Your Expert Guide to Art Supplies in the UK
There’s a particular kind of heartbreak reserved for bullet journalers: you’ve spent twenty minutes ruling out a perfect weekly spread, and the pen you’re using decides, halfway through Thursday, to bleed clean through to the page beneath. Choosing fineliner pens for bullet journaling isn’t really about which packet looks prettiest on a stationery haul video … Read more
There’s a very specific kind of joy in cracking open a brand-new fineliner pen set for artists — that faint plasticky smell, the satisfying click of caps, the way the colours line up like a tiny army waiting for orders. And then, almost immediately, the anxiety sets in. Which one do you actually buy? A … Read more
Somewhere between the CAD file and the finished set of drawings, there’s still a moment where a human hand has to pick up a pen. Maybe it’s a quick section sketch pinned to the studio wall, a hand-annotated site survey, or a student portfolio that needs to look like it was made by a person … Read more
There’s a particular kind of heartbreak reserved for the moment your carefully inked sketch meets a watercolour wash and the lines start to bleed into a grey smudge. If you’ve been there, you already know why waterproof fineliner pens matter more than almost any other tool in a mixed media kit. So, what is a … Read more
Somewhere between a biro that skips and a fountain pen that leaks onto your cuff sits the humble fineliner — quietly the most underrated tool in any stationery drawer. If you’ve ever hunted for the best fineliner pens and drowned in a sea of near-identical black tubes with baffling numbers on the side (0.03? 0.5? … Read more
Stand in front of the pencil aisle at any UK stationer and you’ll see the same puzzle: a tin of twelve for a few pounds sitting next to a wooden box that costs more than a week’s shopping. So what’s actually going on between cheap vs expensive coloured pencils, and is the pricier tin genuinely … Read more
Somewhere between “I fancy trying colouring” and “I own £200 of pencils I’ve used twice” lies a very sensible middle ground: cheap coloured pencils. Not the pound-shop ones that snap the second you look at them funny, but genuinely decent sets that happen to cost less than a round of coffees for four. Cheap coloured … Read more
Stand in front of the pencil aisle in any UK art shop and you’ll understand the problem instantly: forty different tins, all promising to unlock your inner artist, none of them explaining what actually separates a lovely set from a waste of a tenner. A coloured pencil set for beginners is, in the simplest possible … Read more
Stand in front of an art shop wall of coloured pencils for long enough and you’ll start to feel a bit like you’re choosing a wand at Ollivander’s. Every tin promises “buttery,” “vibrant,” “professional grade” — and somewhere on the box, in small print, sits the detail that actually matters: whether that pencil is wax … Read more
Pick up a lump of graphite and you can shade. Pick up an oil based coloured pencil and you can build light out of nothing — layer by stubborn, waxy-smooth layer, until a bowl of clementines looks wet enough to lick. That’s the appeal, and also the trap: walk into the pencil aisle (or, more … Read more