Art Mediums, Materials, and Supplies

    The first question people ask me after finding out I'm an Artist is, "What kind of medium do you work with?". This was a daunting question for me when I was just starting and didn't know exactly what I was doing. Over the years I have refined the materials I use for artwork but it has been a long journey. Since this is a constant question I get asked, I wanted to share with you some basic items I have used for most of my life as an artist and where I am now with my latest projects. 

   When I was first starting as a young artist, most of if not all my art materials were supplied by my mom and academia. It wasn't until college I was able to curate the kinds of materials I wanted to work with.

 

     When I was in middle school I was enrolled in my first art class where we had to buy special materials. It was not that long of a list since I went to a school that provided most of the materials we would needed, like student grade paint, decent pastels, very large pieces of thin brown paper we used for sketches, and a few other items. Items my mother had to buy were a large drawing pad for finished work, a pencil kit, a protractor, Prism color pencils, a sharpener, and white erasers. This was my first introduction to formal art training with student-grade materials. High school was not that much different than middle school except a lot of the materials we used in class were provided for us through our teachers who always complained about how there were never any supplies. I now understand that a lot art teachers in LAUSD at the time  had to purchase a lot of the supplies out of their own pockets and thus why many items were on a checkout system only to be used in class. It wasn't until my freshman year of college I had an insane list of materials that would cost me an arm and a leg to get. For Art 101 I purchased, a drawing pad, a set of charcoal pencils, and a set of drawing pencils, I had to buy a plaster head, bust, body, sphere, and square, a set of 48 color pencils, and a few other items.

   The first paint I used was in school and it was watercolor paint. Sometimes it was good and other times it was bad. I used to take these from school sometimes and by the time I was in college, I wanted to try sometime new. I went to Michael's and bought a set of acrylic paint. Once I started buying acrylic paint of my choosing I started doing more exploring other art stores, and more professional art stores. 

    Most recently I have used both acrylic and oil paint for my fine artwork. Since I have always bought paint from different stores I have used a lot of different brands of acrylic paint since acrylic has been my main medium for over 10 years. I am currently narrowing down all the acrylic paint to a brand I found here in Los Angeles, California called Nova Color Paint. Their paint is super pigmented, fluid and comes in many colors. I've also used Blick's Series 1 Acrylic Paint, and New Amsterdam Standard Acrylic Paint which I enjoyed using. I am new to oil painting so I have only used one, Blick's Studio Oil Paint. I would love any recommendation for any oil paint that is worth trying in the comments of this post. With acrylic paint, I only use water as my mixing medium. For oil painting, I have been using linseed oil and gamsol. Let me know if there are any other mixing mediums I should try with oil paint.  

      Paint is a rather large topic as is the one about brushes. I buy all-level quality brushes. Mostly I have bought those value packs of brushes at the beginning of every aisle at every art store. I like when they come with sponges and plastic palette knives, although I have a few good metal painters knives as well that I used for my Emotional Fast Series: A study on Water. I treat my brushes terribly so I don't buy expensive ones. I like to make abstract work so when a brush dries with paint or glue I can still use it to create a mark. My favorite brushes however are from Princeton Art Co. They are long and have good bristles, all the other brushes aren't that special except for the ones with dry paint on them. 

   Last but not least but the most important is the canvas. Something I did some years back was buy a roll of gessoed canvas at my local art store. This has been so clutch having it. I still buy pre-stretched canvas but I have also used wooden panels to back the rolls of canvas I use as well. I mainly get prepped canvas at Michael's, they have the best deals. So there you have it, these are the current types of materials I work with. I hope this helped anyone curious about the art for sale. If you have any other questions about art supplies, let me know in the comments. <3