocational schooling before I got hired) The best part was seeing your work done. The ink sitting on top of the paper still wet with a smell to it. the perfect look of the kiss cut trim on the completed stapled chap book. The clean thick white pages with a golden rod colored paper cover that one of my friends said looked like a taco wrapper. I'm pretty sure they don't make goldenrod paper anymore. Maybe I will try and find some someplace for this project I am dreaming of. Thick cardstock paper. Like it was back then. My boss once handed me an R. Crumb comic strip of Mr. Natural washing dishes and grunting as he did it. The last panel was a rack of dishes and he was thing to himself "a job well done!" he gave that to me when I left. I'm still writing new chapters of my life to this day. Those cartoon characters are in there waiting to get out. Just gotta make it happen. Time keeps on ticking.
-Scoocher 4/7/2022
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