i love your work! ! omg !! may i ask what brand of coloured pencil and oil pastels you use?
Thank you very much!! 🥺🥺🥺
To be honest, I use mostly the lowest quality, cheapest stuff around. This is for several reasons:
1) I used kid-grade stuff growing up, and never developed a taste for the more expensive stuff. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. 2) I find that most expensive art supplies are deeply overrated anyways. If you can’t afford what I have, please don’t be discouraged. Never let anyone tell you you MUST have a specific product to make art. 3) I remain a starving artist 🥲 I can’t sustain an expensive practice. I have rescued a lot of my supplies from the refuse of other artists 🦝 it’s important to consider what I can afford to replace before I develop a shine to it 4) Using expensive materials makes me very nervous; if it’s too precious, I will never use it at all. 5) I make art out of junk all the time. My most recent illustrations were made on cardboard I found in the trash. It’s extremely gratifying to make something out of nothing, and it’s also eco friendly.
That being said, I do wish I had better oil pastels. The ones I have right now were rescued from the trash. They were part of a generic kid’s art set. I rarely use oil pastel, so I’ve yet to be able to justify investing in a better set, though I’d love some 🥲
I have a bazillion colored pencils of many brands and qualities. I have had most of them for many years and have forgotten their source. Many were gifts, some were handed down to me, others I scored at garage sales. I use a mixture of higher quality, soft, waxy types (primarily prismacolor) and cheap, hard types (crayola, roseart, and other kid grade brands). I return to prismacolor and crayola repeatedly.
If you’re starting out in pencils, I would get a few kinds and experiment with what you like. Don’t break the bank on a bunch of prismacolors or watercolor pencils before you’ve tested them out. Don’t be afraid of mixing material or using it in a way you aren’t “supposed to”. That’s how I found my technique. Sometimes I need the luxuriously soft and blendable prismacolors to achieve a certain outcome. Other times I need cheap crap pencils with hard leads that won’t blend, so I can layer them cleanly, or cut through the more waxy layers to produce more defined mark-making.
I will say that prismacolors have been worth the investment for me, personally. Just make sure you’re extra extra gentle with them, as their leads break like CRAZY. Not all of their pencils are created equally, I tend to go for the ones with the most opaque colors so that they show up on toned paper. I also buy prismacolor col-erase pencils whenever I see them on sale. These are fantastic erasable colored pencils for sketching. Beginning my process with color by using col-erase made me really start to focus on color in my work.
Hope this helps 💖
