Radiant Comics

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.

What’s in my brain today? I don’t know. I’ve been working on my duster cape all day (it’s a Sunday) and watching the Giants lose to the Dolphins so I’m a little burnt out at the moment. That’s to be expected though because I got my Covid vaccine on Thursday and that usually wipes me out for a day. The next day that is.

I got the shot on Thursday and then had a feverish night of not sleeping very well that night. Every time I’ve got the shot the next day I feel like I have a fever, some body aches, and I get sensitive skin. I can feel my shirt rubbing up against my skin. It’s a weird feeling. But it goes away after a day.

The strange thing was that after that bad night’s sleep, despite feeling feverish, I wasn’t sleepy at all on Friday. I got some paying work done just fine but didn’t have the energy to get any of my own stuff done. That’s par for the course when I’m feeling poorly. But then on Saturday I couldn’t stop yawning. I was tired all day. I felt fine besides that.

So it was finally today, Sunday, that I got back to painting my duster. It’s funny but it has felt like it’s taking an exceptionally long time to get this duster done. I think this was the third weekend that I’ve worked on it but, if memory serves, I’ve only worked on it one day of each weekend. I think I’ve worked on it some weekdays too but I’d have to check my calendar to see for sure. Either way it feels like it’s been a while that I’ve been working on it. A month for sure but not a month straight.

I have been getting one “Dreams of Things” cover a week penciled, inked, and colored. Not the some cover but three different ones in three stages. Plus I’ve been writing seven comic strips a week and finishing and posting five of them a week. I’ve also been writing this very blog once a week.

I’ve been getting plenty of things done but since those are the things I always get done my brain sometimes doesn’t count them as being done. I feel like I haven’t gotten anything done this week. It’s strange. It’s also why I keep a calendar of the things I get done so that I can look at it and say, “See brain, I got plenty of stuff done. Quit bothering me.”

Things that I haven’t got done are: Big Ink Drawings, paintings, prints, or Gatsby illustrations. I was really close to finishing my own illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby” but then I decided to paint this duster. So sometimes I’m a little frustrated with myself that I’m not finished with Gatsby. But I knew that I had to strike when the iron was hot to get this duster painted.

I also spent some more money on fabric paint today. I spent about $60 on fabric paint already and now just bought a $20 jar of opaque white fabric paint. That’s $80 worth of paint and I also spent $80 on the coat.

I bought the opaque white fabric paint to use as a ground. I already used up a smaller jar of it on the cape but now I’m going to do some Pollack like action painting on about the bottom eight inches of the duster. That means that I’m going to drip, splash, and throw paint on it. But first I want to paint those bottom eight inches white instead of the black that it is. Otherwise you won’t see the paint very well. It’s going to take a lot of opaque white paint to cover those eight inches hence the big $20 jar.

I do like the way the eyes I was painting today on the front of the duster cape are coming out. They’re almost done but I might do a few things on them tomorrow. It was a case of me having a plan, working on the eyes a lot of the day, the eyes not looking particularly well, and then they came together in the end. That’s the way it is sometimes.

I’m a methodical artist. They means that the way something is done is important to me. I have a method. To use a sports buzz phrase it’s about “Trusting the Process.” But that’s not always easy. When the evidence of your eyes is that the thing doesn’t look very good then trusting the process can be tough.

I also didn’t plan the color of the painting out as well as I could have. The graphic design eye that I was painting was one that I drew nearly twenty years ago. It was finished and looked good but I knew I’d have to adjust some of the colors as I went along. It wasn’t going to look like the original print I made of it. I was okay with that but it meant that I was on my own without a full map to guide me.

Fabric paints are very thin and transparent. It takes a lot of coats of them to get saturated color. That is unless you mix them with opaque white. But the white makes them a more pastel color and that’s not always what I want. So sometimes it can take three or four coats until what I’m painting looks good.

There was one purple area that I was painting today that, at first, I put in as a white/purple mix but then as the day went along the color didn’t look right to me. That bothered me for a while. I decided to go over it with a darker purple but that purple was transparent so that it took me a few coats until it looked good. Part of the reason it looked good was that it had an opaque light purple under it rather than black or even the white ground. I’ve learned to work light to dark over the white ground with this fabric paint.

So it was a frustrating day watching the Giants plus a little bit of a frustrating day painting. But at least the painting came out okay in the end.

I love art supplies. That’s probably not a big shock to anyone since I am an artist. But a lot of artists only use the tools they need to get a piece made and they make pieces the same way all the time. As a consequence they don’t buy many art supplies outside of their regular stuff. On the other hand I like to try new stuff. That new stuff doesn’t always work out but I’m okay with that. It’s the trying that’s fun for me.

The newest stuff I bought was a bunch of fabric paint to paint the duster that I’ve written about over the past month. I’m using most of those paints. First I bought some good paints in individual bottles then a set of cheaper paints in a set of eighteen. I’ve been using all of those paints on the duster so I’ve been, for sure, getting my money’s worth out of them.

This past week I decided to get even more fabric paint. Except this time it wasn’t bottles of paint but some fabric paint pens. They were only ten bucks for twenty pens but so far they haven’t worked out. From the pictures of them on Amazon the pens mostly look like they are sold for craft projects to both kids and adults. There is a lot drawing on white clothes with them. I tried using them on the coat I was painting but they ended up being harder to use than brush and paint. They didn’t have enough covering power over the paint I already had down to be much use to me. I put them aside and I might give them away.

When I got the original bottles of fabric paint I also bought a set of brushes. The set was of nine sable hair brushes of various sizes and only ran about twenty dollars. I love brushes in general and sable hair brushes for watercolor and gouache in particular but I usually pay more than $20 for one good brush. I knew these wouldn’t measure up to that quality but I wanted to try them out anyway. I only used one of them for the coat and it was okay but in the end I switched over to one of my better ones. I might give this set away too but first I want to try out some of the larger ones.

By the way I still have another few sets of sable brushes on my Amazon wish list. They’re all cheap sets that I don’t really need but I might get them over time just to try them out. I’ve discovered plenty of good art supplies over the years just trying things out so I’m okay with some of them, or even plenty of them, being misses.

Over the past year I also bought plenty of new watercolor pan paint sets. I’m a big fan of Gouache (a type of opaque watercolor) but I’m not as strong with regular watercolor. That didn’t stop me from buying a few watercolor sets though.

First off I replenished my gouache collection. Back in the 1990s, when I first learned to paint in gouache, I had a lot of tubes of gouache that were really nice. I bought some high quality paints. I used them all up over the years and mostly stopped painting in gouache sometime in the late 2000s. The only gouache I had left around the studio was my beloved cheap Pelican pan set plus another not so beloved cheap set of tube gouache. Last year I bought an empty set of watercolor pans to put the tube gouache in to make them more convenient to use but that still didn’t make me love them. That did lead me to want to get some good tubes of gouache. So that’s what I did.

It was about this time last year that I put in order in for fifteen or so new tubes of gouache. At seven bucks a tube that was no small order for me. I also got another set of empty watercolor half pans to put the gouache in to make it more easy to use. I made a few small paintings with the gouache but I still haven’t gotten back into it the same way I did back in the 1990s. But it makes me feel good to have the gouache ready to go.

As I mentioned before watercolor isn’t my strongest medium but that didn’t stop me from buying a few new watercolor sets this past year. It helps that watercolor pan sets are generally pretty cheap so that I can buy them on a whim.

I bought three sets from Gansai Tambi who are a Japanese art supply company. Their stuff has shown up on Amazon and Jet Pens and is fairly cheap. I got a set of six gem colors, a set of six graphite colors, and a set of eighteen regular colors. Add to those sets a set of twelve pearlescent colors from Soho Artist plus an unbranded pan set of 24 watercolors and I got a lot of sets over a short period of time.

I haven’t even used all those watercolors very much. I had a lot of fun making swatches of the colors though. I find it fun making swatches. I make rectangles on paper and fill them with color. I try them all out. The pages of swatches become an art piece all on their own after a while.

The last thing I bought, just because it looked really cool, was a set of mechanical pencils. Once again it was not very expensive, it was under fifteen dollars, so I bought it on a whim. It was a set of three 2.0mm pencils with a whole lot of graphite for it of various hardness plus some color graphite refills too. They’re not even the type of pencils that I generally use but the set looked so cool (and I wanted to try the color graphite) that I had to snag one.

They funny thing is that I was showing the pencil set to my friend Eddie (also an artist) and he immediately ordered one for himself. They weren’t even the type of pencils he usually uses either but the set looked so cool and cheap to him too that he wanted to get one. He’s another fan of art supplies. Shouldn’t we all be?

The Inks

This week I continued to work on the painting on the cape of my new coat. The coat is a western duster which is the only type of coat I know of that comes with a small cape. It takes a lot of work to paint on a coat. Luckily the cape comes off the coat. That makes it a lot easier to work on.

Last I wrote I had transferred the drawing onto the cape and was ready to “Ink” the drawing. I put ink in quotes because I didn’t actually use ink. Instead I used black fabric paint. Ink would have been easier. At least ink on paper would have been easier.

The end result is about the same as I’m redrawing the pencil drawing with a black line but fabric paint on canvas is a tougher task than ink on paper. Fabric paint is thicker than ink and the canvas material of the coat is a lot rougher than paper.

I used the same type of painted watercolor brush to make the black line but since paint doesn’t flow as well as ink I had to make shorter lines before putting more paint on the brush. It’s a much more tedious process but the paint line isn’t going to be the final line so it doesn’t have to be perfect just yet.

After I put down the black line then I’ll fill in between the lines with color paint, Then I’ll redo the black line to a finish. The “Fill in between the lines with paint” part sounds easier than what it will be because I won’t just be filling in. I’ll be painting the images at that point in some style that I have yet to determine. It’ll take a while.

What I did yesterday was to make a digital color sketch. I took a photo of the black and white drawing on the cape, brought the drawing into Photoshop, and then colored the drawing. This is a really complicated drawing and it took me about six hours to do the color sketch. Since I’ll be wearing this painting for who knows how many years there was no reason to rush through the color sketch. I took my time and contemplated what each area of the drawing should be. That was not easy with so many shapes and colors.

At first I tried to make the color sketch on my iPad with Procreate. It’s not hard to do on that app but I started growing frustrated that the screen was too small and it was clumsy to make such a complicated color sketch on such a small screen. That’s when I decided to switch over to Photoshop and my 27 inch monitor. Plus I have a lot more experience with Photoshop than with Procreate. It ended up being the correct decision since all my frustration disappeared.

The Digital Color Sketch

I also have my swatches in Photoshop. Those are a palette full of the colors that I use all the time. They’re like a set of paints. I’m so used to working with those colors that it’s second nature to me at this point. I’ve even transferred those same color swatches over to Procreate but somehow it’s different. They’re literally different in that all the colors are in one palette in Photoshop but take up three separate palettes in Procreate. That makes them harder for me to work with. Or at least I’m less used to working with them that way.

After I had the color sketch done in Photoshop I tried something new. In order to prepare the cape for painting I first primed it with opaque white fabric paint. I bought a set of fabric paints that came with a regular white paint but I bought this bottle of opaque white special just to prime the cape with. Since the cape was black I knew that the fabric paints would have a hard time covering up the black on their own so that priming the cape with opaque white would help me when I started laying down the color. As a consequence I had a black line painting on a white ground. But I didn’t keep it white.

I thought I could make the whole process easier for myself if I could transfer my color sketch on the cape. So I got the idea to use my Copic markers to draw on the white parts of the cape. It would almost turn it into a paint by numbers painting.

I’m going to have to mix some colors out of the fabric paint. I bought a set of eight colors of what appears to be good fabric paint but then I bought a second set of eighteen colors of cheaper fabric paint. I don’t know if the cheaper paint is really any worse for my use but they’ll help me get the exact colors that I want.

Meanwhile I took a couple of hours and transferred the color onto the cape with markers. It was nothing fancy. I just had to pay attention to my digital sketch, chose markers of a similar color, and then fill in the appropriate area on the painting with that color. The color looks thin and transparent but it is getting painted over anyway.

I think I’ll be able to mix a color with the fabric paint and apply it to the cape faster than if I have to look over at the color sketch on the computer monitor and follow along with that. Plus with the marker color I can see if the colors work well with each other in a real space rather than a digital one.

I’m happy now that the black line is painted on and the color sketch is applied to the cape. Now the painting can really begin. All the previous stuff is preliminary work that has to be done but maybe isn’t as creatively satisfying. Of course along with the more creative work comes having to figure out what style I want to finish the piece in. I’m still not a hundred percent sure about that. But I have time to figure it out. Even though I’ve got a lot done so far there is still a long way to go to finish this painting.