My pink camo book is pretty much my default sketchbook when going anywhere. I have no rules for it: doodling, drawing, gluebooking, whatever. It’s all welcome here. After all, this was bought on a whim and on the cheap. The pages are smooth, not at all like sketchbook paper. Ink takes forever to dry, but it’s a decent surface for gluing.
Pencil on pink camo paper
Most recently, I dragged this old book to Anime USA in Arlington, Virginia, to give me something to do during the slow times in the artists alley. After gluing in assorted remnants from recent trips to Harpers Ferry and the African-American Civil War Memorial and Museum, I opened my convention program and started to draw a couple of the guests in pencil. Since I was doing this specifically to kill time, I felt absolutely none of my usual impulse to rush. One of them in particular came out fairly well:
Pencil on pink camo paper
Last time I went anywhere with this notebook I bemoaned my lack of coloring supplies. A few months ago I took advantage of the start-of-school sales and picked up a 24-count box of Crayola Crayons for a buck. I love coloring, and I love using as many colors as possible in a given picture. Thus, instead of using a realistic color scheme, my next drawing turned into Lady Gaga meets Jem (or, more precisely, Aja):
Bad Romance or Truly Outrageous?
Then I decided to try something different, and instead restricted myself to black, white, and gray, and was impressed with the range of tones you can get with crayons:
My husband says he looks like Brett Hart
Yes, he’s all smeary and rough, but my post-elementary-school experience with crayons is rather limited. And my patience for monochrome was short-lived:
yay kitty! :D
Do you ever use basic school supplies in your art? Any favorite kiddie brands?
amazing what can be done with a box of good old crayolas! love these sketched faces!
Thanks! :)
I think all these drawings are good, and the Aja/Gaga (Gajaga?) one to me just looks like a punk rocker.
I love crayons! Last night I tried out some iron-on crayons (draw with them and you can iron it on to fabric – though be careful that you only write backwards or with letters that are the same each way! otherwise you’ll have to carefully crop the offending parts out…) and that was lots of fun. I like colored pencils of the regular Crayola variety (if I have a brand, it’s Crayola – RoseArt just doesn’t seem as good to me). Markers less so.
I have yet to find a consistently good brand of markers, but it may be that I’m just too cheap. The ones I get always dry out so quickly. I’ve heard Copic markers are excellent, but they’re pretty expensive.
Since I started using Prismacolor colored pencils I have been completely spoiled for all other brands. Too bad they’re so pricey.
Today I’m going to venture out to the dollar store and see if I can find any cheap non-watercolor paints. I am not optimistic, but I figure for my first foray into acrylics I might as well start at the bottom. No sense in making a huge financial investment if I don’t even know if I’ll want to use them.
Let me know what you find!
Online, createforless.com has some sets that aren’t too bad:
http://www.createforless.com/Delta+Ceramcoat+Super+Pack+Basic+Colors/pid10036.aspx
http://www.createforless.com/Delta+Ceramcoat+Super+Pack+Bright+Colors/pid126818.aspx
http://www.createforless.com/Palmer+Prism+Acrylic+Paint+Jar+Set+12+pc+3/4+oz+Basic/pid62866.aspx
though you have to pay shipping, of course. They have smaller sets but one of the ways they keep prices down is by having minimum order sizes, and for the smaller sets you have to buy in multiples of 3. It seems like a craft store ought to have smaller sets available for not too much, though, with the little string of plastic pots with snap-on caps.
Good luck!