Materials + Supplies

The primary materials, aside from the art supplies, are the cardstock paper boards and some painters tape.

If you’re planning on making this many paintings it’s critical that the supplies and materials be readily available and relatively inexpensive.

This is what you’ll need:
  • Boards
    ➥ Silver Age: 7 1/8 x 10.5 inches (18.1 x 26.7 cm) cut in half to 7 1/8 x 5.25 inches
    ➥  White on both sides. Glossy on one side and matte on the other
  • Bags or Plastic Sleeves [Not immediately or even ultimately required but strongly recommended.]
  • Painters Tape
    ➥ Delicate Surfaces .94”
  • Art supplies - Whatever you have around.
  • Numbering and date stamp [Not immediately or even ultimately required but strongly recommended.]
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Boards
For those of you that don’t know about comic book backing boards they are used by collectors to protect their comics. Comics are frequently kept in clear plastic bags to protect them and they are made more rigid/sturdy by a paper cardstock backing board. This protects the comics from being folded or bent and keeps them safe from environmental damage. Since comic books are valuable to collectors these storage supplies are typically of a high quality. They are archival quality materials.

Comic books come in various sizes and so do the boards and bags. We have used most every size for the pieces in the project and eventually settled on the Silver Age size just to maintain a level of continuity.

Ideally you’ll need to find a local comic book store where you can always buy the boards to use for the project. These boards are used for a lot of reasons. They are cheap and high-quality, acid-free, archival boards and will hold up over time. These boards come in a couple of standard sizes. Mainly Silver Age and Modern/Current sizes. These are just the sizes of the boards based on the size of comic books as they were published over the years. The Silver Age size is for the older comics and they were a little bit bigger than the comics published today. [Look at Rolling Stone magazine!] As of now we pretty much only use the Silver Age size. [It sucks to use different sized boards and bags and to avoid this inconsistency we agree on the Silver Age size.]

You can find these online for sure if you don’t have a local comic shop to give your money to. Regardless, they come in packages of 100 and cost about $10 per pack. If you want to do it properly then you can buy the bags too. These are 100 to a pack and cost around $7. You’ll actually need 2 packages of these. So your total cost is around $25 for enough materials to make 200 paintings.

TIP: ➽ These boards do come in different varieties and it’s important to get the correct type. More often than not they are white on both sides with one side being a glossy, slick surface and the other a plain, matte-type surface. Sometimes you will find boards that are white on one side and a natural brown paper side on the other. These are not the ones you want. They may be sold for a tiny bit less money but they are not useful for this purpose. .

You will need to have these things professionally cut to size and Kinko’s or Office Max or Staples can do this for you no problem. Sometimes they charge a cut-fee of around $1 but a lot of times they just do it for free. Have them cut the boards exactly in half. We used to cut these things in half on our own and used scissors or a guillotine arm paper cutter. This is obviously a pain to do it that way and it is hard to get them cut straight.
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Bags
Using the plastic sleeves is important too. It’s not absolutely required that the pieces in the project be stored in these things but it’s very highly recommended. These are, after all, pieces of art. But, more importantly, they are easily smudged and smeared and all of that. People touch them and they touch other pieces and they tend to get stuck to one another when you amass a stack of finished pieces. If you don’t protect them they’ll get really messed up fast.

TIP: ➽ The plastic sleeves are cut down by about 3” or so. This doesn’t have to be exact. And please instruct the copy shop person to leave the sleeves in their original bag when cutting them down. These plastic sleeves are slippery as hell and will invariably slide around making them very hard to manage and cut properly. We also used to cut these by hand and would hack at the pack of bags with a razor knife. This is unsafe.

We've just always used the comic book bags and backs as they were just easily available almost anywhere. We're looking into securing a source for pre-cut boards of the same quality as well as plastic sleeves that are designed for storing ephemera.

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Painters Tape
You get what you pay for in the tape department. This has been the only source of mild frustration felt from gathering the supplies for this project. The cheap tape sucks and the good tape is a bit more expensive. But since the whole project is not very expensive at all it’s grudgingly accepted that spending a few bucks on good tape is just the way it goes.

The Scotch Blue painters tape comes in various styles and sizes and the preferred choice is the kind for Delicate Surfaces. Size matters for sure and you don’t want to use anything wider than 1”. The preferred size is the .94” variety.

I don’t think anyone has ever taken the time to calculate how many finished pieces can be created with a single roll of tape but I’d guess its in the neighborhood of 200 or so pieces. I’m not sure. [That’d be cool to calculate sometime.]

Art Supplies
This is the definition of mixed-media. Use what you have around. For a long time we used discarded materials that we’d get for free from friends or garage sales or whatever. We’d raid the trash for cans of old house paint. A good source is still the mis-tinted paint section of hardware stores. People order custom colors and then hate them or the store messes up the tinting and they get marked for quick sale. They are awesomely ugly a lot of times.

I think that if you can think of a medium then it’s been used for pieces in the project.

Numbering and Date Stamp
The pieces need to be cataloged and documented and the number and date stamps are now a critical part of the project. It also indicates the vastness of the project in a way. The main thing you’ll need is the date stamp. Always add the date that you completed them to the front of each piece.

TIP: ➽ If you are planning on contributing your work to be included in the project then you’ll need to wait before you stamp them with a series of numbers. It’s a coordinated effort and we don’t want to have double-numbered pieces done by different artists so wait to number them. At this stage of things it’s common for Christopher just to mail me his finished pieces and I am the one that numbers them. It’s easier to keep track of this way. But we’ll coordinate it in some way so hold off before we do.