When I was 5, my parents gave me a simple oil painting kit, and I painted a flower in a vase. They instantly decided to enroll me in a fine art workshop for adults with a local professional artist. I spent nine years in this setting, but it didn’t fire my creativity – I always felt inferior, and the workshop leader wasn’t a teacher of the basics, so I didn’t learn much. It was an exercise in frustration.

What sparked my inspiration was drawing and doodling with regular graphite pencils on notebook paper. From the time I was 13, I did my doodling, and really loved it, but it took years to bring me back to art supplies.

Two things combined to bring me back to art. First, I was invited to join Amazon Vine Voices in early 2019, where you can request items to review, and second, then pandemic hit. While the Vine program lets their reviewers choose from a wide variety of items, at some point in 2019, I discovered they had art supplies, but since I was out of the loop, I didn’t know which companies delivered. Early on, I ordered a set of jelly cup gouache from HIMI, a set of watercolor brushes from HIMI, a set of waterbrushes from Doodle Hog, and I was – as they say – off to the races.

First I want to mention that I didn’t have the right paper for any of these starter art supplies, but I didn’t know it yet. Then came a set of inexpensive Dyvicl charcoal pencils, which I found I preferred to the charcoal pencils I had to use in art class. A set of craft grade gouache in tubes, A set of mechanical pencils, a set of Gencrafts tube watercolors. A set of Derwent Chromaflow Colored Pencils. I had to try all these art supplies as I had to review them, and I was having so much fun with them!

I didn’t know the difference between grades, didn’t know that quality paints are made with pigments, I didn’t know about lightfastness, that some art paper were cellulose while others were cotton. But I was about to find out.