New Supplies

 Artistically speaking, it's been a slow week. There was a birthday and outings and eye doctor appointments and, as such, less art practice. But that is just the nature of life and if I find I have had a week in which I was less able to pick up my art supplies or my needle and thread as often as I would have liked, that just means I'll focus on the week to come. Needless to say I did not fulfill my goal of creating a drawing from reference every day. 

What I did do was purchase a few items to play around with. Firstly, I bought a couple of containers of beads to add to some of my embroidery pieces. The last piece I finished, a colorful planet surrounded by a ring of beads, was hopefully the first piece in a little space-themed series, and I liked using the beads so much I wanted to continue to incorporate them into my designs.

I also bought a set of Prismacolor colored pencils because the only pencils we have in the house are Crayola. Indeed, thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I've never used quality colored pencils before at all and I wanted to try that out. I also bought a Moleskine sketchbook and I doodled a bit with the new pencils on the first page. 

I just stuck to simple things, cute objects with faces and cheeks. Comfort drawing. It was fun, but I did discover that the Prismacolor pencils break very easily. That sent me to Google to see if I could find out why and how to potentially stop that from happening. Don't sharpen too much, make sure the sharpener blade is very sharp, and look for pencils in which the lead is centered is basically what I found. The pencils, despite the breakage issue, lay down color so nice and creamily and I do love them. 

There's something so invigorating about new art supplies. It's so exciting to have something fresh and full of potential for play. And play is so important in art. To be able to tap into that childlike part of yourself that creates without self-judgement, simply because creating is fun. It's exploring, it's play! New supplies tap into that feeling. Too bad I don't have the budget for a constant flow of new supplies because that would really help things in the art-is-play department. 

Goals for this next week: Finish the draw this in your style I started last month (finally!), fill another spread in my Moleskine, draw from reference (ideas for that: roses and bunnies).