Art Haul - October 2015

Today I will be doing an art haul yay! It's been a while since I did one of these and my last major buy was my finecolour markers and if you didn't read about those then please click the link below to see the review I wrote on that: 

http://loveheartdoodles.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/copic-marker-alternative-finecolour.html

So, usually I do my art shopping from eBay or Hobbycraft but these recent buys have been from Waterstones - weird right? I'm about to tell you How that came to be! 

My mum works in the Principals office at UCL so they're always throwing away a bunch of goodies and mum being mum always brings them home. This time she stumbled upon a draw full of Waterstones vouchers valid for two years and she bought two home worth £25 each! My Brother wasn't interested so I used both! 

1. Faber Castell Kneadable Eraser 

Waterstones had a very tiny art section so I ended up buying this eraser for £1.99. I have seen it before on certain youtube videos and with some good artists so I thought I'd buy it and try it out, I have not tried it out yet since I bought it only today and I'll be drawing after this blog post, testing all the new products. 

2. Faber Castell Artist PITT pens

These cost me £13.99 and I must say as beautiful as they look they let me down... I'm a marker hoarder so I know exactly what I'm looking for and I thought I'd go for it because I'm familiar with Faber Castell products. They behave exactly like felt tips, when you try to layer or blend them the bleed and the paper starts to peel and I feel like I've wasted so much of the gift card. The set I bought was the most random assortment which doesn't make sense either... I had green, yellow, flesh pink, grey, brown and cinnamon they aren't blendable which make them hard to use. I tried to experiment with different kinds of paper and I found that these pens can only layer with water colour paper which is very annoying. So, I ended up just using them as regular felt tips for my revision notes. 

3. Daler Rowney A5 Sketchbook

This was £7.99. I've owned a Daler Rowney sketchbook before and they're so awesome. They can take whatever you chuck at them whether it is ink, marker, watercolour, acrylic etc and you will have no bleeding or nasty blotches. The paper is very strong and the cover comes in plain black, leaving you to be creative and design the front. 

4. Gertie's New Fashion Sketchbook

This book cost me £10.99 and it's just a big book full of croquis, this is really helpful for me and just pushes forward my drawing process by 5 mins since the figures are already drawn. I'd really recommend this to a beginner in Fashion illustration to help with figure drawing. 

Hopefully sometime soon I will be posting short reviews on all these products so please keep an eye out for that, also coming up soon is October Favourites so watch out! Thanks for reading.

Song of the day: Cynthia Morgan - Come and do

A Short Product overview: Faber Castell Classic Colour 24

Hey guys, this blog is now looking for guest posters! So if you think you have great fashion art news or advice or a tutorial - share it with us! I'll post it up and you'll be credited for it. Today I've decided to do a short overview of these bad boys (The Faber Castell Classic Colour Pencils): 

First lets go over some basics. It's a pencil pack of 24 however you can get them in a pack of 12, 24, 26 and 48 which is very convenient. They come with their own sharpener. They are not available for sale on the Faber Castell website, like all the other products. So the next place I look is amazon. 12 set - £6.38, 24 set - £11.18, 36 set - £26.99 and unfortunately they don't sell the 48 set on there so you'd probably have to go to ebay or find it from an online art store. I think they are reasonably priced. I have the 24 set which is enough for me because I don't use them a lot. Now the actual product. I actually think I don't know how to use them because whenever I do it doesn't come out as expected. The pencils are strong, they don't break easily for you to sharpen. I mostly use the black and white for shadows and highlights. They don't smudge, i'm not quite sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. They are good quality. They work well with markers and don't cause fine liners to bleed. Try them out today! 

Laurey xo