 Oh my goodness! Hi! Hi there! Hi! I'm Sandy Claus and this year I get to bring you the gift guide for shopping for artists because I love all the art supplies. They're all so beautiful and they're also full sets and they have all the rainbow of colors and I have to have them all and you know you do too because if you're an artist you need all the stuff. What exactly is going on here? Is that too much eggnog? I don't even like eggnog. Thank you very much. Don't even insult me. I'm just excited about art supplies because I love to talk about them. It's just so much fun. I don't know maybe too much candy cane? Why did I love the day that I get my Blick catalog in the mail? It just makes me so happy and I actually got a package from Blick that I ordered because I bought myself a present that I can wrap up and it's pastel pencils and I can't wait to wrap it so I can open it! Oh my goodness! Just chill! I posted a reel on Instagram and it went viral and there's like 250,000 people who have seen it and I had somebody who left a comment and she said, I didn't even know watercolor pencils were a thing. Oh my goodness! How can somebody not know that watercolor pencils exist? I need to talk about that. So the ones that I used in that video were super color and they're by Karen Dash and they're really sweet and really nice and really beautiful. The most expensive would be Paper Castell, their Albrecht Dora line and I just absolutely love them too. They're both beautiful. Intense are beautiful. They're just a little bit on the brighter side, stronger side and they don't melt out quite as nicely but you know they're so good so you should get all of them. No, no, no, no, no, hold on. You don't need all of them. Let's talk for a quick minute about what you might want. Get yourself some quality watercolor pencils. It makes a difference because if you don't have high quality they're not going to melt out and they're going to be weakened color. On the left here is Faber Castell's Albrecht Dora. Second is Super Color by Karen Dash. Third is the High End Karen Dash Pencils Museum Macorrell and then these are not technically watercolor pencils. They're ink tense pencils and they're in ink and I have a whole video on that and what makes them different so if you want to see that I'll put a link in the doobly-doo. So here I'm just using a wet brush wiping the excess water off so that I don't overgoop my trees and then scrub the brush around on it. I'm using a number eight brush here and it's that simple. Just let the colors mix together because fall trees just mush into each other and if your pencils don't melt out, if you don't get to lose those pencil lines the way I'm losing them here, then you need some higher quality pencils. Some of the ink tense don't really melt out all that well, just some certain colors. So then I'm just going to sketch in some tree trunks and some grasses. You can see the color gets more intense as you get to the right. It's because the quality is going up when you get to the Museum Macorrell and the ink tense is only bright because it's ink. And if you're going to get watercolor pencils you also need to get some brushes and I love all the brushes. I get all the brushes. I buy them all because I love them all and I go to the art store and I just can't stop buying them. But if you want some that are really nice and pricy but they're going to last you a really long time then the sable ones are really really nice. The natural hair ones I just love those for painting with. They just do a really good job and then there's synthetic ones that don't do as good a job but they're way more affordable. And the ones that I like that are kind of less expensive are the silver brushes and they're called black velvet. You don't need one of every single size. You can go like a two, a four, a six, an eight, and a 10 and 12. That is simply too much. That's like almost all the sizes but not all of them because I can have control too. You do not need every other number but a non-silver brush that you might want to get is this one and I use it all the time. My Mottler brush for just wetting the paper evenly. If you use a round brush to do that you're just going to get water puddles everywhere. So here I'm using a number eight for the start of the sky but I switched to a number 12. You can see how much quicker you can cover the paper when you have a bigger brush and you don't want to go slow. You need to move quickly and a bigger brush is going to help you do that. A teacher of mine once said use the biggest brush you can get away with. So this one is a number four brush for painting this wet in wet tree and putting a little bit of detail around it while the paper is wet underneath of it gives me a real soft look and in the next pass on top of that once it was dry I painted with the silver brush number four to put detail in the trees and this is my crazy inlaid liner brush that beginners don't need but you know if you're treating yourself to something you might like that brush quite a bit. Save your old toothbrushes to give to your artist friend because they like to use gouache to splatter snow and if you're wondering is there a full tutorial on this painting yes it's over in the winter bookmarks class now as a bonus lesson. Now in the viral video I also used my long point pencil sharpener and I had a lot of questions about that and I had to send a link out to a whole lot of people so let's just show you what the long point pencil sharpener does. There are different long point pencil sharpeners and some people just use a knife that's what I use with my pastel pencils but this afmat is the one that I have for making my long points and when you crank this it feels like the whole pencil is going in and like you're eating up the pencil but it's eating up the wood because it's carving the wood into this long point shape and when you open the bottom part of it there's a piece of sandpaper in there where you can sharpen this thing on the tip because the tip doesn't sharpen sharp sharp inside the sharpener so you need to kind of give that that very very tip a sharp point. I find it easier to just keep a nail file on hand something really simple I can leave on my desk and then I don't have to open the pencil sharpener and get shavings everywhere. Now if you get that pencil sharpener you can sharpen any pencil not just your watercolor pencils to be a nice long point like that it can be your graphite pencils that come in the really soft and the really hard and everything in between so you get a nice range of grays when you're doing sketching or you could actually use them on your colored pencils and maybe some of you didn't know there was colored pencils too yes there are. I have three preferred brands of colored pencils first is Prismacolor and I love them because I've been using them since college but also because they have the most naturalistic color collection and I do mostly natural type of art so I like the desaturated colors. For flowers I often go to Polychromos which are a bit brighter colors they have more brights in their collection and then luminance are just the creamiest most wonderful pencils but they're expensive so I save them for special projects. Now if you're looking for something to get for your colored pencil friend get them some pencil extenders because you can never have enough of these they make a short pencil last longer. If you get yourself pencils of any kind you're going to need something to put them in to hold them sometimes they come in a tin that you can keep but you can also put them into a case like a zipper case and put your pencils in there and you can also instead of using a zipper case you can put them in drawers I got these drawers on top of my desk to make it more easy to access my pencils and that's always a good thing. Just slow down talking to a friend of mine at church and she wanted to get into art and she wanted to start with watercolor and I did not tell her it's a hard one to get started with but that's okay because she'll find out and she asked me to tell her a little bit about the paints in the paper and the brushes that she would need so I started telling her all about the liquid watercolors and the tube watercolors and the pan watercolors and stick watercolors and she wasn't asleep yet so I kept going with the brushes and telling her all about the different kinds of brushes that there are that she could get and then I told her all about the papers and the rough papers and the hot press papers and the cold press papers and the student grade papers and the professional papers and then she was really glazed over so I emailed her a little list of just a few things to get I've learned a lot about watercolor over the years one of which is that I didn't need this first palette that had so many tiny half pans in it I thought I needed all the colors because I didn't really understand mixing but then I switched to a palette that had full pans instead of half pans and now I have even bigger wells in my professional palette I also learned something about brushes and these silver brushes were the ones that I used for a couple years at the beginning and I realized something once I started using the sables and this is expelling all the paint as much as I can out of the brush kind of squishing it to get to the end of the silver brush but when I use a Kalinsky sable the paint comes out of the brush like it wants to I'm not fighting it and it does it slowly so the paper stays wetter all the way down the wash and it doesn't come out as much in my water my water is not dirty whereas with the silver brushes a lot of it stays within that brush and you have to rinse it out and then you lose a lot of pigment let's do a very fast chat on paper and comparison arches is my go-to brand hot presses not my go-to paper it's too smooth cold press is the most popular the rough is the bumpiest and a lot of people don't like it but I love it and I'll show you why and then the student grade I'm throwing in here just for the heck of it it's by kansen it's not by arches and I want to show you the difference between a good and a not good paper so I'm going to use the synthetic brush here on the left and I want to show you something very specific with it as we go just going to let the pigment dry just fill the whole thing with the blue paint and let it dry and see what happens now these two are kind of working fine the hot press is looking a little shaky the cold press just has one little bubble in it but look what happens when we switch to the kalinsky sable brush the paint is coming out of the brush it's like landing on the paper instead of landing in the water when I rinse my brush or go to get more paint and the rough paper also has more of those textured rivulets the mountain and valleys which is moving the color around better so I get smoother blends and when it's all dry I actually get a better result from rough the hot press I can never get a good wash on it I just can't some people do great on this paper but that's just not me cold press I've used for many years and not had very many problems even though I have that little goober there rough has been working great for me and both cold press and rough weren't great with my good brushes the student grade paper though I reserve for using water-based markers and I don't do any big washes with it now if the person you are shopping for likes to go out and do urban sketching or plein air painting let me show you what's in my kit in case this gives you any ideas first off is a chair and this is like an ugly hunting chair okay I'm sorry it's not beautiful however it has a special feature to it it has pockets and I can put things in the pockets I can put snacks in the bottom of the pockets which is awesome put sketchbook in there but then I have a zipper pouch you can get an artist's zipper pouch because we use these for everything and I keep a container for water just make sure it doesn't leak because we can always use those you can get them rags like all of your old rags we can use rags get them a small and I say small like six 12 colors maybe max a very small palette because we don't need to haul out the entire studio when we go outside get them a pencil and a kneaded eraser not just any pencil treat them to a graphwood 9b this is an amazing pencil and it's a little pricier than most but it's so nice and then get them kneaded erasers you can get a whole bunch of them in a little pack and because we use them and we lose them and so that's a really nice cheap thing to get them and then also let's see what else is in here there's a fountain pen and this is a twizby eco pen which is my favorite it comes in extra fine fine and medium I would recommend the fine and then spray bottles little spray bottles bigger spray bottles we are always losing spray bottles when we go out painting and then of course if you're going to have a pencil in there you need a sharpener and this little black wing is tiny and it works really great and then you might also consider just for fun getting them a travel paintbrush and these things are kind of cool because they have a lid that comes off of them and turns into the handle past year I got myself something else that was amazing and I want to share it with you and it's for sketchers I got this sketch easel it is so cool I got it on etsy and I keep my binder clips on the outside and you're just regular office supply store binder clips on the back of it it has this little gizmo and you attach it to the gizmo on the end of your tripod and that way you can make a table out of it basically you can make it high so you can stand at it or low that you can sit and this forms an L that stays in place so you can take your sketchbook and lean it against the backside and your paints and put them on the table surface of one kind or another whatever you're painting or drawing with and that way you have a little workspace out there in public for yourself if you're going to gift a medium of any kind to any artist it's always a good idea to also give them a sketchbook to go with it because that means on Christmas morning they have something to work on right away okay that is something I can wholly endorse so let's talk a little bit about sketchbooks so stillman and burn makes some of the best sketchbooks out there I really love theirs this is the alpha and it works excellent with graphite look at that 9b it's so rich a lot of papers won't handle that and this alpha does a great job I've used pastel pencils in here all different kinds of dry mediums on this paper work nicely he's a little light wash this turkey has just a little bit of watercolor in it you can create a lot of soft blends but you can also use an electric eraser or kneaded eraser to get sharp textures in that just fantastic colored pencils stonehenge hands down this is from the winter wonderland class and I've done a number of classes that are in these sketchbooks on this paper and colored pencils just fantastic in it you can do a little bit of pen and ink work in there but I also discovered something which was kind of interesting that you can use alcohol markers with colored pencil because then you end up with the colored pencil texture on the colored pencil paper so what I did for one of my series of classes the animals infer is doing the whole animal first in alcohol marker and then adding all the detail in the colored pencil so if you're interested in those there will be a link in the big link at the end of this video in the doobly-doo don't go there yet and you can see all of those classes if you wish your artist uses all the mediums then you might like a stillman and burn beta for them it can handle alcohol marker like that that berry but it really does best with wash and ink and that's what I really like it for but you can do some graphite in it I haven't really messed with colored pencil in here but it doesn't have much tooth to it so I don't think colored pencil would be great here but wash and ink works fantastic pencil less so but it's a great sketchbook alcohol marker any quote unquote marker sketchbook in general I find works and the ones that I have are old ones that have been sitting around the studio for a long time but I have tried so many of them over the years so I highly recommend just getting a marker sketchbook it's going to be thinner paper than what you might want like you know some people just don't want it to bleed through but it's going to bleed through that's just the way it's going to go so just get a marker sketchbook this sketchbook is the one that I created the color and line class in so you can learn how to do all those drawings and some pen and ink on top of the drawings in alcohol markers or different kinds of markers or even watercolor in that class for pen and ink my very favorite paper of all time is the lettering paper from Hanamura you know it's weird I think they need to make a sketchbook out of this because I love it the paper doesn't ever feather with your fountain pen I absolutely love that you can get a nice crisp line and the pen just glides over the surface it is beautiful but it all falls out because it's just a pad not a sketchbook but I also use in pen and ink my pentallic sketchbooks a lot this one is what I call my epic sketchbook and it took me a while to go through it some of the pages are falling out because this was my traveling you know going out with my sketch group kind of thing as well as sitting on the sofa thing but it was all epic scenes that were like jumbled full of craziness I did some washes in here so it can handle some washes it's not something I'd say is watercolor friendly but it's definitely watercolor-able along with your pen and ink and pentallic also works excellent for gouache the paper is kind of like Kansan XL I might say it's got that smooth surface but a little bit of bumpiness to it and the gouache just kind of glides over nicely and paints beautifully so I'm going to continue using these pentallic sketchbooks from my gouache going forward because I do love them quite a bit now let's talk watercolor sketchbooks everybody wants one with arches in it and I had Lake Michigan Book Press make me one and you can order any of their sketchbooks in any kind of paper you want so if you're somebody who wants really good paper in your sketchbook have at it she makes a whole bunch and I'm going to get a new sketch a day hopefully in January I'm going to try to make myself finish this one in 2023 that's my goal but I have all kinds of things in here little sketches big epic studies for a bigger piece I did things in here where I was working toward a class if I was going to be painting you know a particular subject I'd paint it five six seven times in here I was working on learning how to paint fire so I just painted fire over and over and over again and then did a video on it and here I was playing around with some travel sketches for the travel sketches class those didn't make it in but they were fun to do in my sketchbook eventually I'm going to do water I have to get to that maybe early next year I'm hoping but these were studies for the galactic watercolor class super fun to be able to have a place to just play in a giant sketchbook now if you want something smaller this white ibis is not bad it's not arches but it's really close it's a Japanese paper I guess but just know this that it's 12 pages and it's like 30 bucks so it might be better off just getting a pad of paper and binding it if you need to have something bound because watercolor paper is expensive this painting that you saw earlier is in the white ibis sketchbook so you can see how nice the edges are in watercolor painting in that now this other one here this Tu Muarta is one that I found because I was looking for something quick and inexpensive for my students in the palswood class so I started playing around with these sketchbooks and I actually got a couple more of them because I take them all over the place with me I leave one in the car leave one all over the place so I always have a sketchbook at hand and it does fairly decent edges with watercolor it's not like super fantastic but it takes pen and ink nicely and it's great for quick little sketches and for a stocking stuffer or something or if you're putting together a watercolor kit for somebody for Christmas this is a great little addition to that there you go watercolor sketchbooks and now let's talk stocking stuffers do not leave these for the last minute because there's some really important ones that you might need a little time to order like the pencil sharpener the afmat pencil sharpener for those nice long points yes this would fit great in a stocking every artist stocking needs favorite castell erasers these are needed erasers they come in colors as well as gray but they are amazing and we keep losing them so get us more you might also consider an electric eraser you've seen my flowers that were done with this eraser but here's how I trim it I keep it pointy by using my scissors to just trim it into a point and then all you have to do is press the button and the battery makes the thing go around and then you can use it almost like a little tiny drill to lift up very small small bits of things you want to erase it also works with colored pencil here I was creating a crunchy snow texture that looked like it was all frosty on a cold morning and it worked just perfect how about a presto jumbo this little sucker covers up anything it even covers up red alcohol marker or paint or ink it is amazing it's like white out in a little squeeze tube you can also get a fountain pen and a bottle of ink that would be tremendous little gift to tuck inside a few fun things you can consider for watercolors might be getting oh little dishes little ceramic dishes sometimes with partitions in them sometimes not we're always mixing stuff up you also get the more spray bottles because you can't ever have enough and I would suggest treating them to one watercolor stick these are like pure pigment you could draw with them you can dip them into water and you can mix them into little dishes you can do all kinds of things with these and they are more cost effective than a tube of paint so get them one and attach to it the name of my video in which I show you a whole bunch of ways you can use a watercolor stick a little treat you could get for a gouache artist I have turned into one of those lately and I would recommend getting them a little palette to use for their gouache getting them all the paints is a little much but if they don't have one of these they're gonna love it there is an underrated art supply that you can get in your local grocery store and it's nice and cheap and it's this this is the business end of my tea strainer and the way you use this is with any kind of pencil you grate the pencil into the top up here and you let the powder fall onto the paper and then you can spread it around with a cotton ball and get very soft textures since I am mostly in control of this video I want to share with you my list of awards that I want to hand out to classes at art-classes.com and I think I have chosen the winners but you might have some thoughts as well and you will have an opportunity to weigh in with your recommendations to nominate for the 12 awards let me read them to you and you can be thinking about them number one aging like fine wine what was the first class at art-classes.com what is the oldest one number two vic courses which ones are the most important to get a good foundation under you number three most likely to succeed as you succeeding which one are you guaranteed to do best in but number four glee award which class just sings number five is the kindness counts award because there might be a little charity involved and then we have the yes I can award in which you become more confident by the end of class how about the de-stressor award which class is just going to wash over you and make you feel relaxed and then there's the in sync award remember the boy band yes well this is a different kind of in sync number nine is the biggest drama queen award which class makes the most dramatic scenes which is related to the art wizardry award where there is magic and then every award list has to have a class clown which one would be the class clown at art-classes.com and last but never least is my hero the caravaggio award the king of light and shadow and you can nominate classes for any of these awards if you wish and i am going to turn this video over to my boring half to explain how that works finally she relinquishes control so we can have a sane conversation if you missed anything during that fire hose do not go back and watch the video again at half speed it doesn't get any better i have put together a list of all of the supplies that were discussed and even some that were not they were cut for time believe it or not and it is all categorized by medium and then there's a little list for stocking stuff or ideas for that medium so shop to your heart's content using the link in the doobly-doo but don't go there yet i'm not done also on that page is information about our sale at art-classes.com and i say our sale because now apparently i'm hooked up with eggnog lady so we are our royal we so our sale is going to be a tiered sale and that means there's different tiers tier one is at $50 and if your card reaches $50 in a total of your classes your printable images and gift cards then you will get a free printable image it's a brand new one coming out on friday i'll show it to you then and you will get that added to your cart at no cost and when you add the value of that which is $10 to the value of the $50 that you just purchased then it's basically like 16 percent off everything then when you get to tier number two that level you're going to get a free class when your cart reaches $100 and it's not just any class it is the brand new class that's coming out on friday and it's called you can to can it's a level two coloring class and it's in color pencil water based markers and alcohol markers and you also get the digital image so that means you're getting $36 worth of free stuff you add that to your hundred dollars then it's like 26 percent off you get to $200 then you also will get a sketch from one of my sketch books in the mail yes i will actually send you physical mail with a good sketch in it i won't put my icky sketches in there i'll give you a good one all right so if you're interested in any of those you might want to fill your cart up now so you're ready to just punch the shop button or the buy button or the cart button or the whatever the button is you know the final button so feel free to fill up your cart in the meantime link in the doobly do it has everything on it including a link to my final page where there's a 20 off sale over there and all just it's all in one spot somebody's going to be a little unhappy that i almost forgot to tell you the awards are also on that page but they're down at the bottom section if you would like to see which classes are nominated for those awards like the in sync award or the de stressor award then please feel free to scroll down there and if you have another nominee to add to the list then click the button and send in your nomination for which class you think deserves which award and there might be something special coming on christmas eve with those things so yeah i'm not going to tell you about it we're just going to have to be a little surprised on christmas okay i told you i had some good ideas i'll see you again in another video very soon in the meantime get out there and create something every day and i'll see you on friday with that new printable i've had so much fun in this video i hope we get to do it again next time i'll see you over on the link in the doobly do go check it right now