It’s January the first of 2023 as I write this. December was here and is now gone but as I look back on the month I notice that I bought a lot of odds and ends in terms of art related stuff. I think I ended up buying many things that I put off all year because they are mundane art related stuff. Paints, paper, markers, pencils, and canvases are much more thrilling to buy.
Canon Powershot 740s – This one is the most thrilling on the list but also a little anti-climatic. It doesn’t bring anything new to my photo taking but it is more convenient. I recently wrote about contemplating buying this camera (a-new-camera-almost-story) but I finally pulled the trigger on the purchase. It’s nice but I won’t get to really try it out until the new semester starts in a couple of weeks and I’m commuting to NYC again. But it will be nice to not to have to carry my bigger camera to take street photos.
Camera Case – I blew $20 on a camera case and I’m not sure why. I don’t think I’ll carry the case with the camera but I’ll put it in the case when the camera is home. It’s a cool case so what the heck. But it really wasn’t a necessity.
Camera Battery – It’s always good to have an extra battery to carry with the camera. At first I thought this camera used the same batteries as my older one but they’re ever so slightly different. Of course they are. The official Canon battery is $50 so I went with a $20 knock-off. In the past I’ve noticed that the knock-offs don’t last as long but I’m still not dropping $50 on a battery.
Camera SD Card – This is another iffy purchase as I could have used a card from one of my other cameras but I wanted this one to have its own. It was only $10 for a 64 GB card so it wasn’t that bad.
Mailing Boxes 7×10 inches – I’ve been looking to organize things around the studio and I have a bunch of small drawings stacked up that could be put into boxes to neaten up the place. I looked into buying archival art boxes, which I’ve bought before, but they are at least $20 a box. I ended up getting basic mailing boxes for much cheaper and buying archival sleeves for the art.
BCW 6×9 Inch Photo Sleeves – As a friend at my comic shop said recently, “What does it matter if your comic book boxes are non-archival as long as the bags you put the comics in are archival.” That made sense to me so after I bought the boxes I bought some archival sleeves. The art goes in the sleeves and the sleeves go in the boxes.
The problem I ran into with the sleeve was that they didn’t actually fit 6×9 inch paper. They fit 5 and 15/16 inch paper. I had to trim a sixteenth of an inch off the side of 250 drawings. I’ve got a good paper cutter so that made the job easier but it still took time. It’s a good thing all the drawings have a border around them. Plus I only bought 200 sleeves for those 250 drawings and so I need more sleeves.
110 Film Holder for Scanner – I bought a new film scanner earlier in the year and it came with holders for 35mm slides and film but it couldn’t scan 110 size film. I don’t have a lot of 110 film to scan but I do have some. I may as well spend $30 on a holder now rather than try and track one down in the future. This sort of equipment disappears from the marketplace after a while.
5.5×8 inches Sketchbook – I buy one of these every year to be my Ink Book for my Ink Book drawings. I’m up to Year 23 of filling up one of these with drawings every year.
Inkjet Photo Paper 11×17 Inches Glossy and Matte – This is a “Stocking Up” purchase. I noticed that I didn’t have much paper this size so I bought some more. The matte paper came damaged (the side is dented) but it’s thin matte paper so I’m only going to use it for proofing stuff and it was only $16. It’s annoying that it arrived damaged but it’s more trouble that it’s worth to return it. I think the glossy paper is okay but I thought the matte paper was okay until I went to use it.
Three Ring Plastic Storage Binder – This is another “Organizing” purchase. It’s an archival box with binder rings inside it to hold my art cards in nine card pages. My old binder was out of room so I figured I’d try one of these box binders. It’s nice.
Marker Holder – Yet another organizing purchase. This year I bought some knock-off Sharpie markers that Amazon brands and sells. They’re okay markers but I never had a good spot to store them. They sat around in an inconvenient pile. I bought a marker holder that’s a piece of foam with holes cut in it. It works just fine. At $13 the holder may have been more expensive than the markers. But marker holders aren’t cheap. They’re not really that expensive either so maybe it’s just that Sharpie knock-offs are really cheap.
4TB Hard Drive – This is a purchase to clean up and store some digital files. I would always rather buy more hard drives than to delete anything. So I have a lot of hard drives.
Frontline Combat #3 – Don’t get all excited. I didn’t buy the original of this from the 1950s. Instead I bought a reprint of it from the 1990s. It was only $10. This has always been one of my favorite comic book covers and I decided that I wanted a copy of it on a comic book. I have it in a hardcover book but I love comic books and their covers as objects so I wanted this.
Birthright #1-4 – Another few comics that have been on my want list for years. I have the collected edition of them but since I have the rest of the series in single issues I wanted these too. I looked for them on a whim and found them on eBay. All four of them together were $20 shipped. A good deal so I went for it.
Those last two don’t really count as art purchases but I figured I’d throw them in there anyway. I bought that “Frontline Combat” just for its cover art so it’s close. Close enough for blogging!