Radiant Comics

I’m writing this walkthrough on Sunday October 29, 2023. It was just yesterday that we all found out that Matthew Perry, who played Chandler Bing on “Friends” died at the age of 54. I’m 57 so all of the friends are in my general age range and that makes me really feel his passing. I’ve reached that age when it’s fairly common for people to die. Perry was the first of the six friends to do so. Now I’m going to write my first walkthrough after one of the six has gone.

I’m up to Season 7 Episode 4 “The One with Rachel’s Assistant.” It first aired on October 26, 2000. Let me check my calendar to see what I was doing on that day. I worked at Marvel Comics that day. I also went to the comic shop and then bought a video game at Electronics Boutique in the Nanuet Mall. I find that a little strange since I don’t think I often went to the comic shop and commuted into Marvel on the same day. It was a long commute after all. Either way I watched “Friends” live on that Thursday night. It also says that my website (jaredosborn.com) went live that day for the first time.

Let’s start the show. It starts with all six friends in Monica and Chandler’s apartment and they are watching Joey on his new show “Mac and Cheese.” It wasn’t a good show and they all have to figure out how to deal with that while Joey is suddenly on a call with his mother. No one wants to tell him how terrible it was. Phoebe comes up with the funniest bit. I finding myself a little sad as I watch Chandler. Here comes the theme song. The song is a little extra poignant this time.

Now it’s a coffee shop scene. Joey and Rachel have battling stories. Rachel is getting a promotion and Joey is going back on “Days of Our Lives” and they have a good news battle over it.

That was a quick scene and we cut to Rachel at work interviewing for her new assistant (hence the title of the episode. Of course she’s not very professional about it. In walks the hunky Tag. The guy with no experience but he sure is cute! It’s a gender swap of a classic sitcom gag.

And we’re off to Central Perk. It starts with Chandler and a quick “Only the friends sit on the couch” gag. Monica tells Chandler that she is keeping a secret from him and he demands total honesty because they’re getting married. Chandler tells her a long held secret about her brother Ross while she gives up gossip on people he neither knows nor cares about. He’s been tricked! Zounds!

Time moves on and we get a new scene with Rachel entering Chandler’s apartment and asking him about her assistant conundrum. She really wants to hire the hunk! Phoebe is there too and gives her the right advice. Yet Phoebe keeps the photo of him she’s shown because he’s so hunky.

Joey goes into the “Days of Our Lives” office and they ask him to audition for the role of the twin brother of the guy he used to play on the show. Not him! He’s too big for auditions! He blows it as he acts like a big shot and walk out.

Here comes Tag with a plant for Rachel. She blurts out that she is hiring him and then she has to. That was a short and awkward scene.

Next Chandler comes home to his apartment and there is a callback to the embarrassing Ross story. So of course Ross has to walk in. Ross eventually figures out that his secret is secret no more and is annoyed. Ross then tells a Chandler secret. A funny scene over all.

Next we get Phoebe, Joey, and Rachel in Joey’s place. Rachel doesn’t want to tell them that she hired the hunk and Joey gets a phone call telling him “Mac and Cheese” has been cancelled. In the morning he had two shows and in the evening he has none! Zounds again!

Meanwhile back at Chandler and Monica’s secrets are still being spilled. It all gets out of hand. The old “No one can be totally honest” bit.

Back with Joey he’s all upset at having no shows. A very quick scene!

Tag is on the job! He’s practicing answering the phone. Phoebe is there too and discovers that Rachel, “Hired herself a little treat.” Love that line and its delivery. She tells Rachel that she can’t get involved with him. Of course Rachel wants to!

The scenes are coming fast and furious in this one as Joey is back at the “Days” office and has to eat crow. He begs and gets an audition. But he doesn’t get the part. Instead they bring back is old character “I’m back, baby!”

Ross, Monica, and Chandler have moved to Central Perk and are uncomfortably busting on each other about their secrets. (I paused the episode on Chandler to write this and got a little melancholy.) The jokes fly. Chandler and Monica call off the total honesty.

Now we get a credits scene at Rachel’s office. Tag got asked out twice by guys during the day. Since Rachel wants to bang him that’s what she told another interested lady in the office. Tag says he wants to ask out Phoebe but then Rachel tells him that Phoebe is gay. End scene. Nice little goofy wrap up.

Let me check and see what was cut out of the episode for syndication. One joke was cut out of Ross’s secret. A joke about a plant in Rachel’s office was cut. Another Tag joke with Rachel wanting to hug him was cut. A quick joke between Phoebe and Joey was cut. A second “mac and Cheese” joke between them was cut too. Not much was cut out of this one but I’d still rather have them in there. That’s why I watch the old DVD versions of the show.

I’d rate this episode four out of five stars. That means I like it a little bit better than the average show. That could be my sadness at Matthew Perry dying so let’s see what I rated it back in 2010. I gave it four stars back then too.

It was fun watching the show and writing this but now I think I’m going to spend some time contemplating my own mortality. Later.

I put in an order for some new art supplies this week. Just a couple of weeks ago I put in a big order to dickblick.com but that order was mostly paper. I was running low on 14×17 and 9×12 inch Bristol pads so I ordered some. This week’s order comes from jerrysartarama.com and has no paper in it. What it does have is a lot of markers.

I already have a lot of markers. My collection of Copic markers runs to about 130 different colors. Plus, earlier this year, I added some Dick Blick house brand markers and Artfinity brand markers. I have about 15 markers each of those two brands. All three of them are alcohol based markers and can be used together.

The main thing I use the markers for is to color my “Dreams of Things” faux comic book covers. I’ve been getting one cover drawing a week done of that series for a while and having lots of markers helps. After I bought those 30 new markers earlier in the year it really did change my color schemes. With new colors to choose from new color patterns emerged in the finished drawings.

In general I like Copic markers. I use the sketch marker type because I like the brush tip best. When I first was trying to develop a finished marker technique back in 2010 or so I tried out a lot of different brands of markers. The Copics won out not just because of the quality of their markers and inks but because the markers were refillable. I could buy a bottle of marker ink and refill my marker. That made them much more economical.

This year I bought the Blick and Artfinity markers and inks not just because I like to try out new art supplies but because Copic changed the size of their ink bottles. The got rid of the bottles that held 25ml of ink and replace them with 12ml bottles. That’s less than half the size and they didn’t lower the price much. The new price is about $6 ($5.40 at Blick) a bottle. I don’t remember what the old price was but it was right around that. I think I was paying $7 a bottle for 25ml.

I actually read a press release from Copic saying that they made the bottles smaller due to customer demand. People were complaining that the bottles were so big that they were never running out of ink. That’s a complaint? I’m pretty sure that press release is a made up bunch of baloney.

I also find the new Copic ink bottles much clumsier to use.

Both the Blick and Artfinity ink bottles are 25ml. That is the main reason I decided to get new markers from those brands rather than new colors of Copic markers.

At $6 a marker the Copic markers are also more expensive than $4 a marker for the Blick and Artfinity markers. The Blick refills are about $7 a bottle but the Affinity refills are only about $4 a bottle. That’s a pretty big savings going with Artfinity.

When buying new markers I always buy a marker and refill at the same time. So it’s about $11 for a Blick marker and refill, $7 for an Artfinity marker and refill, and $11 for a Copic marker and half size refill. Marker prices can really add up as I pick more and more colors.

What got me buying new Artfinity markers this week was a sale at Jerrysartarama. The refills went on sale for $2.50 a bottle and the markers for $3.19. So less than $6 for the pair. So I ended up ordering another 18 new colors. That ended up being about $108 but that’s better than $126.

It turns out that Artfinity doesn’t have bottles of ink for all of their colors (neither does Copic). There was one color I wanted to try, Amethyst, that had no companion ink bottle for it. But Artfinity does sell their markers in three packs for $6. So I bought a three pack of Amethyst. That way I won’t get caught short on that color if I like it.

Of course I ended up adding other things to the order too. I got some extra brush tips for the markers. The brush tips wear down over time but are replaceable. Just pull the old ones out and put the new ones in. They come in an eight pack for $7. I bought two packs just to have in reserve. I’ll put them with my Copic replacement nibs.

I also bought an official Artfinity 48 marker storage case for $17. I already have an $8 generic marker stand for them but the case looks so much cooler. I know that’s a silly thing but the case is probably easier to use too. The generic stand is occasionally frustrating as sometimes the markers get caught in it and are hard to pull out or put in. Sometimes a cap gets pulled off by the stand as I’m removing the marker and then I have to go track down the cap. That doesn’t happen often but when it does is really annoying.

I also bought an Artfinity chrome marker with the order. At $7 for the marker that’s not too bad but I also bought a 30ml bottle of chrome refill ink for $22. As I write this I’m not even sure why I bought that except that I got carried away with art supply madness. I’m going to have to find a use for a chrome marker because I sure don’t have one now. I do have some black paper though.

The last thing I got with this order is some New York Central Black India ink. It is 16 ounces for $13.39. I’ve never tried this brand but it says that it’s the blackest India ink that you can find. In my last Blick order I bought a 16 ounce bottle of Super Black India ink so I really didn’t need any more black ink at this moment but I like to try out new stuff so I bought it.

One last word on my markers. The Copic, Blick, and Artfinity markers are hardly the only markers that I have. They’re the main ones for sure but I also like to try out other types of markers. I like cheap markers such as Sharpies, Bic Mark-Its, Amazon basics as well as other types of art markers such as Prismacolor, Windsor-Newton, and Letraset. I also want to try out the new Pantone markers.

But to get in my starting lineup markers have to have refills. I mostly draw on Bristol board and that paper can drain a marker dry fairly quickly. It’s paper that soaks up ink. Without refills I’d always have to have at least two markers of the same color on hand and be constantly ordering them. Not to mention I’d be throwing away a lot of dried out markers instead of refilling them. I can do without that kind of expense, inefficiency and waste.

“Beat Holder”

As I’ve been writing lately about the art supplies I buy I’ve also been thinking about the art supplies I’ve abandoned. I like to try out new supplies but that doesn’t mean that I like everything that I try out. Sometimes I use things a few times, never figure out what I want to do with them, and then they sit unused for years. That’s generally what happened to the things on this list. I think I’m going to give them away to some students.

Shin Han 60 Marker Set. Back in 2011 I decided that I wanted to work in marker again. I had worked in marker way back in the 1980s during my college years but hadn’t done much with them since the early 1990s. I wanted to come up with a finished technique with markers and not just sketches. As a result I ended up buying this 60 marker set.

At the time Copic markers were the king of the marker world but these Shin Han markers were cheaper. I was also told that they were good and they were Korean markers that were used all over the animation industry in Korea. I bought the set on sale for around $100. At about $2 a marker that was super cheap.

I ended up using these for a while and developing a finished style with them but they had two flaws for me. They didn’t have a brush tip, which it turns out that I much prefer to the bullet or chisel tip that these have, nor did they have refills available for them. I fairly quickly stopped using these and started buying Copic brush markers and refills.

Shin Han 14 Wood Marker Set. This was a set that I bought because they were dirt cheap. Shin Han markers were a bit of a flop in the USA and the online stores that I saw selling them were discontinuing the line. By this point I had stopped using my Shin Han markers but at around $15 for this set I bought it anyway. It’s sat unused since about 2012. I made swatches of the markers but that’s about it.

Shin Han 23 Blue Markers. I totally forgot about these markers until I just started looking at my Shin Han swatches to see the dates on them. Before I bought the set of 60 markers I tried out some individual ones. I decided to buy a bunch of blue markers to concentrate on one color and figure out a technique. I probably paid around $2 a marker for these. I did figure out a technique and then bought the set to expand on it. I have no idea where these markers are right now but they’re somewhere around here in a marker wallet case.

Rembrandt Set of 15 Pastels. I can’t remember when I bought these but it was a least 12 years ago. I never worked in pastels and wanted to try out a new medium. These are really nice soft pastels and I made a few of drawings with them but didn’t take to them. One of the reasons I didn’t like them is that pastels are a lot messier than I expected. I hear people say that oils painting is messy but I found pastels to be way messier. Pastels are made of fine powder and they leave fine colored dust everywhere whenever I used them. I found that too annoying.

Set of 12 Pan Pastels. About five years after trying the pastels then came out with pan pastels so I bought some. These are pastels that aren’t in stick form but are like compressed powder in a flat little pan. You rub this small rubber soap/thing into the pastel pan and then rub it on the paper. It’s was really weird to me and seemed a bit like doing makeup. I didn’t like the whole rubbing color on paper aspect of it and quickly abandoned the pan pastels. I don’t think I ever even finished a drawing with them.

Le Pen Set of 8 Drawing Pens. I bought these just this year. I think they were cheap. Maybe around $10. The pens ranged in size from around 1.0mm to .01mm. I ended up liking the .8mm one so I then went and bought a box of them. I almost never like nor use the pens on the smaller end of the scale so there is really no use in me keeping them around. I got what I wanted out of the set, which was to test them out and see if I liked one of them, so now there is no use in me keeping the whole set.

Set of 24 Pans of Gouache. This is another one I bought just this year. I think I bought it just out of curiosity. One of my favorite sets of gouache is a cheap pan set of Pelikan gouache paints that I bought back in the 1990s and have replaced and used over the years. I saw this set (which I can’t find a brand name on) while shopping online for art supplies and decided to get it. It was also cheap and reminded m of the Pelikan set. I wanted to see how similar it was.

The unbranded set turned out to be fairly similar to the Pelikan one but I don’t like the box/case that it comes in nearly as much. I think I just looked at the set and then put it aside. I never even swatched it. It’s been sitting there unused all this year.

Various French Curves. This is the last thing on this list that I can think of at this moment. I learned about 20 years ago that good new French curves are hard to find. My French curves needed replacing so I went and got a new set. That new set was terrible. I thought they were defective but it turns out that all the crimes were bad. The edges of them weren’t very smooth. I couldn’t get a smooth curve with them. It’s like they were made on old worn out machines and nobody cared.

As a result of not being able to easily replace my old French curves I had to buy a bunch of them whenever I saw them. I bought a few different set from a few different brands over the years. I slowly found three or four of them that I liked but I also had a bunch of them left over. I threw away the really terrible ones but kept the ones that were good but just not the sizes I liked. They’re still kicking around.

So that’s my list of art supplies that I’ve got hanging around the studio that are never going to get used by me. Hopefully some of my students can get some use out of them.

I bought some art supplies this week. I buy most of my art supplies online these days. Either at dickblick.com or jerrysartarama.com. There are not many art stores left near me these days but there are still some art and craft stores like Michael’s out there.

The first art store I ever bought supplies at was a mall store back in the early 1980s. It was called Koenig’s Art Emporium and my store was part of a chain of art stores. Being an art store in a mall it was pretty expensive. I don’t remember if I bought any supplies at Koenig’s in high school since my first memory of it is buying supplies for my freshman year of college.

During the summer before college I was sent a list of supplies that I would need for my first semester. I dutifully brought the list with me to the art store and bought everything on the list. I remember the sticker shock. I think the whole list of supplies cost me around $200. To a kid who was working for $3.35 and hour that was a lot of money. It took me about 60 hours worth of work to buy those supplies.

The funny thing was that on the first day of classes I think I was the only student who had bought any supplies. No one else had bothered. Some didn’t even know that the list existed. My professor didn’t even know the list existed. Someone gave him a copy of it and then he went over the list and pointed out all the stuff we really wouldn’t need. The stuff I had already bought. Yikes!

I still have some of the things that I bought at Koenig’s that day so long ago. Off the top of my head I know the X-Acto knife (holder not the blade) I still use came from back then. I also still have the 18 inch metal ruler from that list too. The third thing that comes to mind is a flexible curve. That was always a useless art tool since it never flexes properly enough to make good curves but I’ve held onto it for all these years. It makes a good fidget toy if not an art supply.

Near that school was an art store that we students used to go to for supplies. It was in Monticello NY and, if memory serves, was around half an hour from school. That’s a half an hour drive so you needed a car to get there. Not a lot of the 18 to 19 year old students had a car so we had to wait until a friend with a car wanted to make the trip.

I can still remember the feeling of standing in that small store and looking at all the stuff. I don’t remember what I bought there except for a bamboo brush. The cheap kind of bamboo brush that’s meant for calligraphy but is really not very well made and inevitably scares students away from such brushes. I still have that brush too and even used it this past summer to make a bunch of textures in ink.

At my second art school in the mid 1980s we had an art store that we went to in New Rochelle NY. I can’t remember the name of it but it was also a chain art store. It wasn’t in a mall so it was a pretty big art store. I remember it being large and well stocked. It was more of an art store than today’s arts and craft stores but it still had a lot of crafting supplies in it.

The only thing I can specifically remember buying there is a particular Bill Alexander pallet knife. I still have it. Bill Alexander was the painter on PBS who had his own line of art supplies. These days people remember Bob Ross as the PBS painter (you can find a lot of his videos on YouTube) but he took over from Bill Alexander and even inherited his art supply gig. When Bill Alexander died they just changed the name on the supplies to Bob Ross.

After college there were a couple of local art supply stores that I bought from but I mostly got my art supplies in NYC. The local ones were the Koenig’s Art Emporium and a place called Rockland Art Supplies. The Koenig’s had moved locations. No longer were they in the mall but they were across the street in a strip mall in a bigger store. The Rockland store was in yet another strip mall nearby.

I remember the Rockland Art Supply store being the most expensive one. And that’s saying something because no art supply store is cheap. I only went there as a last resort because it was so expensive. A tube of paint that might cost me ten bucks some place else was fifteen bucks there. I think both stores closed in the late 1990s. The Koenig’s went first and the Rockland one a couple of years later.

I would also occasionally drive to the Pearl Paint store in Paramus NJ but it was the Pearl Paint on Canal Street in NYC that was my main art store in the 1990s. I used to take trips down there to stock up on art supplies. I’d either go at lunchtime if I was working at Marvel or take a special trip down just to buy supplies. Either way I had to carry my supplies on the bus ride back home. Sometimes I’d have big (24×36 inch) sheets of paper with me or even ten yards of sixty inch canvas. It was a lot to bring on a bus.

During the 1990s when I worked at Marvel it was in Midtown at 387 Park Avenue South there were a whole bunch of art supply stores around there. There were at least four stores within walking distance at lunch time. The only name I can remember is Sam Flax because that’s the one Marvel itself got a lot of supplies from. There was even one just a block or so down from Marvel but it wasn’t there for long.

All of those Midtown Manhattan art stores closed by the late 1990s. Even Pearl Paint which had been a destination store closed in 2014. There is a story that goes with Pearl Paint that I wan’t even aware of. Pearl Paint Story.

I started buying most of my art supplies online in the early 2000s. Not only because most of the stores had closed already but because it was easier and cheaper. I didn’t have to carry supplies with me on the bus from NYC or drive forty five minutes into NJ to buy supplies. I could order them from home and have them delivered. It’s tough to beat that but I miss going to art stores.

Bottom of the coat draped over a chair.

The coat painting continues this week as I attempted some drip painting. So far in the saga of painting my new winter coat, a black duster, I have finished painting the back and front of the cape that drapes over the shoulders of the coat. The back has a complex image filled with lots of different faces and such and the from has two large eyes in decorative circles. That took a long time to do. Then I moved on.

At some point during the painting of the cape I decided I wanted to paint the bottom six inches of the coat. That and the first six inches of the sleeves (which I still haven’t done yet). I knew I wanted to paint some sort of design on the bottom of the coat but I didn’t have any idea what kind. I had an idea for some sort of geometric design but then it never really came together in my head. Instead I got the idea for a drip painting in the style of Jackson Pollock.

Pollock had a very specific way of working and there is a documentary movie where you can see him painting. He called his style/method “Drip Painting” and that is a very apt title. He didn’t throw or fling paint at a canvas he dripped it on. He would put a canvas on the floor of his studio, dip a stick of some sort into the paint, and then let the paint run off the stick onto the canvas as he moved the stick, and therefore the paint, all around the canvas. Despite the reputation of this method it is very controlled.

I haven’t done much drip painting but I remember testing it out a couple of times in the past just to see if I could get the paint to drip off a stick. It really does take a bit of practice and you have to have the paint at the right viscosity.

Right side of the drip painting.

Before painting the bottom six inches of my coat I first had to measure out the bottom six inches. A long coat, such as the duster, doesn’t actually got all the way around the bottom in a single piece of fabric. The fabric spilts in the back, right down the middle, and there is a left and right side to the bottom of the coat. I isolated the bottom right side, measured off six inches, drew a line in white, ran an inch wide piece of tape along that line, and finally covered above and below that line with protective paper. Then I was ready to drip.

Almost. First I had to put down a layer of white paint over the black fabric. So I painted that. I bought a large jar of opaque white fabric paint a few days before just for this purpose. That was another $20 added to the coast of this coat. I think I’m up around $200 total for coat and paint.

I knew I was going to have a problem with the dripping part. The fabric paint that I was planning on using was from the cheaper $20 set of eighteen paints that come in these squeeze bottles that let out the paints in drops and globs as you squeezed them. The paint is thin compared to the fabric paint I bought in jars so I thought that they might be thin enough to drip out of the bottles. They weren’t.

I even tried putting a brush handle/stick into the paint but it was not thin enough to drip off. I think I needed a bigger stick dipped in more paint to get it to drip properly.

I had already spent a lot of time painting the back of the cape and didn’t want to spend a lot of time of the bottom of the coat so I knew I’d have to muddle through. This part of the coat was being painted purely as decoration anyway so I wasn’t looking to make a “Real” painting out of it. So muddle I did.

I grabbed one of the bottle of paint and started squeezing the paint out as I flung it around the bottom of the coat. I could get some strings of paint coming out of the bottle this way but it also made thick blobs of paint too. It came out sort of like a squeeze bottle of ketchup where you get one big blob of ketchup one your hamburger and then had to spread it around. But I couldn’t spread it around because that would ruin all the strings and drips.

Left side of the drip painting.

Seeing those blobs of paint made me realize that I had underestimated the time it would take the paint to dry on this drip painting portion of the coat. It was water based paint which usually dries quickly but not when it’s in blobs. I painted the images on the cape with thin coats of paint. A coat would take about half an hour to dry. Often less time depending. But not these blobs.

It only took about half an hour of flinging paint out of sixteen different bottles (I didn’t fling the black or white bottles) to get the drip painting to where I wanted it to be. That went quickly. I figured it would be another few hours before the blobs of paint were dry but I was way off on that.

I was making the painting on top of my drawing table and I finished it around 3PM. I left it in place figuring it would take few hours to dry. 6PM rolled around and there was no sign of it drying. I wanted to free up my drawing table so I had to figure out a way to move the coat. I ended up sliding a 24×36 inch blank canvas underneath it and I then put that canvas onto the arms of a chair. I had my drawing table back.

I left the coat there and the next morning check it again. It was still not dry. That afternoon, 24 hours later, the blobs of paint were still mushy and not dry yet. It wasn’t until the following morning (Saturday) that the paint was dry enough to move around. I’m still not sure if it was all through and through dry but I could, at least, remove the tape and then paint the left side of the bottom of the coat. So that’s what I did.

It was Saturday morning that I drip/squeeze painted the other side and now it’s Sunday morning as I write this. The coat is again sitting on the canvas on the chair. It’s nowhere near dry just yet. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning for that. Now I have to contemplate what to do with the cuffs.