Time for Some New Tools to Play With

Recently I remembered my college art class. I don't know why, but I did.

I remember that I was a decent artist at the time, if my art professor was any judge.

So when I thought about that class now, I said to myself, "I'm probably still pretty good at drawing stuff. I should get some stuff to draw with."

So I did. I got what you see below.

My new Arteza and Strathmore art supplies

What's in the Box?

Before getting the pencils and sketch book, I did a little research. That left me with half a dozen different brand options for the pencils. The book was easier to pinpoint because I wanted lots of plain, white pages to start with.

I asked a friend who is an artist if she had any thoughts about which brand of pencils to get. After reading her comments, I decided to get a brand that she didn't own, so she could try out a different brand if she ever wanted to. (She has Prismacolor, a popular brand.)

I then eliminated two brands that were geared towards watercolor pencils, or so it seemed to me. Watercolor pencils sound interesting, but I wanted to start with basic pencils.

The two remaining brands seemed equal in all but price, so I got the less expensive of them - Arteza.

Welcome to the Pencil Inn

I'm starting this blog on Blogger because it's free. I picked a name for it that's available as a for-real dot-com (at least for now) should I ever want to switch it over.

Since I have no idea how long I'll continue to write here, free is fine for now. There's really nothing wrong with having a Blogger-based site.

The name itself is a nice pun. (I love puns, especially bad ones.) It also reminds me of another site I have called The WP Inn.

What Will I Draw?

I got a box of graphite pencils of different hardnesses - 6B through 4H, for those who care. (Your common #2 pencil is a 2B.)

The box of 72 colored pencils comes arranged in three trays as shown.

72 colored pencils and 12 graphite pencils

I read that someone once asked Arteza why they arranged them in the order you see above.

No reason.

That is, no real reason for this specific order. Obviously there is an order to them. And it looks nice, when you first open the tin, to see a quasi-rainbow of color.

I was a bit disappointed that one of the pencils is simply called "orange".

Orange A003 pencil

I mean, all the others have cool, mostly 2-word names. Why just "orange"? And how did orange get to be number 003?

The Noir pencil makes up for this a little.

I have some ideas rolling (or sloshing) around in my head as to what I will draw with these sticks. Sorry, but I'm not going to divulge those secrets just yet. They're obviously subject to change.

I'll keep you posted here with progress reports, if and when I make some progress.