Eugenia
Ex-technologist, now an artist. My art: http://www.eugenialoli.com
- 0 Posts
- 5 Comments
Traditional painting and illustration! While I now know that I never needed to spend more than $250 for professional-grade tools, I’ve spent about $18,000. As for sales in 3.5 years, they don’t account for more than $800. For that I mostly blame Instagram where it’s not possible to grow anymore organically and get an audience & potential customers. So I moved to the federated open source PixelFed now, if anyone’s interested in my book-style illustration: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli
Also, as a word of advice for anyone who wants to also do illustration and don’t want to do the same mistakes that I did. All you need is:
- The Lukas 24 watercolor palette of student grade ($18). It’s good enough and these days most paintings are scanned, so even if not all colors are lightfast, it’s not a big deal. Few people only buy originals, most go for prints. If you’re going to go selling originals, consider the Daniel Smith primaries set of 6 colors for $40.
- A set of brushes of different sizes, including a flat brush and round brushes including a long thin one to do details, $15
- Pencil, eraser, sharpener, $15
- A set of gouache. Best bang for the buck for professional quality is DaVinci brand ($10 per large tube), or if you want to go cheap, the Himi Miya set for $25. If you go for the cheaper stuff, it’s still advised to get a better quality white tube, so it’s truly opaque (the cheap stuff aren’t opaque enough). So go for Holbein or DaVinci white for $10-$15.
- Soft core colored pencils, set of 48+. $15 (you will mostly need the muted colors to enhance the painting with harder edges)
- Grey, sepia, black ink pens, and manga ink brush pens (for some types of paintings only), $40
- 100% cotton paper for watercolor $25, or any watercolor paper for gouache $10 (gouache works on any, watercolor is more nuanced).
- Brush watercolor markers, e.g. Tombows or Ecoline – in case you want to do such type of illustration too, $30 for a few muted colors.
- Masking fluid for watercolors, $10
- White gel pen and white Posca pen (0.7mm) for white highlights, $15
- Faber Castell white pencil soft pastel, $4
- Caran d’ache Luminance white colored pencil, $4 (the cheaper colored pencils above again don’t include a strong white)
- Caran d’ache Neocolor II white crayon, $4
- A ruler, to help you sketch.
I included various mediums above in white color because highlights are king in illustration, and each provides a different look and feel, depending on the painting. Happy painting!
When I was 6 I told a lady that she was a teacher for a group of women under a government program to learn how to make clothes, that she was arrogant, snob, and know it all. She was. She was extremely “look how above you I am” kind of a person. I stand by it to this day, at age 50 now. My mom still remembers that day with terror, because she felt extremely ashamed that I shouted these words in the presence of everyone there. She forced me to apologize, and I did so, but I didn’t really mean it. She was terribly annoying.
Thanks, I have been posting there for a while now! :-)