The Bad & The Ugly

Good supplies are essential. An excerpt from my forthcoming book.

Bad supplies are both bad and ugly. Why? Because the ugly truth is that bad supplies are worse than no supplies. Really!

That’s the number one thing you need to know about art supplies. There are cheap items out there, that are so bad, they create a negative equation in your development. That means you are less competent if you have one of these bad items, than you would if you didn’t have any version of that item at all.

Bad supplies make you feel bad about yourself as an artist. That means you need to avoid them - at all cost.

For example, most painting requires a fairly stiff brush. A cheap brush with weak, bending bristles is more than useless in painting with acrylic or oil paints. It cannot control the paint. You can’t blend; you can’t make edges; you cannot do most techniques at all. So a beginning artist who uses it, without understanding that the brush is a bad one, will internalize the poor results, blaming their own supposed, “lack of talent,” for the inability to make paint do what you need it to. But it’s all because of that brush.

When I find bad brushes in student’s supplies, I throw them away. You should too. They come inside a lot of sets of paints.

Bad supplies hurt artists. This means that saving money is not just a math equation, it’s a capability equation. It affects your self-perception negatively.