The last time I posted about my return to the world of traditional art, I said I was thinking of picking up watercolors again, so that's exactly what I ended up doing. What was intended to be a light little hobby became a rapid downward spiral to insanity—and I'm having a blast.

This is my only new tube of watercolor. It's going to last me forever.

I can be quite a hoarder, so it was no surprise that I was able to keep a few tubes of watercolors from elementary school. They're really old, so some of them were completely dried out and all of them I had to tear the tubes of entirely. Fortunately, watercolor is something you can keep using long after it's dried out in their tubes. All I needed to do was transfer them in a makeshift palette (this one is a medicine box) and I'm good to go!

These are Sakura Mat watercolors, according to the label on the tubes, which I unfortunately forgot to take pictures of. I truly realized how very old they were when I tried to Google them and found that the current packaging for Sakura Mat is completely different.

I also had a few pots of dried up poster paint. I don't even remember where I got them from. They're very similar to watercolor so I use them sometimes, particularly when painting galaxy backgrounds where I'm not too concerned about transparency, although I have to be careful because they don't flow as well as my watercolors and they dry on paper differently.

These are the only three colors I use. The other pots don't get any action.

Later on I picked up a small pot of white poster paint specifically for the stars in galaxy backgrounds (stars are sort of my thing), but it also ended up being super useful in covering up mistakes. While the gold poster paint I got is not as useful, it's definitely something like a power trip. It makes me want to paint it on everything!

As a result of my watercolor adventures, I've been experimenting with a few kinds of papers to see what's the cheapest I could get away with. The Berkeley sketchbook I mentioned in the previous art post turned out to be decent enough with watercolors, but I haven't been able to see it in stock at the local stores since I started looking for it.

I was surprised that this blank notebook freebie from some insurance company could take water better than most paper I've tried so far. It's not at all great, but it'll do in a pinch.

The only other paper I was fairly satisfied with is vellum board, which local stores had a lot of stock of right before I decided to stock up on it. After that, they literally disappeared from the shelves. What's the deal?

The brushes I use are very cheap ones. The most expensive is probably that one Reeves flat brush I don't even use often. I had a set of old brushes lying around, but they're too big for the kind of drawings I do and even the smallest of them don't make clean lines, so I only use them when painting bigger areas. The ones I use the most are the 1 and the 3 from a set of three brushes I bought exactly because I wanted those specific brushes. The third in the set is a 5 that I don't like using at all.

I also bought this other brush because I wanted something for fine details, but it turns out that it doesn't actually taper to a sharp point! While I still got some use out of it, you really do get what you pay for.

This post was meant to talk about the new art materials I acquired recently, but as usual, there was a lot more I wanted to say about my art adventures than I thought I did. My new toys will be on the next entry, then! I'm excited to talk about them so please look forward to it!