Radiant Comics

When a basic art supply lets you down that can mess with everything. That art supply is currently my full table self-healing cutting mat. I have a drawing table that I work on all the time. It’s got a big surface. 30×42 inches. I have that surface covered with a self-healing cutting mat. I’ve never worked on the bare wood of my drawing table because bare wood it too vulnerable to scraping and pitting. Putting a piece of drawing paper on an uneven surface is an exercise in frustration. All the bumps in the wood come through in the drawing.

I bought my table back in about 1991 and covered it with a drawing surface called Borco. That stuff was pretty good. It was vinyl surface that was excellent to draw on and could be wiped clean. It’s important to be able to clean a drawing surface. But you couldn’t cut on Borco with an X-Acto blade. Well, you could but you were taking a chance of the knife cutting the Borco. It can handle minor cuts but not major ones. Any cutting I had to do in those days I did on an 11×17 inch self-healing cutting mat.

A self-healing cutting mat is a cool thing. It’s made up of many layers of plastic and those layers close up the knife cut as the knife draws across whatever you are cutting. You can cut and draw on the same surface. That’s convenient.

At some point in the mid 1990s I decided to upgrade my drawing surface and buy a cutting mat that would cover its whole surface. A 30×42 inch self-healing cutting mat was at least $100 at that time. That’s pretty expensive but I thought it would be worth it. It’s a nice durable surface that would last me for years. And it did.

In the early months of 2020 I decided that cutting mat would have to be replaced. I had cut on it so much in the 25 years I had used it that a few grooves had developed on it. They weren’t terrible but they were a little inconvenient. I tried to find a replacement but the company who made my cutting mat, Alvin, are out of business now. I found another one at the size I need but a few bad reviews made me wary of rushing to buy it.

Being that the mat and my drawing table is 30 inches high/tall I noticed that I did most of my cutting on the bottom half of the mat. I have my drawing table at standing height so almost all the time I’m working on the part of the table that’s closest to me. The top half of the table had almost no cuts made on it. I decided to flip the cutting mat upside down. I made the top of the mat the bottom of the mat.

The first annoying thing about that is that all the numbers were upside down. The mat has a grid made up of lines half and inch apart on it and those lines are marked by numbers. It’s a cutting mat with built in rulers but now all the numbers marking the ruler were upside down. I actually use the markings when I have to line up a piece of paper to cut it. Now it takes an extra moment to make sure I’m reading the ruler the correct way.

The real problem is that the top of the cutting mat is not as flat as the bottom part I was using for 25 years. Maybe it was because the sun hit the top of the cutting mat more than the bottom and that made it warp slightly but it’s noticeable now that I’ve flipped the mat. It’s only slightly warped. Maybe by about a 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch. It lifts up slightly from the drawing table right in the center. That means when I lean on it it goes back down but when I release pressure it rises up again. That’s really annoying.

Back in the beginning to the year I tried to fix it by taping it down to the drawing table. I used some double sided tape. I slipped a few pieces under the mat and hoped it would stick to the table. It did for a good long while but now ten months have past and it’s popping up again.

It turns out that using a ruler or a triangle to make a straight line gets hard when the surface you’re on is warped. The ruler is a different height compared to the paper from one end to the other. It wobbles and the ruler won’t stay in place as it pivots around the high spot in the mat. I have to lean on the ruler or triangle and use my weight to flatten the self-healing cutting mat. That doesn’t make for easy working.

I started looking today at replacing the mat again. I’d like to buy one at Dick Blick but none of the brands they cary makes a 30×42 inch one. I found a mat on Amazon but some of the reviews warned that theirs came warped and wouldn’t flatten. I certainly don’t need another warped cutting mat. I think I may have to try and use tape again to keep mine flat. That’s a pain since I have to take my parallel rule off my table if I really want to do it right.

Here is an odd thing involving my old 11×17 cutting mat. Even after getting my whole drawing table covered with a self-healing cutting mat I still used the portable one too. If I had to do a lot of cutting of photos I would pull that one out and use it. But over the years my use of it tapered off quite a bit until I found I hadn’t used it for months and months.

That 11×17 cutting mat used to sit in one spot for decades until a couple of years ago I decided to move it. I don’t even remember now why I thought it needed to be moved. Sometime last year I decided to pull it out and use it again. Except I had no idea where I put it. It’s not like I have a ton of spots to stick an 11×17 cutting mat so where did it go? I have no idea. Maybe I threw it out but I don’t think I did. Why would I toss a perfectly good cutting mat? Maybe I’ll run across it someday when I least suspect it. I hope so.

I am an art supply junkie. I love pencils, pens, paints, paper, and any other thing you can think of. I’ve got tons of art supplies. Some I haven’t even touched in a long time. For example I have a couple of drawers full of oil paint. In the 1980s and 1990s I did a lot of painting with oil paint. But then in the early 2000s I wanted to try acrylic paint so I switched over to them. Meanwhile my oil paints just sit in a drawer. They may not be good anymore. I don’t even know. Someday I’ll use oil paint again.

Having plenty of art supplies doesn’t stop me from wanting more of them. After all, art supplies get used up so I may as well have a lot of them on hand. To that end I like to look through art supply catalogs and websites. Even when I end up buying nothing I still like to browse. I am often filling up my cart on one of these art websites only to empty it and never buy something. Sometimes I add the stuff to my wishlist so I can find it easily later.

One of the things I like to buy are markers. I have a hundred marker collection of Copic markers and those are the ones I use most. Even though you can refill the markers with ink I still have to buy replacement markers when the caps wear out. If the cap on a marker doesn’t seal properly then that marker will dry out quickly and be unusable.

I’ve tried out other types of markers too. I have a set of 24 Pitt brush markers, a set of 12 Pitt Big Brush markers, a ShinHan set of about 50 markers that I bought years ago that still have some life in them, a group of about 24 Prismacolor markers, and a few each of at least four other marker brands. Plus I have about a 30 marker group of Sharpies and another 20 marker group of Bic markers. Neither of those sets are as good as the “Art markers” but they’re still fun.

I have all these markers but I still was looking just last night at the Dick Blick website and their house brand markers. Blick has been making their own marker for years now and I tried some out a long time ago but they have recently remade their marker and have come out with refits for them. Refills are really important to me because they make the markers a lot cheaper. One marker is about $6 and one bottle of marker ink is about $8. A bottle of ink can refill the marker about ten times. That beats buying ten $6 markers.

The Blick markers are cheaper than the Copic markers. Especially since Copic just cut the size of their bottle of ink in half without dropping the price. You used to 25ml of ink for $8 and now you get 12ml. So I’m thinking about switching over to Blick markers. But how long would it take for it to be worth it? Do I really want to replace a hundred markers? Plus I already have a hundred bottles of Copic ink. Do I just not buy anymore Copic ink? I don’t know.

Either way I had a bunch of Blick markers in my checkout basket for a while before I deleted them. I figured I’d start with blue markers so I picked out $13 set of six blue markers. That’s a lot cheaper than $6 a marker. Oddly they only had refill ink for five out of the six markers. Sorrento Blue is nowhere to be found. At $6 for a bottle of ink the price went up over $40 pretty quickly. I should just buy the markers to try them out but I’m so used to buying refits with markers these days that it’s hard not to.

I also saw a set of 24 Blick markers for $15. I wanted to grab those up but with tax and shipping the price went up to closer to $25. I put them in my cart along with the blue markers but eventually deleted all of them. Shipping is usually why I like to make big orders of art supplies. At around $50 most places offer free shipping so it’s best to wait until I have a need for that many art supplies.

I’ve also been checking out off brand markers on Amazon. It seems that in the last few years a lot of companies have been making and branding their own markers. They generally try to imitate Copic markers but are much cheaper. I see sets of 80 marker for $40. At 50¢ a marker that’s a really good price. But I have no idea if the marker, or more importantly the ink inside, is any good. Copic is well known for the consistency and durability of their ink. I don’t know if these knock-offs are half as good.

One time back in 2017 I was looking to replace a specific color Copic marker ink and I couldn’t find it. I ended up ordering it from a third party seller on Amazon. Much to my surprise when I got the tracking number the marker was coming all the way from Japan. It only cost me about $6 so I was stunned it was coming from Japan. Sending a $6 bottle of ink from halfway across the world didn’t seem like it would be profitable to anyone.

I get a lot of ads for art supplies on both Facebook and Instagram. I guess since I post a lot of art they’ve figured out I’m an artist. I’m okay with that because I like looking at art supply ads. Usually they’re for gimmick art supplies like a brass aperture that can be used as a circle template. There are also all sorts of tooled metal things designed to help you draw any number of spirograph like shapes. They’re mostly too expensive for my budget. They run anywhere from $20-$40 which is too much for an impulse buy for me. I can get a set of Blick markers for that price!

Before I start this “Friends” walkthrough I want to note that on the week of Thanksgiving I decided to watch all of the “Friends” Thanksgiving episodes. That’s the first time I have ever done that. I’ve never even watched the show out of chronological order. It was fun and interesting seeing the changes over the seasons so quickly.

Looks like I’m up to the last episode of Season Four. “The One With Ross’s Wedding.” It’s a double length episode. It’s numbers 23 and 24 when in syndication but it ran as one long episode when it first aired and that’s how I’m going to watch it.

It first aired on May 7, 1998. Let me check my calendar to see what I was doing that day. I know I watched it live as it aired but what about the rest of the day? Looks like I was working at Marvel that day doing typesetting. No other notations. But the day before I gave a talk a Pratt in Brooklyn to a friend’s class. That’s interesting. Plus the day before I was at the Compleat Strategist in Manhattan and bought some packs of the CCG “Doomtown.” I still have those cards. I ran across them recently. Let’s start the show.

We begin with Monica panicking that they might be late for their plane that’s taking them to London and Ross’s wedding. She runs out of the apartment and we get a condom joke with Joey and Chandler. That foreshadows things to come. Next we’re with the girls. Phoebe isn’t going because she’s pregnant and Rachel isn’t going because it would be too weird. Joey is in full tourist mode already. Here comes the theme song. Fairly perfunctory opening scene. It establishes stuff more than it’s funny.

More getting ready to go stuff. Rachel and Ross say goodbye. Ross tries to get her to go. He’s such a sucker. Lots of kisses goodbye and Rachel and Phoebe have a moment. Here comes a montage of London shots. Joey is in full tourist mode in London and Chandler is annoyed by it. Almost everything about this plot line is unfunny.

A new scene starts with Emily panicking over all the things going wrong with the wedding as Ross tries to calm her. Most of this stuff is pretty dull too. And the church they’re supposed to get married in is being torn down. More panic. Not the funniest but better than the Chandler and Joey tourist music video that follows. Joey’s video camera looks so old-timey these days.

Monica is getting fitted for a nice red dress as Emily panics. She somehow talks Emily into postponing the wedding. This isn’t going to end well. Back in NY Rachel and Phoebe have a heart to heart. Rachel realizes she’s still in love with Ross. End that scene and start more of the Joey and Chandler tourist crap. Sometimes the editing on this show moves really quickly.

Now we get the repercussions of Emily wanting to put off the wedding. She says it’s Monica’s idea. There are too many uncomfortable scenes in this episode for me. They’re trying to make it all funny but it doesn’t work for me. Emily storms out and we head back across the ocean where Phoebe is trying to help Rachel get over Ross. That ain’t going to work. It’s funnier than the London stuff though.

Back to London and more Joey and Chandler stuff. This time in the hotel room rather than out on the streets. Chandler apologizes for being such a killjoy. Royal family member Fergie makes a cameo appearance. Doesn’t do anything for me. Ross and Monica get in the room and Ross is angry with her. They talk wedding stuff and I get bored. It’s supposed to be touching, poignant, and funny but I find it tedious. Chandler and Joey make a joke about how uncomfortable that scene was. I agree with them.

Joey calls Phoebe and Rachel on the phone. This is one of the funnier scenes and it’s completely a throwaway. Joey listening to and watching the “Cheers” opening theme song and being homesick for a moment might be the most relatable part of this whole episode for me.

Ross and Rachel bring Emily to the run down church that they fixed up with twinkle lights to convince her to go through with the wedding. It doesn’t take much. Meanwhile back in NY Rachel announces to Phoebe that she’s going to London to tell Ross that she’s in love with him. This is Rachel at her most selfish. This side of her always made me dislike her character the most out of the Friends. Phoebe tries to stop her but can’t. I think this is the end scene of Episode 23.

Meanwhile back in London Emily’s housekeeper gets a phone call from Phoebe who wants to warn Emily but there is a miscommunication. A scene that no longer happens in the age of everyone having cell phones. Cut to the rehearsal dinner where all four of Ross and Emily’s parents are in attendance. Elliot Gould always does a good job as Ross and Rachel’s dad. Their mom is also funny. Emily’s parents are a couple of characters too. More homesick Joey stuff.

One of the plots in this second half is Emily’s parents jacking up the bill for the wedding that Ross’s parents are paying for. Another uncomfortable plot line. This episode is crammed with them.

Now we get a Rachel at the airport theme. It’ll cost her $2700 to fly to London. Oops! She forgot her passport and has to rush home. We get a short scene with her and Phoebe back home as Rachel rushes back and forth. That seemed really short and pointless.

Back at the rehearsal diner Chandler’s toast is bombing. More discomfort. Phoebe gets through on the phone to Emily’s mom but her warning in not understood. Chandler’s toast doesn’t end well. Joey gets homesick during his toast then romance distracts him. Some random stranger confuses Monica for Ross’s mother sending her into a tailspin. Chandler tries to help her.

Rachel is back at the airport and trying to get a flight. So far no go. That scene was short and then we cut back to London for the big reveal. We catch Chandler and Monica in bed together. Joey almost catches them too. Now Rachel is on the plane. How did she even get on it? That is not explained. But she’s on the plane annoying Hugh Laurie. This was before he was famous for “House” but I recognized him at the time because of his role in the British TV show “Black Adder.” Her annoying him is even more uncomfortable humor.

In London Chandler and Monica are still in bed and are both uncomfortable with each other. Next Joey and Phoebe are on the phone together and she finally gets to warm someone. Now back to Hugh Laurie telling Rachel that she is a horrible person. I have to agree with him. Trying to break up Ross’s wedding is as selfish a thing as a person can do. Hugh Laurie might be the best thing about this episode.

Joey warns Chandler about Rachel but he’s busy being uncomfortable about Monica. Then we go to the church as the wedding is going to start. They’re on the lookout for Rachel. Ross has to stop the bickering parents. Rachel gets by Joey as he’s making out with a bride’s maid. Rachel sees Ross with Emily and can’t go through with telling him she loves him. She finally finds her decency and they have a poignant scene.

Now, of course we get the pretty wedding and the cliff hanger. But first Joey has a pretty funny scene as he’s on the phone with Phoebe. I’m going to spoil it here because it’s a 22 year old show. The cliff hanger is that Ross says the wrong name at the alter. He doesn’t say Emily. He says Rachel. Whoops! Brutal. An uncomfortable moment to end on in an episode where uncomfortable moments were the norm.

Now to look on http://links.giveawayoftheday.com/uncutfriendsepisodes.tripod.com/ to see what was cut out of this episode for the HD and syndicated episodes. They cut out the entire condom joke from the beginning! I don’t like that they did that. They also cut out a Monica “Chickenella joke.” No loss there. They also cut out the whole music video scene with Chandler and Joey touring London. I didn’t like that scene but that’s a lot to cut out. They cut out the whole scene with Monica trying on the red dress with Emily. Weird scene to cut because it explains why Emily was convinced to postpone the wedding. They cut a random Phoebe joke, a random Joey joke, a random Chandler joke, and a Fergie joke. Then that cut out about four more Phoebe jokes. Then a Rachel joke, a Chandler joker and another Rachel joke. There is a lot of cutting in this episode. They even cut some of Hugh Laurie’s stuff. I think this is the longest list of cut stuff I’ve ever written here.

In looking back to 2013 when I rated all the individual episodes of this show I gave this episode three out of five stars. That’s an average rating but right now I might even give it two out of five stars. There was too much uncomfortable stuff in it for my taste. I know that’s what they were going for but it didn’t work for me.

Ideally I would like to take all my own photo reference. If I need a picture of a person, place, or thing to make a drawing from I like to go out and take the photo myself. That way I get exactly what I want and it’s unique. No one else would have my photo reference to work from. But the real isn’t the ideal and that doesn’t always happen. Especially when it comes to the human figure.

Back in the 1990s I used to used a Polaroid camera and pose for my own photos if I wanted to work out a male figure. Occasionally I’d have a female friend pose for the same purpose. That became even easier in the digital age. But if you really want good photo reference you need to hire models. That has never been in my budget.

I don’t always use photo reference in my drawings. More often than not I’m drawing without it. But it does help and when I need it I use it. One of the styles of drawing that I often use photo reference with is my painted ladies. I just recently crossed that style with my big ink drawings and made a couple of 22×30 inch painted lady big ink drawings.

Since these painted lady drawings are basically nude women that I draw a whole bunch of tattoos/markings on I find it best to photo reference the figures. Since I’m not taking my own photo reference I turn to the internet for this. There are plenty of photos of naked people on the internet but the vast majority of them are unhelpful when it comes to use as photo reference. Only about one in five hundred is any good to me. It gets tedious looking for that one.

Cut to this week after I finish the second of my painted lady big ink drawings. I wanted to continue doing something along those lines but not the same thing. As I thought about what I wanted to do one of my own photos came to mind. It was a photo I had already worked with. A picture of a woman with an “F-Train” shirt on walking through Bryant Park. Years ago I had already used this photo in one of my prints where I mix words, pictures, and Photoshop filter recipes but now I wanted to draw it.

I pulled out the digital photo and drew right over it on my iPad in Procreate. I find that the best way to work with photo reference theses days. The Apple pencil and the iPad are great drawing tools. After that I printed out the digital drawing onto a piece of 9×12 in paper and redrew and refined the drawing. I then scanned that drawing in, printed it out on eight 8.5×11 inch pieces of paper, taped the sheets of paper together, and used that big version of the drawing to transfer the drawing to the 22×30 inch final pice of paper.

I forgot to mention I also had to come up with a background for the drawing too. I just used the woman’s figure from the photograph and not the background so I had to come up with a new one. I looked through a whole bunch of my drawings and came up with a few that might work. I added them in digitally to see if they were up to the task. Eventually I mixed two drawings together. The effect above her head comes from one drawing and the face comes from another. After I had the background done is when I printed out the drawing on eight sheets of paper.

Much of the rest of the drawing went as usual. I use a brush and ink to draw over the pencil lines and I start with the face and then do the figure. After that comes the background where I use both brush and marker. I use marker for the straight lines.

This one eventually veered in a different direction than my Painted ladies. I didn’t want to give her op art tattoo markings on her skin but I was at a loss for what to do. Once again the iPad came in handy. One of the new steps I have in making these big ink drawings is to take a photo of them, bring the photo into Procreate, and draw right over the top of the photo. That way I can try out new patterns and lines without ruining the actual drawing.

I had worked on the drawing for a good long while and it was still missing something. I had changed the F-Train logo on her shirt to a skull, gave her a big collar and gauntlets, and put some strange boot tops on her thighs but her shirt and shorts were still pretty blank and dull. Then I remembered seeing some drawings by the comic book artist Frank Cho on Instagram. He sometimes does this style that’s based on old woodcuts where he uses parallel lines on fabric. The lines follow the form the fabric.

I took a photo of the big ink drawing and started to work on it in Procreate. I had to find the forms of the fabric. Frank Cho’s fabric drawings are usually more complicated than this one so it took some doing to get the hanging fabric forms just right. The shorts were a whole different kind of form. But eventually I got the Procreate drawing to be what I wanted it to be.

The actual drawing of the lines on the big paper was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I sketched in all the lines first in pencil and then drew over them with ink and brush. It went quickly. The lines don’t have to be perfect since there are so many of them. In fact it’s better if they’re not so perfect. It looks more natural that way. I’ve got enough perfect straight lines in this drawing anyway.

After I got the fabric lines in I continued to work on the drawing. I put in some more of the grey patterns in the background to separate it from the lighter grey patterns of her shirt and shorts. I gave her fishnet stockings, made her hands into gloves, and gave her those circles and lines on her arms and gloves. Those circles may have been the finishing touch. Just a tiny bit of the Painted Lady.

All in all I really enjoyed the contour lines in the fabric technique. I far from being a master of it like Frank Cho is but I think it worked well for me. I’m going to have to use it more in the future.

Do you know what’s pretty cool? Mystery boxes. Not that I’ve ever bought one nor am I likely to but I still think they’re neat. For those who don’t know a Mystery Box is one of those boxes that a company will sell you with a bunch of random stuff in it. Loot Crate was the first one I ever heard of. It was founded in 2012 but I’m not sure when I first heard of it. It’s gone now but at it’s height a whole bunch of people were making unboxing videos on YouTube showing off their Loot Crate stuff. I’m also not sure when they stopped but Loot Crate isn’t around anymore. But there are still mystery boxes.

Yesterday I watched a video of someone opening a comic book mystery box. Usually those are put together by comic book dealers looking to sell some comic books. The dealer will get together a bunch of comics and divide them into a bunch of boxes all supposedly worth a certain dollar amount. So if the dealer says the boxes are worth $100 each he’ll sell them for $75 a piece. The mystery of buying a pig and a poke for cheap is the sell.

The video I watched was a $500 mystery box. That’s way too rich for my blood. I can’t imagine spending that much money on comic books when I have no idea what they are. Seems crazy to me but people bought them. That guy making the video seemed satisfied but he also had to talk himself into it. At least it seemed that way to me. There was one big $300 book in the package and a bunch of random $15 books. He was most happy about the big book. But he could have bought that for $300 and spent the other $200 on comics he actually wanted.

The appealing thing about the mystery boxes is the mystery itself. What are you going to get? Something good I hope. Plus the comic book ones can also have a grand prize. Someone gets a $1000 book for their $500. The chances of getting that book are like one in fifty. That’s not too bad. Then they hook you with the value play. $100 worth of comic books for $75. Who doesn’t like a bargain? A deal! Even though I never buy them I’m still always tempted.

I once won a Loot Crate box in a YouTube giveaway. It was back when Loot Crate was huge and a fellow comic book YouTuber happened to get an extra one so he had a contest to give it away and I won. I don’t remember much of what was in it except a T-Shirt that I wasn’t interested in. I think it was a Transformer shirt. That’s the problem with mystery boxes. They can be filled with a lot of stuff you have no interest in. One month things can be great and the next a dud.

I remember back in 2016 when they came out with a “Firefly” mystery box. I was tempted because it’s a show I really like but did I really need $35 worth of “Firefly” odds and ends? I saw box openings of what was in it and there was a couple of cool things but I’m glad I never got it. There was nothing that special in it. At least nothing I even remember four years later.

The mystery boxes I see ads for all the time now are art supply mystery boxes. Because I post my art on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter I get a lot of ads for art supplies in general. It was probably last year sometime that I started seeing ads for the art supply boxes. You can buy one of them or get a subscription which it typical for mystery boxes. Like other mystery boxes they tempt me but I’ve never bought one.

Each month, or each new box, they’ll send you a package of art supplies. They generally try to give you stuff for making art with just the supplies in the box. Some kind of paper, pencils, colored pens, markers, brushes, and paint. If they send paint it’ll usually be packaged with a brush. Most boxes have some sort of theme like a color or maybe inks or markers. Something to tie it all together. Some of the boxes even feature an artist and give you the tools he or she used to make a piece. You’ll also get a postcard of the art.

I’m an art supply junkie and love to try out new stuff. Sometimes I try out something new and end up using it for decades and sometimes never again. About six years ago I wanted to try something new so I bought a small set of stick pastels and another of pan pastels. Though I never used them a lot I did make a few stick pastel drawings and they lead me to making my “Monsters on Comics” series with black marker and white pastel. I barely touched the pan pastels. But I’m glad I tried them out.

I’m always tempted by these art mystery boxes. They seem like fun. But then I examine their content and I’m not too impressed. I can see how they’d be good for a new artist or someone without many supplies but I’ve been buying art supplies for 35 years. I have so much stuff just lying around. For example I often see colored pencils or colored pens in these boxes. Not my favorite supplies but I still have three sets of colored pencils and two of pens tucked away. I hardly ever touch them so why would I want new ones?

These art mystery boxes are also supposed to be a bargain. $50 worth of art supplies for $35 or some such. Art supplies have such a high retail price so that’s not hard to do.

What I was thinking about doing, maybe next year, is putting together my own mystery box. By that I mean that once a month I could spend $25 on some new art supplies that I’ve never tried before. I think that would be cool. The problem is shipping always drives the price up and my best local store is 40 minutes away. But whenever I see one of these mystery boxes I always end up with the same conclusion. Why don’t I just spend that $35 on stuff I pick out myself? And I always do.