You can stop now!

I mean, you know, if you still WANTED to donate that would be totally awesome and all, I'm certainly not taking those buttons down, but I have all I need for the printer and I've just ordered it.

I'll be writing a better note of thanks later this week and I'll be sending several of you extra special thank yous for your holy-shit generosity, but I wanted you all to know that I'm no longer in desperate straits in this matter, you have come to my rescue and covered my ass, and your charity should now be focused elsewhere.

What kind of printer is it, you ask? You'll find out when I do my post about printing blueline layouts.

Getting there!

Hey everybody, since Wednesday when I asked you all for help getting a printer after an expensive month long fiasco that I didn't even describe half of, Comic Tools readers have donated 100 dollars and forty three cents, which is a hair short of halfway to a brand new large format printer which will allow me not only to start finished art for my First Second book, but also to finish an amazing Comic Tools entry where, in researching the method I'm using to produce the art for my book, I visited Jason Little in his home, where he taught me how to do it, demonstrated by printing out a page of his own layouts, and then he actually penciled and inked part of a panel right then and there, with me photographing the whole thing.

I also have entries coming up such as an insanely in-depth review of different inks, how to choose perspectives in comic panels, and a HUGE multi part tutorial about scanning that will rival my anatomy tutorial.

I don't need any money to produce any of this content (this isn't PBS, you're not gonna have to deal with annual fund drives), but I do really honest to god need this new printer to do my job, and I've already spent more money on this misguided adventure than I can afford. In the last several days many of you have donated, some of you generously enough I may have to take a bullet for you or something. For those of you who haven't yet, if each of you donated five dollars it would put me into the clear and leave a little extra for ink. But any amount at all would still be closer, and deeply appreciated. This is a piece of professional equipment that I really need, and if you've enjoyed this blog and the content I've provided, maybe it's worth enough to you to help me out. You'd really be pulling me out of a ditch. To all of you who've already helped, holy moly smokes thank you thank you thank you. (To those of you who gave big, and who will give big- you have special packages coming to you in the near future. )

This week: Balloon Shape.

This entry isn't about what you probably think it's going to be about. I suspect you think I'm either going to talk about the various shapes of balloons you can use in your comics, (round, cloud, square, unfurling scroll, etc.) or about how to compose your balloons within your comic panels.

Neither of those would be worth discussing on Comic Tools, not because they're not important, but because they're both extremely broad subjects of discussion which are very, very well discussed in many books and websites already. The reason I let myself get away with tutorials on comic tools is that I only talk about things I call "mental tools," little tips and tricks that you can keep in your mental toolbox and use to make your art easier and better. Subjects of broad aesthetic discussion are for the artist in you- Comic Tools blog is for the craftsman in you.

This week I want to bring something clearly into everyone's mental focus that they may or may not think of, but which very few people think of enough, if at all: The shape of the outline of the balloon is as important as the shape formed by the negative space inside the balloon, and the shape of the negative space inside the balloon is as important as the shape of the words inside the balloon. The words, the negative space, and the balloon's outline all have to combine into a single, pleasing form.

Many cartoonists, and most beginning cartoonists, look at text as something they have to either put over or cram into their art. This is because most young cartoonists "just want to draw," and don't want to have to deal with it. By the time anyone has gotten to a point of being even a little professional they've at least caved in to the idea that they actually have to leave room for balloons or their work will look like shit and be totally unreadable. Most even go to the effort to compose their pages by using the balloons as a visual element to lead the eye through the page, recognizing them as a part of the image and not just something they have to make room for.

But many professionals, even many good ones, stop there. They'll compose the balloons on the page, but they don't think about composing the balloon itself. And thus their balloons keep making their art look worse, and thus they keep hating text.

An average of 30% of your comic page might well be word balloon by area- it's worth taking the time not to make a third of your page look like garbage.

The problem with text, from a drawing perspective, is you can only do so much to change it, especially if you're working off a script you can't re-write. Those words are going to be that size and that spacing. You can't draw the word from a different angle, or from above, or in perspective to make it thinner. It's frustrating, how unmoldable they are, how undeterrably horizontal. All you can really do is stack them into a shape that's easy to draw a balloon around.

Most young cartoonists don't even TRY. I'm sure every one of you has seen a comic with one or more of these mistakes:
The problem on the top left is different from all the others in that it's a mistake made by cartoonists who are just starting to try to address the relationship of their text to the balloon but don't quite have the hang of it. I did it for awhile and so did many of my classmates at SVA. It happens when you keep drawing your balloons around your words and leaving huge amounts of space around them here but almost crashing the edge against a letter somewhere else. The teacher or a fellow student will say "You need to be leaving more equal space around your words, imagine there's a forcefield around the letters you can't cross." But then you take them too literally and you draw these spandex-fit balloons that really are like drawing a forcefield around the text.

If you're still doing that? It's time to graduate. although it IS important you have space around your words, it's not important that the space around them be equal. It's important that the space around them, and the words themselves, form a pleasing shape.

Let's take a phrase and I'll show you what I mean.

Below I've misspelled "I am a very hot Paleontologist, yes." seven times, in different arrangements. I've eliminated some, approved of others, and I'm iffy on one. Have a look at them and then I'll explain why.

Alright, now below are those same arrangements, but with the shape of the letters emphasized:

1 is just a boring shape, and being rectangular it's hard to form a pleasing oval around. But it used space pretty efficiently, so I marked it as lukewarm, a shape I might use is I had to but one I'd avoid when composing my page.

2 and 3 are pointy, nasty shapes that waste previous room on my page with empty and not very artful lumps of negative space. I can do better, and I can think of no reason why I'd use them.

4 and 5 are both more efficient at using their space and form stable shapes that are easy to draw a balloon around. I like to plan versions that will float as well as versions that I can bodge against the panel border if I need to, so I have options when I got to compose the panel.

6 is another inefficent waste of space.

7 is not only a better shape, but it's more compact, despite being an extra line. Should I choose to put this balloon in a corner this will take up the least of my drawing and do so very attractively.

When composing a page I figure out the best balloon shapes for the text first, and I compose only with the ones that pass. This way I know for sure that the text will look great later- I've already eliminated all the bad options!

Doing this not only makes the page look better, it makes the page read better. Text that gets forgotten till later usually gets crammed in, and cramped text actually has quite a detrimental effect on a reader. Read these two balloons with identical text, and pay attention to your eye strain, and even your level of stress, as you read one, and then the other:


If you're running a balloon up against the side of a page you also have to decide whether you're going to have the letters run flush against the border or be centered in the balloon. You have to draw the balloon differently for both. Also, you either have to have the balloon up against the border or totally away from it, having them tough forms and unattractive and awkward to draw around tangent:



When everything is working well, the reader should notice as little as possible that they're even reading. It's for this reason that I'm also typically of the opinion that text should be kept absolutely as simple and innocuous as possible. The goal is to be not noticed, so as not to pull the reader out of the story.
Using very regular, innocuous text also make composing much easier. However, as anyone who's read my comics knows, I DO think there's times where it's appropriate to draw attention to the text for effect:

I think a lot of folks associate bad lettering with digital, or computer lettering, either as seen in crappy mainstream comics or in englich Manga translations where the letterer is rarely an artist, such as these examples:
They're hilariously bad, to be sure. But let's not forget that plenty of great artists who did all their lettering by hand have made the same mistakes. Bill Watterson constantly ran out of room and had to bodge the rest of a long word in by drawing all the letters small, and Winsor McCay, one of the greatest cartoonists of all time, may well have been the worst letterer of all time. (Which is odd, since his title lettering was breathtaking. I think it's because he thought of the titles as drawing and his balloons as text.)

I think it's just easier to see mistakes in digital lettering, and that mistakes look worse in digital lettering, because everything is so regular and clean. Doing things by hand gives you a little leeway.

Two of my favorite letterers who use digital are Steven Griffin and Bryan Lee O'Malley.

Just look at the letter shapes in this spread from Hawaiian Dick, which Steve colors and letters:


They're immaculate. They sit there like perfect jewels. I envy the shit out of this guy. You can't see it here, but his colors make me foam at the mouth with jealous rage too.

I've always loved Bryan's combo if hand drawn balloons and computer text (some of the most tasteful computer text I've ever seen), but what's really unique and interesting about his lettering is how most of the time he composes his balloons so they only have one or two worse across running down his distinctive tall balloons in a punchy column.

Sometimes he'll let them get wider and grow into fat circles, but unlike just about every letterer I've ever seen, O'Malley defaults to the vertical, rather than the horizontal. The result is that instead of reading a block of text, I meander through the character's words as they speak. It makes for a unique reading experience.

Next week: The marvelous erasers of Japan

Shaking my coffee cup at you

Hello Comic Tools readers,

I have a major tool problem right now, and I could really use your help, and by help I mean cash.

For the project I'm working on for First Second, two epic books, I need a large format printer to print my layouts in pure cyan onto my illustration board, so I can finish pencil over it and then drop out the blue later. It's a process that I learned from Jason Little, and I recently documented how he does it in his home in Brooklyn for an upcoming comic tools entry. I'm waiting to do that entry so I can contrast some interesting differences in how he does it versus how I'll be doing it. And there we come to the problem.

Months ago my wonderful girlfriend sent me her large format printer to use. When I went to use it, it turned out to be totally messed up from travel and disuse. So I bought a used one from an architect in Carol gardens for fifty dollars- it has a serious issue with it's print head that will cost me upward of 100 dollars and a trip to Jersey to fix. So I got another for 70 dollars, but it's in need of a similarly expensive cleaning, also involving a trip to Jersey as well, adding even more money.

It's not worth my time to fix these, and doing some looking around there are two new printers that will serve my need that cost in between 250 and 350 dollars. The lower end of that is what fixing these old craigslist printers would cost me, and I'd have a new machine.

I don't have the money for either option, an this is an essential piece of equipment for my project. (not to mention the entry.)

I have deliberately taken no steps to monetize this blog, because I feel that this information should be free and spreadable as possible. I will never, ever charge anything for the information on this blog. But I know many of you appreciate it enough that you would pay for it, and I'd like to ask you, if I've helped you or your art in some way, to help me in purchasing this extremely important piece of expensive professional equipment. Maybe there's a five dollar cup of coffee, or hell, maybe even a ten dollar comic you can go without. Maybe you can spare a dollar. I'm in a serious bind here and I'd be one step away from blood-indebted to anyone who'd help me out here.

If you'd like to help, please click on donate, think of my puppy dog eyes welling with tears, and give what you can. I'll make a post to stop you should some miracle occur and I get enough actually cover the cost of the printer.

(Edit: actually, I did the math, and if everyone who follows me on Blogger gave five bucks that would totally cover it.)

(Edit 2: donation button fixed.)

Hello Comic Tools readers!

In my absence I've also left a lot of comments unresponded to, so the the bottom of this post I'm going to respond to all the comments that weren't just "Good job, love the blog!" I'm going to respond to those kinds of comments right now- Thank you, each and every one of you!

I've been away so before I get back to tutorials I'd like to play a little catch-up, as there's been a ton of great stuff accumulating in my links folder over these weeks. I won't even be posting all of it today- I'll be spreading some throughout the week as well.

To start with, this will teach me to sit on a link for too long. The whole main subject of this week's post was going to be all these great cartoonist videos that had been posted, and all of them have since become unavailable online. To start with, you may remember all the videos I linked to in which P. Craig Russell would take one of his comic pages and discuss the composition and storytelling in great depth. Comic Tools reader Chester Kent informed me that those videos had been taken down, but then re-posted , evidently because the website hosting them (and also responsible for producing them) changed it's name from "Lurid TV" to "Wayne Alan Harold Presents. " Chester helpfully provided me with the link, and I tucked it away to post to Comic Tools later.

Well, as it turns out those videos are no longer available online except as a DVD containing all of them, and, if I read the description correctly, other material as well. Here's the cover:

And the description: NIGHT MUSIC: THE ART OF P. CRAIG RUSSELL takes you into this artist’s pro­fes­sional and per­sonal life for an in‐depth look at both his career and his sto­ry­telling tech­niques. You’ll also go behind‐the‐scenes to see Rus­sell hard at work on his comics adap­ta­tion of Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN: THE DREAM HUNTERS.

I'm sad to see they're no longer available free, but they were certainly some of the best educational content I ever linked to. A commenter to Lucy Knisley's LJ recently asked, regarding Lucy mentioning one of her Center for Cartoon Studies teachers,

"What were you taught? To think in a story arc, to use different inking tools, to vary perspective, to compose in spaces of different sizes? What about cartooning can be turned into a syllabus and assessed in a portfolio evaluation, a graded essay, a set of multiple-choice questions? I hope that you will share an anecdote from cartooning school, one that says -- I was stuck HERE, and then with THIS comment, I was suddenly THERE. With, of course, pictures."

Having gone to school for comics myself and having gotten some use out of it myself, I'd answer with a story of a teacher saying something a lot like the kinds of things P.Craig Russell says every three seconds in these videos. These videos are like a superconcentrated comics course, so the current asking price of 20 bucks does not strike me as high at all. How much did YOU pay for college courses that didn't teach you nearly as much? The answer for me is honestly probably thousands. So, maybe you should get the DVD.

In that same week those videos were (temporarily) re-posted Sam Hiti posted a FANTASTIC video of him inking a free-handed sketch in brush, but it was promotion for his new books- all of which come with an original sketch by Sam inside- and he has since taken it town. I'm actually going to write him and ask super nicely if he would please re-post the video, because I think the fastest way to learn inking is to watch it actually being done, and I think Sam is one of the best inkers out there. (I should mention that Comic Tools reader Looka clued me in to the video even existing.)

But these weeks were not all lost educational opportunity! Quite the contrary!

Matthew Reidsma wrote a fantastic post on why large, vertical, easy-to-read-from-a-distance signs are important for conventions, especially non comics conventions. What makes this piece particularly great is almost less the lesson and more why Matt learned the lesson in the first place. Matt found himself growing dissatisfied with comics conventions because in going to them he only reachs out to people who are already comics fans. So he started attending zine fairs, craft fairs, and other art fairs, and in doing so he found what he was looking for. Reidsma:

"...it's the market I always SAY I am looking for. Comic conventions are full of people who already love comics. You just need to convince them to like yours. Art markets have a wide array of people who may have never read a comic in their lives (except perhas Garfield or Dilbert). Those are the people I want to meet. Because if I can convince those people that comics are worth reading, that's better than selling 5000 comics at SPX or MoCCA. On the business side, one crafter asked me at a show in Indianapolis last month, "Why go to a show where ALL of your competition is in the same room with you?"

One of Reidsma's convention signs:

Jillian Tamaki and Yuko Shimizu BOTH posted more fantastic process images from their professional illustration gigs. I will never get tired of either of them. Their names link to their posts rather than just their sites.

Below, Yuko changes eye color: Comic Tools reader/ deputized Comic Tools contributor Rivkah has posted the second part of her educational series about print. The small image below links to her post, which in turn links to an image that you can click on to get even larger versions of the panels. She has learned her lesson about working for small computer screens and has resolved to work smaller in future installments. Part one can be seen here. (readers who peruse her blog may note that she also did some ink reviews awhile back- they didn't go unnoticed, but I have an idea for a larger post about ink that they'll be a part of.)
Oh, and this isn't educational, but I'm just saying: My classmate and friend Nicolas Cinquegrani has a new book out. You should buy it. Here's an interview with the writer, Neil Kleid.

Here's where you buy it.
And now, reader comments:

In response to my post "I love my new ink bottle,"

Anton Edmin wrote "Older bottles of Sheaffer 'Skrip' fountain pen ink have a clever little built in inkwell near the lip. These can be bought for next to nix.",

and Westival wrote "I just bought an old glass inkwell on ebay in attempts to solve this problem (among others). I personally only want a small amount of ink out at a given time, as I have already felt the burn of spilling a full bottle of ink onto the carpet. I'll let y'all know how it goes when I receive it."

When I have excess cash lying around I might well check those out. In the meantime I have, as I said in the post, and ink bottle that I love. How are you loving yours, Kiel?

In regard to my post "Don't buy one of these things,"

Steampunkpainter wrote "Thanks, I've been following ever since this was an interview blog, and props to you especially because I was thinking of buying one of those "stay wet" paint palletes, as I work in acrylic gouache and it is a BITCH to keep workable. Now, I needn't worry."

I actually kept that container with the paint in it. There's a tiny bit of mold near the lid but the paint and paper are both still usable, weeks later.

Joey wrote "Good call on the homemade stay-wet tray. I never had any problems with the tray I used in college, but cannot remember the maker. Anyhow.
As I read this I kept coming across the word guache in your post. What you are referring to is gouache.
guache = lacking social experience or grace.

Actually, we're both wrong. Gauche = lacking social experience or grace, Gouache is the paint, and Guache isn't anything. I have corrected the misspellings, thank you for pointing them out! (Blogger spell check recognizes none of them, by the way.)

In response to my post "Tiny little metal ball,"

JoBi wrote "I'm doing an experiment. Bought two pens. I emptied one cartridge and filled it with plain Talens india ink. Did it more than six months ago (I don use it every day) and still no clogs, no problems."

I shall have to try this!

Thanks to all of you! I'll see you next week with a lesson on word Balloons!

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear last time.

In my post on February the 5th of this year titled "That's gonna stop right now" I thought I made it very clear than if you were a company and you wanted to use my blog as an advertising platform you are to contact me directly and ask, rather than spamming my comments posing as a legitimate reader.

I believe I also made it clear that anyone who did spam my blog would see this blog used as a platform to damage them and their enterprise.

The FREE COMICS, MANGA, ANIME ARTWORKS DOWNLOAD blog just fucked up big time.

Not only did they have someone pose as a commenter on my blog, their site has several comics made by personal friends of mine who frankly don't get rich from making their comics, and this site is giving away their copyrighted work for free. Some of these books are self published, so they can't exactly say they're sticking it to the big guys, or that they're only hurting big companies. This site also has a great many comics from Dark Horse that I know they didn't get permission to give away, and I love Dark Horse as a company and have many friends with them.

If that commenter is reading this- you used the name OneShare- I passed along this blog to one of my editor friends at Dark Horse to have her pass it along to their legal department- maybe they'll find it worth their while to slap you with a cease and desist order, you fucking douche nozzle.

I'm a professional fucking cartoonist, asshole- what the FUCK did you THINK I was going to do when you strolled into my blog advertising the fact that you were giving away other cartoonist's work without their permisson? Choke on shit and die like a pig in hell. You'd better hope I'm too busy to remember to contact Marvel, Image, Fantagraphics, DC and many others while I'm at it. You stole from Jason Shiga, motherfucker- for that alone I'd gladly snip off your toes and fingers with a cigar cutter.

I hope I've made my stance on this issue very clear, yes? Anyone else wanna spam me?

There will be a regular comic tools post later today and regular weekly posting will resume thereafter.

Don't buy one of these things

I normally try to keep this blog focused on ink, paper, and digital from time to time, but enough cartoonists use gouache and watercolor often enough for this to be a good topic.

The contraption above is one of the pieces of equipment I've owned over the years where the relationship started as a dazzling, starry-eyed honeymoon, but ended in tears and bitterness. If you don't recognize it, it is a Masterson Sta-Wet Palette, and if you have ever worked with tube watercolor or gouache and had your perfectly mixed color dry onto the palette, never to be quite the same again after re-hydration, you are probably already ordering one online after reading the name.

Don't enter your credit card quite yet.

First of all, let me say for the record that this product does exactly what it says it will. It will keep guache and watercolor and acrylic wet, even in the thinnest of layers, for days to weeks. It's a sealing plastic box that comes in various sizes. Inside is a sponge pad and a sheet of acrylic coated paper that you use as a disposable palette surface. You soak the sponge and get the paper wet, put the paper on the sponge, blot off the excess water and you put your paint on that. Close the box when you're done, come back to still wet paint. I'm not panning their product because it doesn't work.

I'm panning it because they charge $obscenity.bullshit for it. The small palette costs ten bucks and the large one costs 15. The flimsy paper, which paint will often leak through and stain the sponge, costs 4-7 bucks for refills of 30. The sponges, which have to be replaced occasionally due to paint leaking through the paper, and which are prone to mold (evidently they have no antimicrobial treatment like many kitchen sponges do) are 7-10 bucks for three. It all works but it's all shitty and cheap, and you can do better for less money, and NOT have a mono-tasker tool taking up space in your studio to boot.

All you need is:

• A piece of cheap-as-you-can-find tupperware like Gladware, or whatever off brand gladware is, or a deli takeout containter, or anything that seals up watertight that's large enough to fit your paint mixing area into. (either use a large one or a bunch of small ones.)
• A piece of cotton fiber paper. Most watercolor papers and decent stationary paper are cotton. If you're an artist you probably have scraps of this lying all around. Those scraps can be put to good use as stay-wet palettes, and then you can doodle on them when you dry them out.
• A sponge or sponges.
• Water.

Here's what you do:

Below you can see I had a soaked sponge in my plastic tub. I chose a small one so the photos would come out better. The sponge is really wet, I did not wring it out.
Next I took a piece of light weight watercolor paper and soaked it till it was floppy, then blotted it so it wasn't slick with water on the surface.
On top of the sponge it went.

Then I took some red gouache, because I figured it would photograph well. Left on it's lonesome this guache dries despair-inducingly fast.


I spread it around to show that even the thinnest skim will stay moist and workable.

Then I sealed it,

And out it in my closet:

That was Thursday night. Tonight I opened it, and voila- as you can see it is quite moist, yet it has not bled or been dilluted. It is exactly as I left it:



With some scrap paper and your tupperware you can have your own stay-wet palettes for cheap, and you can use them for food when you're done. Why buy one?


By the way, I want to say an odd sort of thank you to all my readers. It's common on the internet for people to develop a strong sense of entitlement to content they like, to the extent that people will harass bloggers and movie makers and comic artists about not updating their totally free whatever that they earn no money from and don't even get ad revenue from. As you've all undoubtedly noticed my updates have been less frequent lately, which is because I've been trying to get past a stage in my book for First Second and it is just a freaking slog, and, well...no one's given me shit about it. Not one single person. No one's even asked me the uncomfortable to answer question of what's been wrong, why am I not updating as often. I've gotten some very kind comments about people's appreciation for the blog, and that's been it.

So, thank you all, for not being self-entitled pricks and being really kind to me. I'm really pleased to see that's the kind of classy audience I attract. I'll tell you all this, the best of the blog is not behind me. Two of my biggest tutorials are still in the pipeline, as well as several requested topics, and I am always finding new stuff. I'm having a hard time finding time lately, and when that's over, I'll post weekly or maybe even more once again.

Thank you all again.

-Matt

So I have totally loved Jillian Tamaki's stuff since I first found a copy of the single issue of Skim in Giant Robot in like, 2005 or something, and the finished book totally lived up to the hype. And Matt's already posted to her before, but since then she's put up one of her handouts on keeping a sketchbook from her class at Parsons. There's also one on idea generation, both of them good reads.

Also, Eddie Campbell has been posting about his upcoming Alec book on his blog, which have always been my favorite of his comics. But I've had this link saved for two years now, the first of seven posts about paper he uses, though the others are image specific, and at times things that materialized somewhere in his studio that seemed to fit the purpose.

Part 2,, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6,Part 7

Rivkah Print Lesson 01:

Comic Tools Reader , cartoonist extraordinaire, and fellow online tutorialist Rivkah is starting a series of comics teaching about print. I know my pre-press pretty well, and I pride myself on sending files to my publishers that get compliments (scanning is an upcoming multi-part Comic Tools lesson, in fact), but I don't really have much knowledge of print. Rivkah ran a publishing company and knows this stuff inside and out, so I'll be posting her lessons here as they come out. I've already learned stuff I didn't know just in this introductory comic. These will get pretty intense, so strap in.

(click to see full-size version)

This week: I love my new ink bottle

No, Comic Tools isn't dormant again, and the posting schedule isn't changing, I just had lots going on and took an unannounced 2 week vacation.

During the first week Ma Fille visited me from out of state and while she was here, she bought me this lovely sumi ink bottle at Kinokuniya. Here's a good shot of the label, which is entirely in Japanese:


I didn't want the bottle for the ink, which I transferred into a bottle of totally useless and crappy fountain pen ink I've had lying around since I lived in Maine, but rather for the bottle itself. As anybody who's inked much knows, bottles are a royal pain in the ass.

Most ink bottles come thin necked and wide-bodied like this:

The result is you can only comfortably get your nib or brush in so far before you start accidentally getting ink from the edge on the tool and your fingers if you're not careful, and it can be very hard to see where the ink level is to avoid over dipping the brush.

This is actually a much fatter bottle than the ink I currently use. I don't have any fresh bottles of what I use now lying around, but here's their dropper caps, which will show you just how much smaller the bottles for my current ink are. I can barely fit my nib holder through the top of the bottle.
I tried solving the problem by using old film strip canisters as ink containers. It sort of worked- as you can see you can really reach the nib in their easy with no mess on yourself because of how wide and shallow they are:

But unlike a good ink bottle they didn't seal watertight and any little jostle would fuse the lid to the canister with solid ink:
Even worse they, allowed evaporation over time. Here's about four bucks worth of ink reduced to an eighth of an inch veneer that will never come off or be fully reconstituted the way it was ever again:
Which is why I got so excited about this sumi ink bottle. First of all, it's huge, which means you can put a lot of ink in. It's got a stable, wide bottom. It's got a wide mouth, and it even has a nifty brush holder groove:
See?
That groove looks more for show than action but I tell you, it's very stable. It actually works. And the best part? It has a cap that seals air and water tight:
Never ever ever take the styrofoam out of a bottle like that by the way, or you'll take away it's ability to seal.

This is the bottle open. Two things to notice here: see how they made the neck ridge low and prominent so you could wipe the excess of the brush without gunking up the top edge? And notice how even the thin film of ink on top of that ridge, away from all the other ink, is WET? That's how little moisture this bottle lets out- no dry ink forms inside.
I am so psyched to have this thing.

Also, Timothy Dempsey asked me to link him here, so here I am, doing that. Here is his blog where he posts things that he did. Perhaps you might like to have a look.