Art Journal/Mixed Media Class Haul

So I’ve been shopping for materials for the upcoming art journal and mixed media classes that I’ll be teaching.  I’m so excited because a huge box came in the mail containing some mediums that I’ve been wanting to play with for quite some time now.  I will be trying out new techniques and posting about the results in future blog entries.

I have had watercolor pencils for about 4 years but, in this more recent haul, I picked up some watercolor pastels, as well as water color crayons.  Every how-to video or blog that I see uses a brand called Caran d’Ache but those are very expensive artist quality materials so I thought I’d start off with something slightly less expensive to see how I like using the crayons before investing in a more expensive brand and I ended up settling on the Karat Aquarell Watercolour Crayon Set of 24:

I also got some student grade water soluble oil pastels, which I’m loving because the colors on these are so vivid and they’re great for creating backgrounds.  Not to mention that these are very inexpensive.

I also bought some lumiere paints that are meant to be used on fabrics, remember it’s mixed media so anything can be used on paper.  I ended up getting one pack of pearly shades and one of regular bright colors.

I got some new spray inks to add to my small collection of glimmer mists and I’m actually really disappointed with these inks because they’re quite opaque, like paint, as opposed to the misty sparkly finish that the gmiller mists had.  I also don’t like the bottles because for both bottles that I got- the ink and paint starts to seep up and leak through the spray pump and it’s making a mess.  Why does Micheal’s no longer carry glimmer mists =(

I went ahead and bought a pack of walnut ink sprays as well and, when sprayed on a gesso’d surface, these things NEVER dry.  I sprayed a canvas about three weeks ago now and bits of it are still rubbing off.  I think I’ll need to do some more research on how to use these inks, the color comes out very strong though and a little bit of ink goes a long way.

The ink pads I got were memento dew drop ink pads.  These are dye inks so I’m going to have to look into how different types of inks work and what I can actually do with them so that I’m using my products to their full potential.  I didn’t get this whole kit, I bought just a few individual colors.

And of course, an art journal and watercolor papers for the students to work on.  I got the 140lb Strathmore Watercolor papers.  I find that a paper weight of 90lbs holds up pretty well but since the students will be working on individual sheets of paper and not something that will be bound into a book I decided to get heavier weight papers.

Please note that I didn’t take the pictures for this post, I grabbed them off the internet because I was super impatient and I opened everything up and started using it right away.

© Ammara Cokar 2014