Radiant Comics

I wrote recently about some new art supplies that I bought. Among those supplies are some new color inks. Though I’ve worked in many types of paint I’ve never worked with color inks. I’ve used plenty of black ink but not color. This year I think I’m going to work on developing a color ink style. I’m not sure how that style will end up looking but at least for now it’s all about making brush strokes in ink.

I bought three big bottle of ink a few years ago. Process Cyan, Flame Red, and Process Yellow were my three colors. I’ve used them over the years mostly in single color drawings. Instead of drawing in black ink I’d draw in blue ink.

Since I bought big pint bottles of those inks (around $15 a bottle) I had to pour a bit of the ink into a smaller container to work from. I ended up using these half cup Rubbermaid containers (I call them cubbies) that I had lying around the place. They worked well. I only put about an once of ink in the container so there was plenty of room to dip my brush and then roll the brush point on the side of the container to point the brush. That’s what you have to do after you dip a round watercolor brush in ink. Roll it on a piece of paper or some such to bring it to a point.

After I bought the recent batch of inks (the first recent batch, turns out I got two batches) I bought some more cubbies to go with them. So when both of them arrived I poured each bottle of ink (these ones are only one ounce bottles for around $5 a bottle) into a cubby. I also made sure to place a piece of tape on the lid and write the name of the color and the brand of ink. That way I alway will know what I’m dealing with. A lot of these inks need to be stirred too. So the cubby makes that easier.

After I emptied the ink out of their bottles there was still a bit of ink residue in them. So I ended up filling the ink bottle up with water to make a wash of the ink. It’s funny because the bottles still look like they have ink in them, the pigment is strong in the water, but if I brush that “Ink” onto paper it makes a really light colored wash. “Wash” means watered down paint.

Now I use those bottles of color to make a toned ground on paper. I don’t need to point the brush when doing that. I just dunk a thick and chunky brush into the ink wash and drag it around the paper. I use three or four colors to make an ink wash. It’s for when I don’t want to work on white paper. I want the paper to have a little bit of color to it. I toned some art card paper and then made drawings on them.

After that first batch of inks I bought at the Dick Blick website I ordered another batch from the Jerry’s Artarama website. They had a couple of different brands than Blick. I bought FW inks at Blick and then Abstract and Amsterdam brand inks at Jerry’s Artarama. It turns out that the Abstract brand is by Sennilier who makes a very nice black India ink. It’s one of my two favorites. Turns out I also had a couple of one ounce bottle of Liquitex ink that I forgot about.

After I ordered that second batch of inks I knew I had to order some more cubbies. It turns out that the Rubbermaid containers I had (and the six I just bought) were being discontinued (I wondered why the price on them rose) but they had a new model with black lids instead of red lids. I read a review of them on Amazon that said the two models, though the same size, weren’t compatrable with each other. I found this odd but ordered a set of ten black lidded ones anyway.

It was shortly after that I discovered I had about six more of the red lidded cubbies that held dice in my dice collection. Coincidentally I just purchased some dice bags to put some dice in so that made me notice the cubbies in a tucked away area of the dice collection. I also had another four red lidded cubbies that I kept little snacks in. I decided to use the red lidded ones for ink and the new black lidded ones for snacks and whatever else.

Then the black lidded ones were delivered and guess what? They’re compatible. You can swap lids with the red ones and stack them all you want. The lids and bottoms of the containers snap together so the stack becomes stuck together. That’s helpful. That reviewer didn’t know what he or she was talking about. I’m still planning on using the black lidded ones for snacks.

The last thing I did was to make a swatch set. I do this with my markers too. I have a digital master sheet of small rectangles that I print out on bristol board (or whatever paper I’m planning to work on) and then I fill in the rectangles with a color. That way I have a visual reference guide to work with. I don’t have to guess what a particular marker, or in this case ink, looks like as I can look at the swatch sheet and see. That helps a lot.

I made a mistake the first time I tried to make a swatch sheet. I printed out the page of rectangles but I forgot that the ink from my inkjet printer isn’t waterproof. That’s okay with alcohol based markers, like Copic Markers, but with water based stuff (like these new inks) the black line of the box will bleed into the ink or paint. So I started making strokes with my brush and ink and the black line started bleeding into the color. I thought it would be okay since it only bled a little but in the end it was distorting the color too much. I had to start over.

I knew the only solution to this problem was to draw the boxes in pencil or waterproof ink. After a quick experiment with an ink pen I decided to stick with a pencil. I measured out and drew a grid on a 9×12 inch piece of Bristol paper. After that I made my ink strokes and wrote the name and brand of each color underneath the swatch.

I decided to use ink strokes of color rather than fill in the grid with a solid color because I plan on using this ink in strokes. I’m still not exactly sure what style I’ll develop with them but I think it’ll be built around brush strokes. Either way it took a lot of prep work to set myself up to use these nineteen color inks. But that’s the way I am. When I want to try something new I dabble in it at first but then when I want to continue beyond dabbling I have to put things in order. It’s good to make things as easy as possible. That way I’ve got a chance at getting something done.

I ordered some after Christmas art supplies this week. I usually do in the days after Christmas. It’s a good time for sales and to stock up for the coming year. I ordered from the Dick Blick website. They’re my usual place to get supplies but I also use two other websites on occasion. Jerry’s Artorama and Mr. Art. I also buy the odd art supply off of Amazon.

Amazon is a good place for me to endlessly look art markers and brush pens. There are so many cheap marker sets on Amazon that I find it fascinating. They’re for students, crafters, or casual artists so none of the sets are particularly good or well reviewed for professional artists. I pay around $6 a marker for the top of the line Copic markers. The best of these sets go for about $1 a marker and the worst are even lower priced. Still I find it cool that there are so many sets. There didn’t used to be.

Brush pens are the other art supply I look at a lot online. I love using a brush and ink and will always chose that over a brush pen but I am still always looking for new brush pens. Once again they are something that was once rare and are now common. There are so many different models from rubber tipped ones that try to imitate brushes to pens that have actual brush bristles to draw with. I wish I could try every one of them. But I can’t. So instead I look at them online.

Here is a list of the art supplies I bought (copied and pasted from my digital receipt) so you can see what I got and the prices.

SAKURA PGM BRUSH PEN/ASSORTED 3PK – $10.50
Look! I bought some brush pens! These are a brand that I used to use back in the 1990s but then they stopped making brush pens. They started again some years ago but I don’t think I’ve ever tried these ones. They are a set of three different size brush pens.

STRATHMORE BRISTOL 14X17 SMOOTH – $10.69×3=$32.07
This is my main paper. I cut it down to 11×17 (which is comic book original art size) and then cut the remaining 3×17 inch strip into three 2.5×3.5 inch pieces (which is art card size). I but three pads of twenty sheets a piece. I still have two pads of it here so that give me 100 sheets of paper. That’s plenty for a while.

COPIC INK REFILLS/!H CHINESE ORANGE YR09 – $5.39
A Copic marker refill that I need. Copic just redesigned their refill bottles and now they only contain 12ml of ink. They used to contain 25ml of ink. They’re still the same price though. That annoys me so much that I may stop using Copics and switch to another brand. But I’m afraid that the Blick and Shin Han brands might do the same thing and then my switching will be for nothing.

W/N SERIES 7 KOLNSKY/SZ 3 – $24.00
The Windsor Newton Series 7 brushes are THE brushes for inking. They’re not as well made as they once were but there is still nothing better. The Raphael brand of sable watercolor brushes is just about as good but for some reason was more expensive this time around. They’re usually a couple of bucks cheaper. I went with a Windsor Newton one his time. I almost bought two but at $24 a brush decided against it.

BLICK MS R/SBL RND/SH SZ 4 – $11.55×2=$23.10
These are two Blick brand sable watercolor brushes. They’re not quite as good as the Windsor Newton ones but they’re half the price. I’m going to use these with the color inks further down the list.

BLICK WTRCLR PAPER/!3 22X30 140LB EA – $1.39×10=$13.90
This is ten sheets of Blick 22×30 inch 140lb watercolor paper. At $1.39 a sheet that’s a really cheap price. I’ve never used it before and it’s probably not great paper but it’s probably good for the big ink drawings that I do. I was buying a Blick/Fabriano branded type of this paper but that dropped the Blick branding and got more expensive. I bet this is that paper.

BLACK CAT INDA INK/BLK PINT – $8.39
I’ve got about a third of a bottle left of my last pint of Blick India ink. I like this ink but find it’s good to have some air in the bottle to thicken up the ink. When I get this new bottle I’ll pour some of it into the old one. By the time I’ve used up the old one the new one should be ready to go. Did I mention that I sometimes find this ink a little thin and weak right out of the bottle? That’s why I like to let it sit around. It thickens over time.

ULTRADRAW INK/BLK .75OZ – $5.36×3=16.08
I bought three bottles of this tech pen ink. I use this ink to refill random black markers. Just pull off the end of a cheap marker and rewet the sponge inside with this ink. It extends the life of the marker and this ink is probably better than whatever was in there. I use it all the time.

Now we come to the section of color inks that I bought. I want to develop a new style of color ink drawings. I already have big bottles of Process Cyan, Process Yellow, and Flame Red. I decided I wanted more colors so I bough these to try out. At $5 a bottle they are cheaper than markers.

FW ACRYLIC ARTST INK/YLW OCHRE 1OZ – $4.94
Yellow ochre. A brownish yellow that is a basic staple of any color set.

FW ACRYLIC ARTST INK/OLV GRN 1OZ – $4.94
Olive green. I prefer bright greens but any color set should also have some browner greens too. Olive green fills that slot.

FW ACRYLIC ARTST INK/FLAME ORG 1OZ – $4.94
Flame Orange. A nice bright orange. I always need one of those.

FW ACRYLIC ARTST INK/VELVET VLT 1OZ – $4.94
Velvet Violet. Purples and violets are tricky. They are often too blue, too red, too dark, or too light. I find them the hardest color to get right. I’ll have to see how this one is. I know I’ll end up buying more violets and purples.

FW ACRYLIC ARTST INK/TURQ 1OZ – $4.94
Turquoise. I like blues and the many variations of blue. They’re usually the most reliable of colors for me. This is a greenish blue. I’ll probably like it.

FW ACRYLIC ARTST INK/LT GRN 1OZ
Light Green. This is one of the bright greens that I mentioned. It’ll come in handy.

So there you go. The end of the year art supplies I ordered. I wanted to buy more markers but in truth I have plenty of them and to buy even more would just be collecting. I think the inks will serve me much better. I look forward to working out a style with them.

I’m not a person who feels a lot of nostalgia but every now and then it gets me in its grip. This week that was when I read an old comic that was on my pull list back in the 1980s. It is called “Night Streets.” This was the first time I read the series since then. A solid 34 years have passed since I last cracked these comics. Reading them brought me right back to 1986-1987 and put me in the head space of that time.

1986 was a unique time in comics. Because of the success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic we were in the middle of what was called the “Black and White Boom” of comics. Back before desktop publishing made it easy to publish color comics small press comics were all in black and white. Except most fans didn’t like black and white comics. There were a few exceptions but in general fans were used to color comics and saw black and white ones as inferior. SO they passed them by.

In 1986 I was twenty years old and I had already been buying black and white indie comics for a few years. They were up my alley. When the black and white boom hit I suddenly had a lot of new comics to choose from. The vast majority of them were crappy but there were some gems in there. One of the gems that I remember liking was “Night Streets” by Mark Bloodworth. it ran five issues form 1986-1987.

What made the black and white boom so unique was that suddenly anyone could get in the game, publish a comic, and hopefully find an audience. Before the boom there was very little hope of finding an audience. During the boom as a comic book creator you could be be in comic shops and a part of the comic book scene in a way that never happened before.

Nowadays you can have a successful comic book or strip on the web or through crowd funding and never be part of the comic book scene. I read webcomics every day and go to the comic shop every week and yet there are successful comics that I’ve never heard of. The scene is a lot more fragmented than it was in 1986 when you had to be on the newsstand or in comic book shops.

Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, and their Turtles became as important to the comics scene in 1986 as anyone in a way that I don’t think can be repeated today. They got shops ordering and fans buying black and white comics in hopes of duplicating the Turtles experience both creatively and as valuable collectors items. They made black and white comics legitimate in a way they weren’t before to mainstream comic book fans. It was amazing to me at the time and now looking back too.

The first issue of “Night Streets” is dated July 1986, the second has no date (but says it’s published quarterly), the third issue January 1987, the fourth issue May 1987, and the fifth issue has a December 1987 date on it. Mark Bloodworth was doing the writing, pencilling, and inking on it so I bet that took a lot of his time. Hence the long wait between issues. I had the series on my pull list so my local comic shop would order a copy of it for me every time it came out and I didn’t miss an issue.

“Night Streets” takes place in an unnamed East Coast city in the USA. It has a huge cast of characters and chronicles a couple of crime organizations in the city. It’s mainly a cops and robbers tale with a bit of odd superhero stuff thrown in. The guy who runs one of the crime family’s is called Felonious Cat and he is indeed a giant cat who walks like a man. There is no explanation as to why he is a cat and only about half a dozen people know he exists. He doesn’t want his identity as a cat revealed and that is part of the plot.

There is also a woman who goes by the name of “The Black Dahlia” and she rides around on a motorcycle at night and fights crime sort of like Batman. She works with and is admired by the police but she’s just another character in this story and not nearly as fanciful as Batman. There is also a friend of hers who writes and draws a comic book about her. That guy is a main character in this comic.

The rest of the rather large cast of characters come from Felonious Cat’s organization, the rival criminal organization, the press, and the police. There is a lot of talking in this comic. It reads more like an episode of a TV drama than a comic book. One of the letter writers even said the only place to find more words in a comic is in an Alan Moore comic. Some people have a problem with wordy comics but I don’t. That is as long as the words are well written. They are here.

As with most black and white comics of the period the artwork is a bit rough around the edges. In this case I think it’s the inking. There are a lot of pages with a lot of panels especially in the first couple of issues. Bloodworth was using a twelve panel grid for a lot of pages especially in issues two and three. That made the nine panel grid stuff seem roomy. The inking didn’t help organize the space but instead, with all its marks and detail, made the page denser than it should have been. Sometimes it was hard for my brain to parse what I was looking at. But the art did get more clear as the series progressed.

Despite the inking problems the storytelling the art was doing was good. There was a big cast but I never had trouble telling who was who. A lot of them were drawn with extreme fashions so that helped. Over all the art was talented beginner stuff which was pretty good in context of the black and white boom. I read all five, rather long, issues on a Sunday night. So they really kept my interest.

The nostalgia part had to do with the rest of the stuff in the comic. The whole experience of reading actual comic books from 1986-1987. There were editorials, ads, and letters pages to read and I read them. I could see the people involved learning as they went. The lettering on the first issue was amateur hour. It was typeset lettering so it was readable but the balloons were terrible. In a later editorial they mentioned the first issue had a tight deadline and it shows in the lettering. It improved with the second issue.

The editorials were filled with plans and hope. They were making comics (Arrow Comics also published a couple of other books) and planning for the future. They even banded together with other small press publishers to form the “Independent Comic Publishers Association” and put that stamp on the cover. I got caught up in the big dreams all over again. The letters pages were even fun as fans wrote in with their praise and criticism. Mark Bloodworth even wrote a special response to one punk rock fan who wrote in with a complaint that the comic made punk rockers look bad.

The fifth and final issue started with an editorial about how there were big changes at Arrow Comics. Their main editor quit and got himself another job and an assistant took over. He had less of a strong editorial voice. In hindsight that was a sure sign of things falling apart. When the boss finds another job the end might be near.

The sixth issue was supposed to wrap up the story but it never came out. I’ve recently found out the Caliber Press published “Night Streets” in two collected editions in 1990, including the lost sixth issue, but I don’t have them. I’m okay with not having the last part. That’s part of the nostalgic experience of reliving the 1980s black and white boom all over again. Most everything was left incomplete.

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.