My first duster cape. 1993
I’m doing it. I finally pulled the trigger on buying a new coat. Though I should put the word “New” in quotation marks.
Back in the early 1990’s I bought myself a coat. An Australian duster. That’s a western style cowboy coat. It’s long, black, and made of canvas. It also has a removable short cape on it that goes halfway down my back and wraps around my shoulders. The cape is also the part that I painted way back then. I put a scene on it of four members of a family, plus a monster, that was painted as if it was a piece of ancient art from Central or South America.
Sometime in the mid to late 1990’s I made a new cape for it. I cut a piece of canvas to size, sewed it, and put snaps on it to connect it to the snaps on the coat. I painted this new cape with a scene that had a person on a precipice reaching out for an orb with Mount Fuji in the background. This one was influenced by Japanese prints. I also painted eyes on the front of each shoulder.
In the early 2000s some of my fellow Marvel Bullpenners used to call it a “Cowboy Wizard” coat. More than once as I stepped onto a subway train the other passengers would move out of my way.
I liked that coat but I wore it less and less after I stopped working at Marvel and didn’t have to commute into NYC. It’s less practical to wear when I’m just driving the car to the store. Plus it really had seen better days. The canvas was coming apart at the seams and even tearing where there were folds such as down near the end of the sleeves. I tried fixing it up but it was never the same.
For the last few years I’ve been wanting to buy a new duster to replace that one. I thought could even attach the old capes. The problem was that the cost. It was around $200 for a new one. I had one on my Amazon wish list but I never ordered one.
Cut to this year and I’ve been using eBay a lot to buy 1990s Tommy Hilfiger shirts. Yeah, I’ve been updating my wardrobe with old stuff. I decided to look for some dusters. Preferably the same model coat that I already have. There were some there but I only looked at them. I started looking at them in the Spring and was checking in the Summer too but there was no hurry to buy a winter coat when it’s warm out.
It’s still summer as I write this but it’s the beginning of September. I started looking for the coat again because winter is going to be here before I know it and I want a chance to paint a new painting on this new cape of the new coat. So I found one on Ebay that was in good shape. I made an offer on it that was accepted and with shipping and tax it cost me around $75. It may be used but that’s way cheaper than $200.
After ordering the coat I then had to order some fabric paint. That’s paint that’s specifically made with a flexible binder so that the fabric doesn’t stiffen when the paint is applied to it. I bought a basic set of eight paints plus a colorless extender and an extra jar of white paint. That’s because on black fabric it’s best to prime the fabric with white paint so that the colors go on bright. The paint ran me around $40.
Now I have to decide what to paint on the coat. I want to paint eyes on the shoulders but I’m wide open about what to paint on the back. For the last five years or so I’ve been doing a lot of 6×9 inch ink drawings so I have a stockpile of images that I can work with. I think I’ll look through them and see if anything jumps out at me. I can take pieces of different ones and compose a new image from them. I have to start making some sketches.
I only started commuting again into NYC about five years ago and it’s only for a couple of days a week. In all that time I’ve never worn the old duster. One of the reasons for that being that the coat isn’t very warm anymore. There are a lot of holes in it (even with me having patched them) and the lining is worn away to about 50% of what it once was.
Instead I’ve been wearing a big and puffy coat that’s really well made and warm but is boring looking. It’s nice on those bitter cold Manhattan mornings but it often makes me feel blah. I appreciate its practicality but my old duster felt a lot more fun. So I decided I want a little more fun back in my commute.
I’m going to have to go back to layering under my duster too. I used to wear a small thin coat under it on especially cold days. Being that a duster is a big overcoat it was easy to layer under it. I think the one I ordered also comes with an extra liner vest that I never had with my old one. If memory serves it was an add on that I didn’t think was worth the price at the time. But I guess whoever bought this one thought it was and passed it on with the coat when he was done with it.
I think I’m going to go modern with the new cape painting. I don’t know what that really means to me right now but I already have the two others that were influenced by ancient art. I might go with a lot of faces on it. I have some drawings that have a whole bunch of figures and faces mashed together and that might be what I go with. I’ll have to see.