I got my ArtSnacks last week! Very exciting. Good to try new things. And find that you dislike all of them. (I would put a laughing emoji here if I could figure out how.)
Here’s my #artsnackschallenge pic for the month (and the supplies used to make it).
Let’s go through each thing like we did last month.
Plumchester Paint Marker
It’s pink. I suspect, like the paint marker last month, that this would be great if I knew what I was doing. And wasn’t afraid of color. (At least this one is harder to drip paint on the carpet with. And you can reverse the nib so there’s different shapes to color with.) It’s thick acrylic paint.
Sennelier Ink Brush
So, essentially, this is a brush with the paint built into the handle. Mine is bright yellow. (The color’s a little off in the picture. It’s a lemon sort of color.) I have a travel watercolor set with brushes where the water goes in the brush itself, so this works the same way more or less, except with less steps and supplies. I like it, it flows nice, but it does seem like you’ll go through the paint fairly quickly and then have to buy another $8 brush pen. We’ll see!
Winsor & Newton Fineliner
Mine’s brown. It is quite fine, but it’s not waterproof, and when I was erasing the pencil lines around the octopus, I found that my eraser was erasing the fineliner as well (I used it for the sucker cups), so that’s less than ideal. Definitely going to stick with the Microns for now.
Royal Talens Indian Ink
Ah! Real ink! In a bottle! It’s very black and dries nice and quick. And doesn’t erase with the eraser, what the heck. I have hidden the bottle from the small, mobile ones, because that’s a terrible combination.
Speedball Standard Pen Nib Holder and No. 512 Pen Nib
I’ve never drawn with ink and a nib, because it’s always seemed very intimidating (and also, I am a klutz, and having an open bottle of ink is a bad idea). But it’s not bad! I have better control than I thought I would. The nib holder is pretty simple but does seem like it could hold lots of different types of nib, and the nib itself is fairly versatile, as long as you want to stay on the more narrow side.
The ink/nib combo is my favorite thing out of the bunch. It was much easier to use than I’ve always feared.
So far, when I’ve gotten a new box, I’ve done a silly page to try out the stuff before I do my official picture, so here’s the one for this box (cuz there’s a landsquid):
(It’s crinkly cuz it’s on the back of an experimental style I was trying out, where you sketch in colored pencils and then wash watercolor over them, but I think the pencils activated a bit with the water, so it’s more abstract than planned.)
I was also playing with some new brush pens (also Sakura Microns, because) last week, making flower wreaths:
I like the texture the brush pens add to a drawing.
Art! Distracting me from my writing. Whoops.
I think I’ll give ArtSnacks one more month and then take a break. It is nice to try out new things, but I don’t necessarily want to accumulate a lot of supplies that I’m not really going to use in the long run.
(Although, if I get more paint markers in various colors, maybe I could experiment more with using them and figure out what I want to do with them. Maybe.)
Oh, the snack this month was a cherry Dum-dum. Good flavor. Dare I say candy is not really a snack? Candy is not really a snack. Though I suppose they are allergen free if you avoid chocolate.
Anyway! Still having fun. Hope you’re doing something to stay sane too, squider!
