For my birthday this year, my Grammy (who is one of the most interesting people I know and I could tell stories about her for days) said she would help cover two subscriptions for me. I just had to tell her which ones I wanted.
I knew my answer straight away. 1. A subscription to The Artist’s Magazine (which I’ll talk about in a future post) and 2. A subscription to ArtSnacks.
Now, ArtSnacks is NOT paying me to write this. They didn’t ask me to write this, either. I’m just writing this to tell you about the service…
Because it’s deliciously awesome.
ArtSnacks is a service that mails you new art supplies once a month in a little box. It’s not replacement bits for the supplies you already use – rather, they send you completely new tools. A lot of the time they send you supplies that haven’t even hit the market yet or are exclusive to ArtSnacks.
That picture was what they sent to me in October, and includes:
- the Liquitex Professional INK! I got the muted green. Each package got one of five colors,
- the Uni-Ball Signo White Gel Pen, which has the most vibrant white I’ve ever seen in a gel pen and writes super smoothly,
- the Copic Gasenfude Brush Pen, made for sumi-e techniques but I use it to ink my comics blacks as the lines are MUCH more vibrant and strong than the Prismacolor brush tip fine line marker,
- the Lauren Series 4350 Watercolor Brush by Princeton Brush, which handled the Liquitex ink I got very nicely,
- a chewy Twizzler-type candy
- and a temporary tattoo of the ArtSnacks logo (I stuck it onto my chalkboard mug).
And yes, they send you candy in every package and it is delicious.
Here’s a smidge of what I made with the new tools, sans candy:
Sometimes ArtSnacks will throw in a bonus item (like they did for the November box. More on that in a minute) and sometimes they just share interesting stuff. The October Box, for instance, did a signal boost for a podcast called the Art Supply Posse. The folks on that podcast talk about new art supplies they’re trying out, and talk with artists about the tools they use. It’s delightfully art-nerdy.
Anyway, yesterday I got the November box, and here’s what they sent me…
Poison not included.
So from left to right, we have…
- a Plumchester 1.5 Fine Brush Pen, which is exclusive to ArtSnacks, as it’s part of their new line of art supplies coming soon,
- a Pentel Arts Sign Pen Brush, in blue (I have a black one already, which I’m using to ink The Case of the Wendigo and Validation).
- a sticker (FINALLY, because I love decorating my sketchbooks with stickers)
- a Stonehenge Aqua Coldpress Mini Pad (this month’s bonus item)
- a MOLOTOW GRAFX Aqua Ink Pump Softliner, which is really unusual because you have to shake it, then use the fancy end of the cap to press the brush tip to activate it, which enables the ink to flow through the tip. Super weird, but the colors out of it are SO vibrant.
- a bottle of Marabu Mixed Media Art Spray, which is the tool that made me realize that sprays are ridiculously fun to use in art! And…
- a pack of SweetTarts.
They also send a little bookmark each month to tell you more details about each new tool you get, and to do signal boosts like the aforementioned Art Supply Posse.
I’m already making a new series of tiny paintings themed around the desert using this month’s tools…
And I want to make more of them!
That’ll have to wait until after Youmacon this weekend, though.
Yes, starting tomorrow, I’ll be at Youmacon. Just to attend! I’m not selling there. I’ve never sold anything at Youmacon, and honestly I’m not sure I’d ever be interested in getting a table at that event to sell my work. Sure, it would be more readers to talk with, but after Phoenix Comic Con a few years ago, doing another large convention sounds DAUNTING. I sold out of lots of things at Phoenix, but that was my hometown at that point, so I could just get more stuff at the house. Youmacon is in Detroit, which is nowhere near me. If I sold out of stuff, I would have a lot of upset fans.
Anyway, that’s going off-topic. I’ll still be updating the blog during Youmacon – it’ll just be stuff I wrote before, that way I can talk about the con on Monday.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
You. Are. Awesome.
P.S. I should say that ArtSnacks is not for everybody or every artist. If you’re a creator who wants to try new stuff consistently and you’re willing to go out of your comfort zone, by all means subscribe to them! If, however, you don’t want to spend the money on the subscription, because it is kinda’ pricey, and you have a set of tools you’re super comfortable with, I would pass on ArtSnacks. To each creator their own… but I’m super pleased with them.
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