 Hello and welcome to today's video where I'm going to be sharing some of the best art materials for sketching and even if you are just at the very beginning starting out with your sketchbook journey. I've also got a couple of tips on how to save a bit of money on buying those art materials as well. And don't forget to stay right to the end as well because I'm going to be sharing one of my sketchbooks showing you a few of the pages and how I've used some of the materials that I share in today's video, how I've used them together. And kind of what my favorite combinations are right now. Now I've created a free download for you with a full list of all materials that I've mentioned in this video and a few more as well. If you'd like to get your hands on that, then don't forget to check the link below this video where you can sign up for free and grab yourself that list right now. Okay, so when you're thinking about sketching, you're likely going to want a few of these combinations. So something that's going to do some black and white, something that's going to give you some color, some wet media, some dry, something that's perhaps opaque and something that isn't. But quite honestly, you could get started with a graphite pencil and a cheap sketchbook. It really is as simple as that. Now behind me I've got what might appear like an entire art shop and you haven't seen the rest of the studio where other bits are lurking as well. And you might say, oh, it's all right for you, Sophie, you've got all these materials. You have to remember that I've been an artist on and off in most of my life. I've gathered a lot of these things. Some things actually even belonged to my mum. I've got some pencils over here that were mine when I was a child at school and one of my daughters used them. So I'll show you those later because some of them are really small and they're packed in the tin. And I've got some things I've gathered over the last few years as well. So my tip here is don't throw anything out. You'll be really grateful to hear that because if I'd thrown out a lot of these things when I'd stopped using them, I wouldn't have a beautiful array of sketching materials that I'm loving to use right now. Okay, so I've written down a kind of list of what I would call basic materials moving on from that pencil and sketchbook. And some of the things I have here today, so I'll show you those as well. Some of them I don't use, but I know that a lot of other people who are sketchbooking are using them. So I would say something like an A5 Royal Talon sketchbook. I don't have the Royal Talons, but it's definitely next on my order. It's affordable, the paper's good enough and it's a great place to get started. The other thing that's nice about it is it doesn't have a spiral bound because it's quite nice to lay your sketchbook flat. And if you do something that you think, well, this is rather nice, I could make it into a card or a print, then it's pretty easy to lay on a scanner, clean up your artwork on Photoshop and then go ahead and make it into a product. So I have these. These are actually Cass Art from Brighton in the UK. It's a little bit of home. I often buy them and bring them over here because I can't get them here in Australia. So this is an A5. I think this is a really great place to start because it also just fits in your bag, right? So it's super simple size A5, whatever type you decide, but I like these. There aren't many pages to them. And actually, if you are in the UK, you can buy, I think it's a set of three. So it's super useful. They also come in A4 as well. And then I would simply use some lead pencil or graphite. So I definitely have my favorite graphite here. It's quite messy. This is a 6B, so it's quite dark. So I used to use it a lot and I've got a few others that are bound in kind of plastic and something. So something like that. I also have my trusty HB and Ange pencils. You can see they're a bit worn down and just a bowl with a sharpener and a rubber. I do actually have a double sharpener for some reason. There's just the single in there today. And this is a little bowl that I picked up, I don't know, years ago. I had a series of them that I used to mix painting. I don't know what happened to them. So that's sort of basic as well. And then you're going to want some sort of wet media. So some sort of paint. Now, I recommend gouache at this point because it's a nice combination between watercolour and acrylic. So it's opaque, which means that you can layer on top of layer. Whereas watercolour, it's got different properties to it and acrylic. It's quite difficult to take out and about. And once it's dry, it's dry. You can't play or move with it. And I do use both of those things. But I think as a beginner, gouache is a great place to start. And you can get all different sorts as well. Now, I was actually introduced to this by an artist in the UK. And I've only just bought it. It's actually untouched. It's at the lower end of the market price-wise, but it gives you a lot of paint. It's quite heavy. So I don't know that I'd want to take it out and about with me. But perhaps you could. There's a really large number of colours. There's a little palette and some brushes as well. So this is quite a useful place to start. However, I didn't start here. I started a bit more at the higher end of the scale, which I like. And this is the Holbein Artist's gouache. Now, the downside with that is they're really small tubes. And you use the paint up really, really quickly, especially once I realised that I loved it. But this doesn't really go very far. However, it's pretty light. And if you just keep them in a little bag or you keep them in the box, that becomes a travel pack. So you definitely want some paints. If you prefer watercolour, then here's a great place to start. Something like a little, I think this is a Windsor and Newton. I've had these for ages. I think I used loads of them actually. Just a really, really simple paint set and you can use the paints that are in here or you can actually buy your own pans and change them out to colours that you would like. You just got to get in there, probably not with my nails, but you got to get in there with a knife and get those out and you can replace them with the colours that you like. Super simple, those again, really easy and a little bag. So great for travel pack. It's also a brilliant place to start. Now, if you say to me, OK, I don't want to buy a whole pack. I'm not sure if I like gouache. Then the best place to start really is actually just to buy your primary colours. Here's a red, yellow and blue and I've got a primary yellow, fallow, blue and flame red and a big tube of white. As you can see, the tube of white has had some fair hammering and these are still going strong. So this is really, really simple. Don't do what Sophie did and that is take it in your hand luggage, not in a bag because I just think I slipped them in the side pocket of my carry bag and one of them exploded inside. So if you're going in an aeroplane, do not take it hand luggage unless it's in a ziplocked bag. Put it in the hole. So that would be a really great and simple place to start where paints are concerned and then with brushes, just really keep it really simple. You definitely want a round brush, really easy for moving the paint around and a smaller one for details and then I quite like a square. If you don't use this that often, I have to admit this is my go-to. These are not expensive brushes either. These are just bog standard, I think, student watercolor brushes. I'll likely go through them and then just replace them again. It's really easy to find palettes these days. So again, I've got these little tiny palettes. They've still got the gouache in because I can just wet that and bring it back to life again. It's very, very nice, a bit like your watercolors. So these were super cheap and again, easy to transport except they probably need to go in a bag or something. Or you might want to get something a little larger. I actually quite like this because I'm mixing my own shades of things and I know exactly where they're located. It might look like a mess to everybody else, but I know what colors wear and so this was a bigger palette. So great if you've got studio. And then really, I would say the last thing, I went back in the kind of color department and that is to have some pencils. Now, you might not be ready to invest in a whole box of pencils. This is the kind of basic sort of starter place, but you do want to have some. So what you might do is go and buy individual pencils and maybe just buy some colors that you really like. Now, I've grown up with colored pencils from school. Again, I'm going to show you a box of those in a minute, but you could just go and grab. So I grabbed some loose pencils from a brand that I hadn't used. These are actually Faber Castel and I just bought, I think I was maybe even traveling when I bought these. I just bought some greens and browns because I didn't have them with me. And those are just five color pencils that when used on top of the gouache, makes life really easy. So that's a super simple, quick and easy starter materials. Okay, so I've titled this bit that would be nice to have section. So as you discover what sort of things that you like, whether you like painting, you're going to have more paint or whether you actually like pencils, we haven't even talked about markers or pens or any of those things. So I have quite an extensive list. I've actually written it out so I don't forget anything, but pretty much they're on the table here. So I will give them a go. So you might want to upgrade next up to a better quality sketchbook. Now, I really like these cast art ones. I like the paper, they're easy to carry, but my preferred sketchbook is actually a sea white. And again, it's a British brand. I would recommend though avoiding the spiral bound because like I said earlier, it's pretty difficult to lay down and you can't really make a nice spread when you've got. So for example, I've got bits of paper in between because I'm using crayons and things that smudge. So this is a sneak peek on my challenge actually. So if you want to make a spread going across both pages, you've got the spiral bound in the middle, which isn't so great. However, I had it already. I bought it, I hadn't used it. And so I love it. I love the paper. I also really love square sketchbooks. I've got another really big one that I started a few years ago for something else. And it's made me think I might go and get another square one. So this is the A4 sized and I've started doing, I'm actually in a Patreon. So I'm following somebody else's Patreon. This is the book dedicated to that. Shout out to Katie Moody. Thank you very much. I'm very inspired by what you're doing. So this is a book just for her Patreon drawings. So we've got those. So sketchbook would be right at the top of the list. And then I really love my Tombow marker pens. And I really did just start by buying three or four and I've built up the collection. I know you can get a box with the whole lot and I was going to do that, but I feel like I'm too far in now. So here I have, here are the colors I have so far. And really what I've done is I started with, I can't even remember what I started with, kind of I think some brown, some green, a couple of browns, a couple of greens, maybe a yellow, red, blue, and then I've built it out. I remember thinking, I'll never want lilac, purple, mauve, like these colors are not things I'm going to want. But as I've explored more into drawing what's around me, of course, what happened this spring is there were a whole plethora of purple flowers. So suddenly I needed to go and add all of these shades of purple to my collection. So it's pretty full. I would also say it's quite good to get one of these. It rolls up really nice and easy. This is Rome, but you can get them anywhere. It rolls up nice and easy and goes in your bag. I think this we could probably say is pretty much full. I think I worked out I can carry maybe four more markers in here and then it is maxed out. That just means I've got to go on another one, right? So another type of marker is the liquid text. Now I had a few of these and they've dried up. I've subsequently found that I was storing them in the wrong ways. I'm a bit gutted. This one works really, really well. It's got a big chisel top and makes a big mark. And I, when I was painting with acrylics professionally full-time a few years ago, I did really advocate for the liquid text colors. They were vibrant bright and they really matched my artwork. So when I saw they were making these, I thought this is great. At the moment I just have orange and black and I'm looking to go and infill some more colors. Again, not great for detail, but brilliant for just getting some big areas in and loosening up with your sketching. Now if this is something you're thinking, I'm never going to do that. Then these are going to not be for you. But if you like the idea of making big, bigger marks where they're not so accurate, then something like this is going to be brilliant. I've also got some Posca pens. And again, this is the chisel top. And again, you can make nice marks with those. You've got to give them a bit of a shake and get the ink down to the end. But I just bought a cream one the other day because I can see that that's quite good for going over things. If you're like, I don't like that area of my sketch, I'm just going to block it out. Somewhere I've got a narrow white one as well. So again, I'm just picking the colors that I like and adding them in. So something I had for all my artistic life with these art line drawing system kind of fine liners and they come in 0.1234 right up to 0.89. I think this is the 0.2 and I've always drawn with these. These work quite often my default. I would do some sort of color wash and then I would draw with pen. And interesting, I haven't been using them as much lately but I think I will throw them back into the mix now. So I've gathered them all together. I've got a lot of them, some work, some don't. But I think these are essential. Again, great to go in the bag, great to travel. So if you're thinking, you know, this is a pretty easy kit you could just put in your bag, right? And a sketchbook, some color, two different types of marks, easy, good to go. So things like refillable pens. I had these for a while and just put water in them. And again, if you're using watercolor pencils and the Tombow markers and many other things that are water soluble you can just add the water and play with them. But I've seen a lot of people also filling them with paint or ink or their own colors and actually mixing them and making them their own kind of marker pens. So there are lots of different brands and I think there are lots of different things you can do with them. This one is a kind of round one. I think one's a chisel one. That's a sort of flat one and I've got a few more somewhere else. So I think these are definitely a great idea that you can definitely expand on those. And then ink. I used to have lots of ink and they've dried up over the years but I still have this and I think I'm going to expand that range as well. This is a good old sepia. And I have things like, you know, these belong to my mum and this is something I made at art school when back in the day I made bamboo pen and thank goodness I never throw it out. I'm so excited by that. And I've even found that was obviously the brush I used for the ink because it's covered in black ink. So excited to rediscover those as well. And again, you know, when you're doing mixed media you want to put in different things, maybe not too many, but like cooking, isn't it? You don't want more than sort of five ingredients in one dish so you don't perhaps want more than five different things. But the idea is to mix and try different things out. So I definitely want to get back into doing some of that because I used to do that as part of my practice when I was younger. I have hundreds of brushes and I'll maybe just show that on screen but having something like something wider that will make some bigger marks, this is useful too. All right, let's talk about coloured pencils. Now, I don't know about you but when I was at school we had the coloured pencils and I loved my coloured pencils and this is what I wanted to show you actually. So I think I've got one box at home. I had a few and they've travelled over from the UK in my storage container here to Australia and this was the original Karandash Prismalo 2 soft pencils. I remember when they came out so excited and as you can see they're a little bit battered now right the way down to the little tiny brown here. So you can buy a pencil extender so I could do that to make it easier to hold. I actually saw somebody today with little tiny pencils like that I thought, how do you hold those? But these were lovely. These were amazing back in the day. There's still nothing wrong with them. So here's a tip. Go around the charity and op shops you can quite often find boxes of coloured pencils sometimes people don't really realise what brand they are sometimes you can get a real bargain. I think the spare set I have at home was $5 at a garage sale and they were top quality Derwent pencils. So that was a bit of a win definitely worth keeping an eye open for that. And then, oh talking about Derwent some watercolour pencils again I've had these I don't know how long but as you can see obviously I've used them a bit but probably not as much. If the budget doesn't run to this buy them singly. You can often buy them online singly or some art shops will favour one brand and you can go and just get a few colours. Find out which brands you like find out whether you like the watercolour pencils or more the oil but based pencils. So I like to have both she says clanging and making a big noise. All right so I have the Derwent Chroma flow I went and bought these just before I realised the inktense would be nice so maybe that's what Father Christmas will bring me. So I've got these and I've been using these a lot and I love to draw with them I have to say the downside is the leads are breaking really quickly and easily and so on my I think the three trays here on my smaller set half the pencils have broken all the way down I don't know whether I dropped them somewhere or anyway that's just a little bit of something that's a bit concerning. However, I've just leaving these in the studio not moving them so that's those and then I recently invested in these back to the old Karen Dash again and these are their luminance and they are the most lightfast pencils out there apparently and their colours are simply stunning. They're so stunning I haven't even used them that much. There's this tray here and this tray here and there's a beautiful you can get many more of these but I thought I would just get this set and they are just creamy buttery beautiful to work with so if you decide that colour pencils are your thing then probably you want to invest in the best of the best and I reckon these are right up there you never know what's going to get brought out and I say Inktense are amazing we have some amazing products I don't have but they've got blocks and pencils and giant blocks and there are videos out there showing you how to use those actually a shout out to Katie again she's got an amazing video on her YouTube where she shows you how to use those as well alright what have we not spoken about oh we've gone into pencils and let's talk about near colours so again this is Karen Dash just takes me back to my childhood I think I love that brand so as you can see this is my own set in here and I'm collecting these singly because I wasn't sure I was going to like crayons I felt they were a bit like back to junior school but actually I love them so what I did was I bought some singly from an art shop in Sydney, Sydney maybe over East somewhere and had them flown over and so I've got that little selection and then I've put the ones I used the most the greens the whites in here and then I changed these up according to what I'm drawing and I'm just going to build out the whole collection thank you to a local artist who donated her pot and it's become the Karen Dash pot so that's great and maybe last no not last but not least okay watercolours so I've never been a fan of watercolours really my mother was a watercolour artist and I just just weren't for me I obviously went into acrylics and then into oils and loved the colour however I did buy these in Florence a few years ago and there's the Schmincker watercolours they were quite an investment and I felt a bit disappointed because I didn't love using them but now with sketchbooking and a few of them the things have stuck I need to actually get out with a pen and take the top off I actually love them I'm going to clean out these pallets and I'm going to start using them again because I think having flexibility choosing different materials for what you're drawing I think is the optimal this is the kind of optimal list that you can build up to but again I had that sitting on a shelf I bought it 2019 so I barely used it and now it's coming into its own and then oh no wait a minute before we talk about pastels because I used to use a lot of those let's talk about paints so I still have them and I want to reincorporate them so I do love the golden brand I mentioned earlier I sort of grew up on Liquitex I do have all the Liquitex paints but I also really love the colour of the golden I just think they're just slightly nicer for me so you can get them in the fluid or soft body or heavy however you want them so these are the fluid ones which again could be quite useful in terms of Mixmedia here in the sketchbook setting so I've got a bit of a rainbow selection of those and then I've got all the others in trays but if I want to dip in and out of those as well this is actually a really useful colour to have because it's transparent so to get the transparent like the red iron oxide or there's a few other transparent brownie colours if you just water that down a little bit and then just wash that over something you've done it's just going to add an extra sheen to it okay last but not least let's talk about soft pastels oh not just soft pastels let's just talk about pastels so you can see that Sophie likes to buy her materials so I always had oil pastels and quite frankly hated them until I bought these and these are of course the Senile ones and I bought the big box and as you can see I haven't used them but I'm going to use them now I mean I've used the odd one no I've used the odd one and the colour range here are amazing so they're kind of the next level from the Neo colours obviously they're oil pastels they're not water soluble but you could put them on top of various other things and you can mix them in around or you could just use them on your own for really quick sketches so look out for more on the oil pastels I personally think it's worth investing in the real deal if you buy some student oil pastels probably the same like a lot of materials the colours are not great the experience is not great but when you buy something like this or you invest in something like this the quality is amazing and they feel better to use better and then I actually brought back from the UK in hand luggage, trip after trip after trip my thousands of soft pastels and they're all stacked up down there maybe at some point I'll give you a tour of all my soft pastels but this is a nice box would be easy to get I think this is also available from somewhere like Casart I thought I maybe bought those from Casart so this is also Sennelier Rembrandt do something similar quite like the Sennelier ones I have to say and ultimately if we were concentrating on pastels we might go down the handmade pastel route because they would be the best ones to get but I think if you're going to get shot bought these soft pastels are absolutely just crumbly gorgeous, divine I used to paint large with soft pastels and I'm really excited to go back and just add them into the mix the thing now that we need to add something over there and that's a fixative because the more messy you get in your sketchbook the more you're going to need a fixative just to kind of settle everything onto the page alright so that's that I feel like that's the bottom of my list at the moment I think I got carried away as you can see I've got many other things and like I say I've got various things over there but I'm pretty sure that's pretty much what I've got so okay now we've looked at the would be nice, we've had the basic set kind of would be nice materials definitely really enjoyed going through all of those it's great to do a bit of a studio vlog sometimes so here's a little bit about some of my favourites and how I've used them in my sketchbooks let's go and look at that quickly I would say at this stage my current go to is either starting with gouache and then working over it with pencils for example something like that which is in my second Europe trip travel sketchbook so I've done quite a few like that they're all kind of falling apart now this was the other mixture that I quite like and that was I just did with neocolours actually some of them were just neocolours a couple of them I put a little bit of paint and they were really quick and really luxurious to do so I'm either doing that or I'm actually just doing the whole thing with the Tombow markers and that way I don't need the spray and I really liked this one this was the scene this is where I used that purpley colour that I never thought I would use so this was the scene at the bottom of the cottage that we've bought here in Western Australia and all these flowers came out in the spring and they've just died about a week ago and there was just a sea of them so I had to go and buy these colours to pick them in the sketchbook but that is literally just done with marker and nothing else so at the moment I'm just keeping it simple where's another example where I've been mixing it together I suppose this one this is from our cottage garden so again I've just started with gouache paint and then I've worked in with some pencil and some of those neocolours and that's it and at the moment I'm really happy with that combination I might have all of these things but actually I'm getting the look that I want at the moment just with those materials so what's going to come up next is I will use different media I'll probably get myself a new sketchbook and start doing the different explore with the inks, explore with the soft pastels but at the moment that's what I'm doing I'd love to hear what you're inspired in doing what materials you use please do leave a comment below and let me know what art materials you use what materials you're inspired to use now having watched this video and anything else that you'd like me to share I'm sure you'd like a process video that's coming up I'm making one of those how I'm doing what I'm doing but if you'd like me to make a video about anything else art related please do let me know either below the video or over on my Instagram account at Sophie Mahia Art thank you so much for watching for this one I think it's time that I clear up this mess more drawing I'm on my year-long daily sketching challenge and I'm on day 4 as I'm shooting this video so I'm going to go away and play with my prompt rocks alright take care everybody see you soon bye