Art Supplies Always Pay For Themselves

Part of the enjoyment of a hobby is being able to collect things for it -- spend a little money now and then on something that's a treat for yourself. This doesn't always fit a frugal lifestyle. I have known guys who got so deep into model railroading that they moved into larger houses to have room for the entire layout. I've known people who collect Hummel figurines or Depression glass who won't part with anything from the collection and wind up living in a museum when it gets out of hand.

When they die, the whole thing goes for pennies on the dollar to another collector.

Or if they go bankrupt and have to make ends meet on a crashing budget. I found this out in the 1980s when I spent several years and several thousand dollars on stamp collecting. I had three or four albums and a complete set of US stamps going back pretty far into the 1950s from various purchases. When I sold those albums to a dealer in order to make the rent, I got $100 for the lot.

That made me think twice about collecting hobbies. Even if the dealers tell you the stuff is a good investment and appreciates, often it doesn't. Dealers are in the business to earn some money, to buy low ond sell high. If I had been good enough at it to post my rarities on eBay at reasonable (dealer) prices, then sold it off slowly, I might have been able to recoup more of my investment.

In an emergency you can't do that.

My favorite hobby is art. Drawing and painting in everything from oils and watercolor to oil pastels and colored pencils is a joy to me. It's wonderful for relaxing and managing stress. The process of creating art, especially using the best quality artist grade supplies, is deeply satisfying.

I was only at an intermediate level of skill when I found out art supplies always pay for themselves.

Several thousand dollars worth of Ral Partha and Grenadier fantasy figurines, metal elves, dwarves, monsters and adventurers including fifteen large dragons, all beautifully painted, vanished in a move. I got as much enjoyment from painting them and used to enjoy playing miniatures games with them too with friends, but when I went to sell painted figures the best I could get was $1 for a dragon that cost $20 boxed and unassembled.

People want to paint their own dragons and armies.

Figures and porcelain houses and model ships are fun when they're new in a kit. The process of painting them is relaxing and you can actually learn a lot about painting in general from doing it. But the resulting art is a keepsake, not really an investment. Like stamp collecting, it's not cost effective as a break-even hobby.

Painting and drawing original art is.

You can start with a pencil and scratch paper using free online art instruction from websites like WetCanvas.com (see Links below) and videos on YouTube. I found out fast that the cheap children's art supplies usually aren't very good. They don't handle as well as adult student grade supplies. Those aren't as easy to use as artist grade supplies either. The best paper, canvas, paints and pencils do cost some money.

Let's compare some prices though, relating them to other luxuries. A full range set of 76 Caran d'Ache Luminance colored pencils, the most expensive brand, billed as the Rolls-Royce of colored pencils and certified lightfast by ASTM standards, costs $215 today at Dick Blick online. You would pay quite a bit more offline unless your local Hobby Lobby has a 40% off coupon on one item. So if you shop in person, look for coupons, sales and what's in Clearance.

Now think about what the cost of smoking a pack a day of a name brand like Marlboro adds up to. Three cartons in a month range from $50 to $75 a carton. Quit smoking and you could get a full range set of Luminance every month. It would take longer than a month to use up those good pencils. Colored pencil realism is a slow art form like traditional oil painting.

Yes, you'll see $40 tubes of paint and $150 brushes sometimes in artist grade brands. But when you compare that to the cost of eating out, it starts to look more like a reasonable amount of spending money.

The big difference between a $200 art supply order online and $200 worth of stamps or miniatures is that you will still have a lot of supplies left after your first drawing or painting. It only takes intermediate skill to start creating art that can sell.

Specialize in one favorite subject like cats, horses, children's portraits, flowers, landscapes, old barns or boats. Choose whatever you really like most. It can be as specific as doing New England Lighthouses or as broad as "Nature and Wildlife."

The more specific it is though, the sooner you will begin to start getting good at drawing that subject. Start with drawing even if you have your heart set on watercolor painting or doing oil painting. This is because good paintings start with good drawings.

Sketch your favorite subject often. Draw it from photos you take or photos that the photographer gave you permission to draw. A series of good books from North Light is the "Artist's Photo Reference" series that includes volumes of flowers, wildlife, textures, two volumes of birds, water and skies or landscapes. I collected all of them to have good photo references by serious artists in all those subjects.

When you use your phone camera or digital camera to take the original photo references, the art is entirely yours. Most art contests will accept realism done from your own photos. I've only heard of one small local one that demanded you sketch from life.

However, if you carry a small sketchbook and start drawing things from life, pretty soon you will get good enough to start drawing them well. At a certain intermediate level, you can do your favorite things well enough that people will buy them on eBay.

If you prefer doing a manga style or comics style, you can get art commissions from roleplaying gamers, people with websites and anyone else who wants a character drawing like millions of amateur novelists. Then build up with practice till you can produce your own graphic novel using a print on demand supplier like Lulu. Lulu still has a free package, that is the ultimate in low-cost self publishing.

There are also websites online like Cafepress and RedBubble where you can upload your art at no cost in high resolution scans, then sell prints of your art at a reasonable markup. Once you get to where you're more than intermediate, you can mark up these items more than the standard 20% but the stuff will be selling long before then if you do something that people care about by subject.

Pastels are a particularly cost effective medium. You can complete an original drawing in half an hour and sell it on the street, the way I did in New Orleans for several years until my health problems interfered. I know I was nowhere near as good an artist or pastelist as I am now, but I had enough practice doing fan art to draw a human being from life and get the likeness in under an hour.

After I did it for the first month, I got it down to where I could get the likeness in half an hour and from there it was the most physically luxurious and prosperous lifestyle I've had before getting Social Security. The work wasn't demoralizing and I didn't spend ruinous hours at it. I could stay home when I was sick and go out when I felt well enough to manage it.

This will work in many parts of the USA as well as New Orleans. Check your local city ordinances about whether street art needs to be licensed. It's good if it does -- that means the city's getting income and the tourists know it's there, you'll sell more. Pay the fee and set up where they tell you to. The more artists set up in one place, the better all of them do.

You can also socialize and meet people doing art. Many local art groups have Plein Air outings, where a group will get together to go to a local scenic place and all paint at the same time. This is a lot of fun. Or you could form an art group by deciding to invite people over for an art workshop or art jam once a month. Just put out flyers and you'll find other local artists.

Best of all though is that if you are caught short on rent or bills, instead of thinking about giving up your hobby and selling off your prized possessions, all you need to do is use them well. Sit down and deliberately do some drawings and paintings that you know will sell, do similar subjects and styles to what sold before. Post them on eBay because eBay sales are pretty darn fast.

I am not the only person I know who lost a job, then got by on selling art and discovered it was easier and more fun living on art than getting another job. What it takes is years of practice to get good enough to sell it -- or one year of very serious practice focusing on a subject that you know is popular with a lot of people.

What sells best is portraits, local landscapes that are pretty, local scenery of any kind, pretty decorative still lifes like flowers or fruit, and animals by type. As soon as you specialize in pet portraits, it's as good as doing portraits of people. Cat lovers are thrilled to see any good looking cat, let alone one that has the same breed or markings as their cat. Dog lovers go "aww" over any cute puppy or noble looking retriever -- and especially a breed animal that looks like theirs. Horse fans are great experts on equine art.

Anytime you choose a subject like that, listen to the critique from your admirers. If they say a horse's legs are longer, pay attention to that. They've studied horses and they know, fixing the mistake can lead to a sale. The longer you draw horses, the easier it is to get the proportions accurate. This is much more important than the details.

If you do a loose fast painting with accurate proportions and good light, even if the good light is just one brush stroke across its back and a blob on the face, a horse enthusiast may love it. If you do a detailed horse drawing with every knob on its harness and every hair on its nose drawn in but the face is too long, they'll never buy it. So work loose and sketchy until you can get the proportions of the animal accurate and give it natural poses.

The best place to start on that is with your own cat, dog, bird, fish or horse. If you have pets, then you have a model willing to pose every time it sleeps. Stalk your pets with a digital camera to try to get the waking poses. Don't use flash, animals hate that and will hide if they see the camera after the first few times. Nonflash may get some cute lens pawing.

Your photos can also be something to market to greeting card companies and websites. Keep in mind every drawing you do, every photo you take and every painting including a colorful abstract that happened because you were testing colors on a piece of spare paper is your copyright. You created it. It is original to you. If that blobby thing looks pretty, turn it in the direction it looks nicest and accept the compliment or the money if someone says it's a perfect abstract.

You don't need to explain that you did it by accident. Your unconscious knows more about painting abstracts than you do and even if you didn't consciously intend that, the painting probably is better than you think!

So give art a try -- and think about supporting it by selling prints or fast paintings done with good materials. Always use surfaces that are acid-free and archival, along with paint or pencils that say they're archival or lightfast or both. It's important to someone who buys your art that it's not going to fade and look ugly a year or two after they hang it. They are referrals for later on, even ten or fifteen years later.

By then of course, you'll be so much better that you might as well have raised your prices several times.

Fine art does appreciate in a way that coins, stamps and antiques don't always. You can get great buys and finds in those things if you're knowledgeable and go to desperate people. But a desperate artist doesn't have to let go of the best thing ever -- a desperate artist can just do more of the faster, easier paintings and make sure they're out there in the market ready to go.

This makes visual art one of the most cost effective hobbies ever. No matter what you spend most of your spare time doing, you will get very good at it eventually. When that's art, it will only get better and better -- and easier on your budget.