After buying a big art supply haul back in February I got another one yesterday (April 18, 2025). That’s a small window of time for me between hauls but I figured I wanted to stock up a little bit more before the summer and also try out some new things.
One thing I did learn with this haul is not to order it close to bedtime. Not in the, “Don’t order things online when you’re tired and not sharp” way but in the, “It’ll get you questioning your entire existence as you’re trying to fall asleep” way.
I ended up thinking, “Do I really need this stuff? Could I have waited to buy it? Does my budget have the money right now? Why am I an artist? Could I have done something else with my life?” as I try to fall asleep. Not the time to contemplate such stuff.
As with most of my big art supply orders I built up things in my cart over time. I never just sit down, fill up my online shopping cart with stuff, and then order it. Instead I put two or three small things in my cart and leave them there. Then over the weeks before I make a big order I put more stuff in the cart as I realize I need the supplies.
This way of shopping sometimes gets me ordering extra stuff. By that I mean buying something I might not actually need because I added something else in a week later that negates the first thing. I did that this time with little black markers.
Recently I bought some house brand Blick 1.0mm black pigment markers. They came with my last big order. I really liked that pen and ended up drawing my “Tiny Drawings” with it. I decided to get a bunch more of them with this order. I bought five more of the 1.0mm, five brush pens, and five 0.5mm ones. Fifteen new pens. Nice.
The kicker is that a couple of weeks earlier I put a set of those pens in my cart. Eight pens in eight different sizes including the three I bought. Being that those three are my favorite sizes I don’t know if I’ll ever use the other five smaller size pens.
In the end it really doesn’t matter because the set was about $12 and each individual pen is about $3 so it was just like buying and even half dozen of my favorites and getting the others for free. But it’s weird that I didn’t notice the overlap until I got the stuff.
The main impetus for this order was to try some Montana paint markers. “Montana” is a brand I first noticed about a decade ago when they appeared in a lot of my art supply catalogs with their brand of spray paint aimed at fine artists. I’ve never used spray paint to make things but these cans and their paint all looked cool. Eventually they made acrylic markers to go with the spray paint.
The markers come in a couple of different sizes. There is the big chunky 15mm size and the smaller 2mm and .7mm sizes. I decided to go with the 2mm size. I would be using them on paper and not a wall so I thought the 2mm bullet tip would be best for me.
One of the reasons I decided to try these markers is that they have refills. I can put more paint in them so that if the marker runs dry in the middle of a piece I’m not screwed. I picked out eight markers at $5.12 a piece and eight refills at $8.81 a piece. It adds up.
It looks like a lot of companies have started making paint markers recently and so I also bought a set of six Copic paint markers. I have a lot of Copic alcohol markers so I thought I would give these a try. It was $20 for a set of six markers and there are no refills with these ones.
Usually a set of 20 no name brand of paint markers costs around $25 so these six markers were on the expansive side. But Copic makes top of the line markers. So I’ll give their paint markers a try.
As I wrote before I make these big orders over time and I add and take things away from my cart as I decide what I want to get. Normally I add a whole bunch of stuff without regard to price and then I delete stuff from the cart to bring the price down to a more manageable level. Standard shopping practice.
So it was a little bit weird that the last things that I added to the cart were the most expensive things. Not that they were super expensive or anything.
Pantone is a company that specializes in color. They have a proprietary color system. They’re well known in the printing industry and any other industry that makes stuff in color. Recently they came out with a line of Pantone branded markers. They’re pigment based markers so they have more lightfastness than alcohol dye based markers. That makes them different than my usual markers.
The Pantone markers are expensive too. They are $8.50 per marker and $12.95 for a bottle of the refill ink. But the refill ink is 30ml compared to Copic’s 12ml refill for $5.39. I just checked the price of Copic sketch markers on Blick and they’re $4.42 per marker. I think that’s cheaper than usual. Maybe a sale is going on.
Back in February I bought one Pantone marker and refill. A blue. A cyan or process blue. Pantone colors don’t usually have names. They have numbers. This time I added on a red and yellow marker along with their refills. That’s an extra forty dollars for two markers I stuck on in the end. Not my usual habit.
One final thing I got in this order was a $10 ruler. A twelve inch clear gridded ruler with a metal edge for cutting against. I already have the same ruler but the grid on it is rubbing off. The ruler is clear and the grid is grey but when I put the ruler on a white piece of paper the grid is so faded that it blends in with the paper. I had to replace that so I did.
So that’s the story of my latest batch of art supplies. All in it cost me about $270. That’s a pretty big chunk of change for me but I’ll use all the stuff. Except for maybe that .2mm black pigment marker. That might be too small for my taste.