On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Crayola is pushing today as National Crayon Day.

Today is also the annual Day of Transgender Visibility, and has long been so.

I am thinking that the connection here can be both useful and entertaining.

For a longish time, my main art supply shop - aside from some stuff I needed from the campus store at Algonquin College and a couple of other venues - has been Wallack's. They're locally owned and operated, and have been here since well before I moved to Ottawa-Gatineau.

They've had a rougher go of it in recent years, and this latest pandemic has been one more kick in the teeth to them. But despite having to close up their storefront to walk-in traffic for the duration of this crisis, they're still game for sales over the web for either pick-up or delivery. Please check their website as linked above for the rules of the process, e-mail them any questions you might have, and if you see something you like and can afford....?

Whether or not you tell them where the suggestion came from is up to you.

I consider this particular change an improvement. A considerable improvement. See for yourself:



From "Light Flesh" to "Beige Red"...

About two weeks ago, I learned something I should've known two months earlier.

On a shopping trip for clothes to the southern reaches of Orléans, I got some of what I'm still looking for and decided on a whim to see what might be on offer at the local Henry's Photography shop. It's been there for at least ten years. I bought my first two digital cameras at that shop near Tenth Line and Innes. Assorted other supplies, like portfolio display "books", batteries, peripheral gadgets and so on as well over the years.

Guess what? The store had been closed up and stripped to the walls two months prior.

Maybe I should have seen it coming after Wallack's closed up their Orléans shop right next door last year. The two shops being next to each other, as well as being across the street from the local Staples, were convenient to my purposes for over five years.

Now? Both gone. And if I want new gear from either one, I'll be hopping a bus downtown again, as I used to do before 2002.

I could blame myself for this, but to what end?

If the two chains decide to try to return to Orléans, I suggest this: Orléans Town Centre Mall. The one with the movie theatre on the second floor of the main building. Which is right across Centrum Boulevard from the Shenkman Arts Centre...which still hosts the local campus of the Ottawa School of Art. I suspect that the combination and proximity will be good for all three organizations.

How useful do you suppose this might be to your own projects?

A while back, I bemoaned the lack of a bookstore devoted to things like graphic design, typography, calligraphy, architecture and other such topics of interest here in Ottawa. We used to have such a store on one or two occasions, the Architectural Book Store first, and then - by accidental consequence of their main business for a while there, Computer Supplyhouse. The first shut down, and the second now seems to be working at completely getting out of bookselling in order to focus on computer hardware.

It is a joy to pass the word along that another store is in the process of picking up where those stores have left off. It's called the Canteen Art Shop, on 238 Dalhousie on the eastern edge of the ByWard Market.

A particularly pleasant surprise was finding one volume devoted to nothing but bar design! A bit on the pricey side it was, but I still wish I'd had that book handy when I was working on at least one earlier comics project! Maybe the public library can be talked into stocking it in the collection as a hedge against future needs of cartoonists of all skill levels?