Tools of the trade

I've been asked several times, what materials do I use?

Pencils: I like 3B and 4Bs. Soft and dark, but not too dark. I use Faber-castells to sketch the outlines and Cretacolor Monolith woodless pencils to soften the lines after painting in the picture.

Brushes: For minute details, Daler-Rowney Expression series (the dark green brushes), the smallest I have is a 15/0.
              For regular painting, I love the Daler-Rowney Cryla series (the silver brushes). I have brushes from 2/0 to 5. They're actually meant for acrylic paints but I find that they work nicely for me. Unfortunately they don't last very long. Either that or I'm not using them correctly.

Paint: I've got a range of watercolor paints from student-grade to professional grade:  pebeo (cheap buy from vietnam, and the colours are kind of nice!), van gogh, winsor and newton, daler rowney, Master (cheapo-china brand which goes flaky but has some nice hues and is only $0.70 when on sale), Cotman and Ecoline.

Ink: dip pen and waterproof ink, and Copic 0.03 pen for those beady eyes.

Paper: 300gsm Fabriano and Daler Rowney watercolor paper (as you can tell, Daler-Rowney makes alot of money off me!).

Oh yeah, that's a picture of my messy palette and paint test paper. All paintings that have gone wrong end up as test paper.


It's been a lot of trial and error, and Art Friend has definitely made a substantial profit off me. I have drawerfuls of art materials that I rarely use because they don't work the way I thought they would. Hey, everything looks nice in the brochure!