How To Screen A Glaze with a Brush Head

If you are mixing ceramic and pottery glazes from scratch, it’s always best to screen your glaze. This helps remove any lumps, granular material, and helps disperse materials that like to clump together.

The Dr. Brush Brill Brush comes with 3 brush heads and an extender.

There are specific tools for screening glaze, such as a manual Talisman Rotary Sieve. The Talisman Sieve is great, but it can be bulky and expensive ($200 or more). If you already own a power drill, another option is to get one or two bucket sieves along with a drill brush head.

But it can be a chore to push all the glaze through with a spatula or brush. That’s where a drill brush attachment can really speed things up.

A drill brush is a simple tool that will fit in just about any electric drill, and with a bit holder / extender, you have plenty of room to use with a bucket sieve.

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The three brush heads and extender in the Dr. Brush package.

Dr. Brush Drill Brush Attachment

For this post, I tested a Dr. Brush Drill Brush attachment with an extender, which is available for $10 and also is called the Holikme 4Pack Drill Brush. The brush heads themselves are great—semi-stiff bristles in three sizes: flat small, flat large, and a rounded brush head.

The head of the extender broke immediately upon first use. If ordering the Dr. Brush, you should plan to also get another bit extender.

As good as the brush heads were, unfortunately the extender on this set broke immediately upon first use. I happened to have another bit holder so I popped that on and I was good to go.

Once I had the brush head attached to my drill, it was a speedy process to quickly move the glaze through the screen. I’m not sure why I spent so many years with a spatula, when a drill brush is so much faster.

After use, the drill brush was quick to clean up with water.

In the video below, you can see how fast the drill brush can help process a whole sieve-full of glaze. There’s a how to and more info below as well.

How to Use a Drill Brush Head

Equipment needed:

• Bucket Sieve (80 mesh recommended for glazes, 40 mesh can work as a prescreen. Available at specialty ceramic supply stores)

• 5 gallon Buckets

• Drill (read our review of corded or cordless drills)

• Brush Head

• Optional: A bit holder / extender

Step 1

Mix your glaze. It’s best to mix all the dry ingredients first before adding to water. Some glaze ingredients (such as bentonite) like to clump together.

Step 2

Stir and mix glaze. A drill head can help

Step 3

Pour glaze into your bucket with the sieve. Put brush head on your drill and run gently against the screen.

Step 4

Repeat until all the glaze is sieved.

For more info:

Read our complete guide to mixing a ceramic glaze from scratch

Check out our guide to glaze mixing accessories

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Speedball Underglaze Cone 6 Test Tiles

Speedball Underglazes are a great option for adding color to your ceramics. They are generally priced more economically than AMACO and other brands of underglazes, but the colors are still vibrant and varied.

For this post, the Speedball Underglaze 12 Color Sampler Set in 2 oz bottles was tested on different clay bodies and fired to cone 6. In general, this was a great set of colors that will definitely be used in my studio, but the lower price does come with a tradeoff in quality control. Some of the colors were a bit pasty / chunkier and didn’t brush as well, but this problem can be fixed by adding water and mixing the underglaze to a more brushable consistency. Despite the issue of some bottles being too thick / pasty, the colors in this set are great and I would have no problem recommending Speedball Underglazes for any studio or as a gift.

The 12 color sampler set is available in 2 oz bottles for around $45 ($3.75 per bottle), or there is also a “school pack” of different colors in 16 oz jars for around $140 ($12 per jar)

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Unboxing

Here’s a few images of the 2 oz sampler set. It’s a great way to try out these underglazes, or to give as a gift.

Speedball Underglaze 2 oz sampler pack

The bottles are packed tightly in a box

Speedball recently redesigned the bottles

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Test Tiles

The 12 colors in the Speedball Underglaze Sampler pack were tested on three different clay bodies: a Laguna mid range white stoneware, Standard 112 Brown with speckles, and Standard 308 Brooklyn red. The underglazes were applied with one, two, and three brush strokes in the greenware stage and bisque fired. Then, the right half of the tile was dipped in glossy clear, and fired to cone 6.

Note that some colors are a bit pasty / chunky. This can be corrected by adding water, but the sets were tested as they arrived without alteration. All underglazes can be thinned and color mixed, so it’s always best to test in your kiln as well.

In general, these were bright, interesting colors and despite the chunky quality of some of the underglazes, I would recommend this set and buy again.

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Flame Red

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Carmine

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Mandarin Orange

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Peach

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Soft Pink

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Amethyst

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Blue Frost

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Royal Purple

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Saffron

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Leaf Green

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Avocado

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Teal

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Notes

• Most underglazes are designed for low fire underneath a clear glazes, but often the colors hold up fine at mid range or high fire temperatures.

• Underglazes are pigmented with ceramic stains, allowing you to color mix them like paint.

• Underglazes do great under a clear glaze, but they can be fine unglazed too. At mid range and high fire temperatures, some underglazes will turn satin. A few might even become glossy.

More underglaze test tiles:

Amaco Velvet Underglazes

Amaco LUG Underglazes

Spectrum Underglazes

See all posts on glazes: click here

What has been your experience with Speedball Underglazes? Let us know in the comments.

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How To Make Pottery Ribs from Detergent Bottles

Just about anything can be turned into a rib for working with clay or on the pottery wheel, but the plastic in detergent bottles can be just the right hardness for a custom rib. It’s a great way to upcycle a bottle, and gives you the flexibility to make a specific shape for your studio. Here’s how to do it.

Equipment needed

• Empty detergent or dish soap bottle

• Box knife or X-acto

• Scissors

• Fine sandpaper, 150 grit or finer

• Marker and other ribs for tracing shapes

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Step 1

Wash and clean a detergent bottle.

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Step 2

Carefully cut into a bottle with a box knife or X-acto, then make a rough cut of the plastic with a scissors. The flat planes of a bottle are best, but the curved areas may be useful too.

The scraps can be recycled.

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Step 3

Trace an existing rib that you like with a marker and cut out, or draw your own shape.

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Step 4

Refine the shape by cutting with your scissors. The final step is to clean up any burrs or uneven bits with sandpaper and you’ve got a new rib!

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Tips:

> Plastic bottles have different characteristics—thickness, flexibility, etc—try this method on a variety of bottles to find the right ribs for your studio.

> It’s easiest to work with a clean bottle, but they do take a lot of water to rinse out. You can also clean the ribs after cutting.

> Be careful when first cutting into a bottle with your knife.

Related post: Make Metal Pottery Ribs

Do you make your own ribs? What do you use? Let us know in the comments.

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Amy Sillman on Why Making Art is Hard

In the essay On Color, New York-based artist Amy Sillman has what may the best description of what it takes to make an artwork:

Making a painting is so hard, it makes you crazy. Before even the vicissitudes of color, you have to negotiate tone, silhouette, line, space, zone, area, layer, scale, speed, and mass while interacting with a meta-surface of meaning, thought, text, sign, language, intention, concept, and history; you have to go your own way, to cut away from your heroes and influences, and still be utterly conscious and literate about the discourse. You have to simultaneously diagnose, predict and ignore the past, present and future, all at once; you have to remember and to forget at the same time. You have to both deny and embrace all your impulses toward romanticism and irony; you have to both love and hate your objects and your subjects, to believe every shred of romantic and passionate mythos about painting and at the same time to cast a gimlet eye upon it.

The book contains drawings and essays by Amy Sillman.

The book has 17 essays, including On Color and Further Notes on Shape, an essay Sillman wrote in conjunction with a 2019 group show Sillman curated at MoMA. In Further Notes, Sillman writes about a theory of “draw-ers” vs. painters:

For a long time I’d been nurturing a second idea, too, that somehow got nested in these thoughts: that you could divide artists into draw-ers versus painters, and that draw-ers were a subculture. Painters, it seemed like, work from an idea, moving deductively from the big picture down to the details in order to produce or construct an image they have in mind. Draw-ers, on the other hand, work from the weeks outward, building up from particulars, inductively, scratching and pawing at their paper with tools the scale of their hands. OR maybe they never get to a bigger picture at all, but move sideways, abductively, from a particular to particular. This made drawing itself seem like an activity not founded on logic but made up of contingencies, overflow: stray parts—a process that might be described as working blind, like a mole, or like a beaver building a thatch, rather than someone with an overarching worldview.

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Later in the essay, Sillman addresses the idea that drawing and making is a political act as much as any other form of artmaking.

Maybe artist fussing over shapes are not the same people we first think of when we think of political art. But they make lumpen form that registers protest, they make gestures of care and repair, or they merely try to beam out an electrifyingly personal and strange signal that wakes up the receiver for a moment—one weird moment that could shift the sense of things, and thereby alter the world, even if only slightly. That sounds urgent to me.

The book also contains a variety of diagram drawings by Sillman.

Faux Pas., Selected Writings and Drawings
by Amy Sillman
256 pages, paperback, 2020, After 8 Books

The back cover of Faux Pas. by Amy Sillman

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Wayne Thiebaud on How to Avoid Being an "Art Employee"

Wayne Thiebaud is known for his iconic pop paintings of everyday American objects and though he was part of the generation of Pop artists that included Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, he maintained his independence from the New York art world (and never really thought of himself as a pop artist). He lived and worked in Sacramento and Davis, California, and in addition to paintings of cakes, gumball machines, and counter displays of pies and food, he also painted vertiginous San Francisco cityscapes, abstracted landscapes, and more. He was also a beloved professor at University of California at Davis. He passed away in late 2021 at the age of 101.

Pages 36-37 of Episodes with Wayne Thiebaud, including a reproduction of Pastel Scatter from 1972, a (lol) pastel drawing of sticks of pastels.

For the book Episodes with Wayne Thiebaud, (view book on Amazon) two of his former students, Eve Aschheim and Chris Daubert, conducted four conversations between 2009 and 2011 which were then lightly edited and published. The book includes lots of great quips and background on Thiebaud (such as he thought Jackson Pollock was a middling painter) along with reproductions of work by Thiebaud and some of his influences.

One of my favorite bits is from the beginning of the book, where Thiebaud details why he left New York City in 1957 after living there for a year:

Eve Aschheim: Why did you come back from New York?
Wayne Thiebaud: I missed space and tennis, and having a life. I was afraid, as I perceived it, which is maybe curious, that there was too much talk and focus on art rather than painting or sculpture or what I think we’re obliged to do. And I think the idea of an art employee is very dangerous.
Chris Daubert: What do you mean by “an art employee” — someone who works for the art world?

Pages 52-53 of Episodes with Wayne Thiebaud (Shop at Amazon)

WT: It refers to the dangers and seductions of the current art scene that can infer a kind of need to belong or be influenced by whatever its present preoccupations may be. And it can be an easy distraction away from what serious and unique directions painters’ personal researches and interests may take them. That, for me, is a disassociation from the percentage of those basically three worlds: the art of the self, the art of art history, and the art of your self (the art of your own artistic preoccupation), so that you get some kind of an equal mix. If they get out of balance, it seems to me you get an art employee, where you’re so saturated with “What should I do? What can I do? What might I do?” rather than saying, “Oh, I really feel I want to do and pursue art with the great tradition” —using that as a bureau of standards and inspiration and knowledge and tools, and combine those as best you can.

Later in the same interview, Thiebaud returns to this idea of the art employee who might end up making “light manufacturing products.”

EA: Your paintings have this incredible complexity, and at the same time the painting is fresh and everything’s at risk when you apply it. Is that something you have to struggle for?
WT: It is a lot like a golf stroke or a tennis stroke. That’s the basis of whyI believe so much in lots of drawing and lots of manipulative skills being developed. I know now there’s a big process on to deskill the artist—have you heard about that?
EA: Benjamin Buchloh has pushed this idea, which lots of people have taken up.
WT: [laughs] Risk. It’s something you just have to take into account, that you’re going to fail a lot and you can’t baby up to it. You’ve got to go for it, and then if it fails you either are stuck with it and you deal with it, hope that maybe you can bypass that area, or you just have to destroy it and start over, you just have to scrape it off. And that’s why de Kooning scraped off so many paintings. He never wanted to have it look labored or chintzed or—
EA: Safe.
WT: Yes, safe. And it’s very hard to get students to do that because it’s hard to do.
EA: It’s hard to simultaneously get the complexity of the composition.
WT: That’s right, but that’s why you have to think of de Kooning drawing so well; he had a rich vocabulary of forms that he could draw on, in addition to what he might be looking at. And we have got to get back to drawing somehow. I know there’s that other danger of learning to draw and then you can never do anything but that.
EA: A critic said that drawing is how to get out of Abstract Expressionism. The next generation of artists got out by drawing and the ones who continued to paint—and this happened several times in different historical periods—got stuck, while the ones who drew were able to find a new way.
WT: That’s true. I think as it became very easy to develop these light manufacturing products, and the temptation was great because it becomes a salable commodity again—and there you are trapped in that art world. Dealers don’t want you to change.

The back cover of Episodes with Wayne Thiebaud.

A few other great quotes from the book:

Thiebaud on drawing:

“Yes, I think everybody should draw. It’s such a terrific way of knowing things and testing what you know. It gives you access to so many things, that we’re just really cheating ourselves to not to teach people to draw…Once you get past the hurdle of people being terrified or bored by it, either one, and to find out it’s not mysterious… You can’t draw like Rembrandt, but you can really represent things, you can draw your things, find out about things. You can begin to see what your life is in terms of where you are in space and what things are, and ways to go. It really is a poetic exercise also.”

Thiebaud on learning technique

“When I used to work a lot harder with the students, trying to get them to do some of these things, I’d just point out, ‘Well, this is one of your muscles here. This is where you’re used to doing writing.’ I said, ‘Then you have this whole hand with all your fingers. That’s wrist. You’ve got to develop this universal wrist so you can come at it, under it, over it. Then you’ve got to the arm, from here, and what that can do or not do, and then you’ve got the shoulder.’ And all of those various motions you have to train so that you do it like hitting a golf ball.”

Thiebaud’s advice to painters:

“Get the hell busy, make lots of mistakes, do thousands of drawings—from the figure—even if you’re going to be an abstract painter. Learn things about grace, pressure, tension. Don’t be afraid of making lots of mistakes. Don’t be afraid of being influenced. Copy pictures. Enjoy the hell out of it.”

This book is full of lots of great ideas and quotes from Thiebaud. It’s a must for any Thiebaud fans or for students of painting.

Episodes with Wayne Thiebaud
by Eve Aschheim and Chris Daubert
104 pages, 2014, Black Square Editions

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Cone 6 Ultramarine Cobalt Blue Glaze (Glossy Clear plus Cobalt Carbonate)

Cone 6 Glossy Clear is a studio favorite for a clear glaze and it also makes a great glossy base glaze for adding metallic oxides or stains. These tests show Glossy Clear mixed with cobalt carbonate ranging from 1 percent to 5 percent, resulting in an Ultramarine Glossy Blue Glaze. (Click here to see the original glossy clear post.)

The test tiles were fired in an electric kiln with a medium-slow speed and 15 minute soak at cone 6. The five tests all resulted in glossy blue glazes that did not craze or crack on the Laguna Frost Porcelain test tiles.

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To my eye, the 3 percent cobalt carbonate is an ideal amount, resulting in a deep ultramarine blue. At 4 and 5 percent cobalt carbonate, a thick application starts to result in a deep midnight blue that is almost black, while the 1 and 2 percent mix was a bit light for the blue I was seeking. But your results and desired glaze color may vary, so it’s great to have options.

To make this glaze, simply mix the Cone 6 Glossy Clear glaze and include your desired amount of cobalt. After mixing with water, this glaze must be screened to break up and distribute the materials, particularly the wollastonite and cobalt carbonate. This test was mixed to a specific gravity of 1.50.

Following the recipe, there are a few images of the test tiles in different light conditions.

Cone 6 Glossy Clear Glaze with Cobalt

Ingredient	Percentage	3000g batch
Nepheline Syenite	30	900g
Gerstley Borate	24	720g
Silica	20	600g
Kaolin (EPK)	16.5	495g
Wollastonite	9.5	285g
Talc	2	60g
Add
Cobalt Carbonate	3	90g
	105	3150g

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Test Tile Images

These images show the test tiles in a few different light conditions, to more accurately represent this glaze.

The test tiles with some indirect Northern light.

Test tiles in a flat lighting condition.

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#Glazes That Work

This recipe is part of our series of posts of glazes that just work. There’s a million glaze recipes out there, but we’re posting a series of our tried-and-true favorites. Click here to see the other recipes we’ve posted.

For more info:
Original Glossy Clear recipe post

Another Cone 6 Cobalt Blue glaze that might interest you

Read our guide on mixing glazes from scratch.

See our reviews of the best scales, cordless drills, or corded drills for mixing glazes.

Check out our recommended glazing accessories.

If you’d like to learn more about mid-range glazes, the best place to start is The Complete Guide to Mid-Range Glazes by John Britt. The book provides a comprehensive overview of materials, techniques and glaze recipes. Shop this book at amazon or bookshop.org

Do you have a favorite cone 6 cobalt blue glaze or mid range base glaze? Let us know in the comments.

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John Baldessari on Cheap Art

John Baldessari (1931-2020) was a California-based Conceptual artist and educator known for his work with appropriated images, video, and text-based work. Famously, he’s known for saying that “Every artist should have a cheap line,” but the actual quote is more nuanced and was in response to a 1976 poll about artist-made books in Art-Rite magazine no. 14.

Here’s Baldessari’s full quote:

“Re. your request for statements on books: I enjoy giving books I have made to others. Art seems pure for a moment and disconnected from money. And since a lot of people can own the book, nobody owns it. Every artist should have a cheap line. It keeps art ordinary and away from being overblown.”

While I’ve heard the shorter Baldessari statement for years, I didn’t know that it was made in the context of artists books. While it’s my belief that when possible, art should be affordable and accessible to all, it’s interesting to learn that he was speaking specifically about books.

What do you think about artists having a cheap line to go with more expensive work? Let us know in the comments.

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Two pages of the Art-Rite Idea Poll on artists books, from Publishing Manifestos.

The entire Idea Poll on artists books is republished on page 56-65 of Publishing Manifestos, a 2019 anthology of statements on book making from artists and writers. Or look for the entire run of Art-Rite magazine republished in a 2019 facsimile edition.

Publishing Manifestos includes lots of great stuff, including manifestos from Takashi Murakami, Allen Ruppersberg, Gertrude Stein, Kathleen Hanna, Mladen Stilinovic, and more.

The cover of Publishing Manifestos

Shop Publishing Manifestos Abebooks | Amazon | Bookshop.org

Shop the Art-Rite anthology Abebooks | Amazon | Bookshop.org

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Red Gorilla Tubs, a review and appreciation

Gorilla Tubs are amazing buckets, especially for mixing plaster, gathering clay chunks, or as a wide trough for pouring glazes. Designed for gardening, stables, and construction sites, these flexible buckets are equally at home in art studios. They are affordable, long-lasting, easy to clean, and just great to use. The only drawback is they aren’t as good for moving large amounts of liquid—stick to a rigid bucket for carrying water or ceramic slip.

Look at the flexibility of this bucket!

Earlier this year, I purchased the Small 3.5 gallon / 14 L blue bucket pictured above, for mixing and pouring plaster. It’s just the right size for most of my plaster pours, and the flexible edge makes it super easy to pour. And when I’m done, the flexible sides make it easy to pop the plaster off and clean it for the next use. If you mix plaster, you definitely need to get one of these buckets.

After using and loving the first bucket, I recently added the shallow sizes, including the mini shallow 1.3 gallon / 5L and the shallow 3 gallon / 15 L tubs. They stack easily when not in use, and are so useful for glazing, mixing clay, gathering odds and ends together, or a variety of other tasks. They are quickly becoming my favorite buckets in the studio. (For throwing, I only use the Argee 5 qt Big Mouth Bucket (shop at amazon) )

Formerly known as Tub Trugs, Gorilla Tubs are manufactured in Spain by Red Gorilla. The buckets are easy to find on Amazon in the U.S., but two that I ordered shipped directly from Spain and arrived in a few weeks. Definitely check the shipping and vendor location etc, but these should be an affordable upgrade to your studio. The buckets are available in a variety of sizes and colors. Included here are links to the three buckets pictured in this post.

More Images of the Gorilla Tubs

The bottom of the tubs is slightly reinforced with thicker rings of plastic, but still flexible.

These sizes stack together nicely.

The inside of the Gorilla Tubs is smooth and flexible. Easy to clean!

In conclusion, without being too over the top, these are great buckets and are perfect for anyone who mixes plaster. But once you get one, I’m sure you’ll find that you’ll use it all the time for a variety of tasks.

Do you have a favorite bucket for the studio? Let us know in the comments.

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Testing Silicon Carbide Grits in Cone 6 Lava / Crater Glazes

Lava or crater glazes can be a lot of fun, resulting in bubbling, textured finishes in cone 6 oxidation firings. The addition of silicon carbide will produce this result in just about any glaze, as the silicon carbide produces vapors as it reaches temperature.

If you want to mix these types of glazes, you’ll notice the recipes generally say “fine silicon carbide is best.” But what does that mean, exactly? There’s a whole range of silicon carbide grits out there, and many ceramic suppliers just carry one or two.

For this post, seven different grits of silicon carbide ranging from 60 grit (coarsest) to 800 grit (finest) were tested to see which produced the best lava- or crater-type bubbles in a cone 6 oxidation firing. They were tested in the Marilee’s Lava glaze at a 3.5% concentration of silicon carbide. (Many recipes list the silicon carbide in this glaze as 0.34, but I’ve seen enough others arguing that was originally a typo many years ago, so I went with the 3.5% recipe.)

Note that excessive bubbling can cause small blister that break, crack, or produce sharp surfaces. It’s always best to test in your kiln. If excessive bubbling occurs, apply thinner coats of this glaze, or reduce the concentration of silicon carbide.

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Table of Contents:

• Intro

• Marilee’s Lava Glaze Recipe

• Results

• Where to Buy Silicon Carbide

• Test Tiles

• Other Recommended Lava / Crater Glazes

• Summary

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Marilee's Lava (3.5% Silicon Carbide version)

Ingredient	Percentage	1000g batch
Custer Feldspar	49.7	497g
Whiting	23.9	239g
EP Kaolin	13.2	132g
Silica	13.2	132g
Add:
Titanium Dioxide	11.3	113g
Silicon Carbide	3.5	35g

Results

Going in to these tests, I assumed the finer silicon carbide was recommended because the rougher stuff resulted in even bigger bubbling that might crack and break, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The larger silicon carbide pieces (coarser grits such as 60 and 120) barely caused any bubbling. The 60 grit resulted in a pockmark texture that is interesting, but definitely not lava or crater. The sweet spot seemed to be 400 grit, if you want big, flowing lava effects. At 800 grit, there was still great bubbling but surprisingly to me, the silicon carbide is so fine that it results in less of the grey discoloration so often found with this material.

Overall, I found all the results interesting and these will help me fine tune my glazes, and I hope yours too. Test tile images for all grits are posted below.

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Where to buy Silicon Carbide

The silicon carbide used in these tests was purchased at HIS Glassworks in North Carolina.

Your local ceramic supplier most likely carries silicon carbide, but many just have one or two grits.

Or check out suppliers on Amazon. There are a few, including a kit with a selection of grits designed for rock polishing.

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Test Tiles

The first group of images shows the range of glaze results with the different silicon carbide grits.

Vertical test tiles of Marilee’s Lava Glaze fired to cone 6 oxidation (medium speed firing). The bottom shows one dip, while the top has a second dip.

Test tiles fired horizontally with the same range of silicon carbide grits. Top half has a second dip.

The horizontally-fired test tiles at an angle to show some of the texture. There is virtually no lava / crater effect with coarser grits.

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60 Grit Test Tiles

60 grit vertical test tile

60 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

60 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

120 Grit Test Tiles

120 grit vertical test tile

120 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

120 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

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220 Grit Test Tile Images

220 grit vertical test tile

220 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

220 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

320 Grit Test Tile Images

320 grit vertical test tile

320 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

320 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

400 Grit Test Tile Images

400 grit vertical test tile

400 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

400 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

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600 Grit Test Tile Images

600 grit vertical test tile

600 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

600 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

800 Grit Test Tile Images

800 grit vertical test tile

800 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

800 grit vertical and horizontal test tiles

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Other Recommended Lava / Crater Glazes

There are a wide variety of lava / crater glazes and even underglazes but here are a few others recommended for cone 6 oxidation:

Akiko’s Crater Glaze (view recipe on glazy.org)

Pinell’s Strontium Crater (view recipe on glazy.org and also here. Also a few color tests here.)

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Summary

This post covered tests of seven different silicon carbide grits in Marilee’s Lava glaze fired at cone 6 oxidation in a medium-speed electric firing. The best lava / crater results were with 400 to 800 grit, but all the results were interesting and might prove valid for future glaze research or application on sculptural pieces.

Lava and crater glazes are a great textural option for glazing in cone 6 oxidation. Due to the uneven glaze surface, they are not recommended for food service but can be used on the outside of pots or sculptural pieces.

If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy the review of the glaze book Special Effects Glazing. If you are looking for a comprehensive introduction to glazing, the best book to start is John Britt’s Complete Guide to Mid-Range Glazes. Shop the book at amazon or bookshop.org.

What lava or crater glazes do you use in your studio? Let us know in the comments. Happy glazing!

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The Best Black Paper Drawing Pads and Sketchbooks

Black paper makest colored pencils, markers, gel pens, gouache and other media just pop off the page. If you’ve never tried it, you should definitely try some in your studio.

For this guide, 11 different pads and sketchbooks were tested and compared for quality of paper, ability to handle a variety of media, and price. There were some clear favorites and a range of papers that are worth exploring. First a quick overview, and then more info on each pad tested.

What we recommend:
Best everyday drawing pads:
Top Pick: Canson XL Black Drawing Pad
Strathmore 400 Artagain Black Drawing Pad is also great

Best for finished artwork / thicker, more vesatile paper:
Top upgrade pick Strathmore 400 Black Mixed Media Pad
Fabriano Black Black
Clairefontaine PaintOn Black Pad
Stonehenge Aqua Coldpress Watercolor Paper

The other papers tested were thinner and more expensive than our top pick, the Canson XL. All the pads are covered below. Shopping tip: Most of these pads are cheaper at Blick but you can find them at Amazon and many other stores.

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TOP PICK: Canson XL Black Drawing Sketchbook

The Canson XL Black Drawing Sketchbook is our top pick for an everyday sketchbook.

The Canson XL Black Drawing Sketchbook is our top pick for an everyday black paper. It’s got enough body and heft that it feels almost professional grade, but it’s still affordable enough that it’s great for an everyday sketchbook or for use by students and kids.

The paper is made in France for Canson North America, and each sketchbook features 40 pages of 92 lb / 150 gsm paper. Try it with colored pencils, gel pens, metallic markers, or regular crayons. The paper has a matte black finish and it’s just thin enough that is can be folded or creased, but it does have a great body and feels like the perfect paper weight for an affordable sketchbook.

These sketchbooks have a cardstock cover, heavy board back, is spiral bound on the long side, and each sheet is perforated for tearing out.

The Canson XL Black Drawing Sketchbooks
Spiral bound, available in 7x10” and 9x12”
40 sheets
92 lb paper
9x12” pad generally retails for around $8.50 or $0.21 per sheet

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UPGRADE PICK: Strathmore 400 Black Mixed Media Pad

The Strathmore 400 Black Mixed Media Pad is our top pick for professional-grade paper.

There are a few black paper pads tested that are great for professional-grade, finished artwork — or just if you like thicker paper — but the all-around favorite for an upgrade pick was the Strathmore 400 Series Black Mixed Media Pad. Made in the USA in Appleton, Wisconsin, each pad features 15 sheets of acid free, 184 lb / 300 gsm paper that is matte, thick, and wonderful for drawing, wet media such as ink or gouache, and can be used for collage or other techniques. And best of all, it’s a great paper that is also quite affordable. At the time of this writing, it was easy to find a 9x12 inch pad for around $6, or about $0.40 per sheet. If you like drawing on black sketchbook paper, order one of these pads and see what happens when you do the same thing on thicker paper.

Each pad is glue-bound on the top edge and has a thin cover and hard cardboard back. The pages removed easily but you may need to cut off a bit of the glue edge for finished artwork.

Strathmore 400 Black Mixed Media Pads
Glue bound, available in 6x8”, 9x12”, 11x14”, 18x24”
184 lb / 300 gsm paper
15 sheets per pad
9x12” pad generally retails for $6.00 or $0.40 per sheet

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Table of Contents

1. Top Pick: Canson XL Black Drawing Pad

2. Upgrade Pick: Strathmore 400 Black Mixed Media Pad

3. Best for Watercolor / Ink / Wet Media: Stonehenge Aqua Coldpress Black Watercolor

4. Best for thick and smooth cardstock: Fabriano Black Black

5. Also great: Clairefontaine PaintOn Black Pad

6. Best recycled option: Strathmore 400 Artagain Drawing Pad

7. Best for Pastel: Canson Mi-Teintes Black Pastel Paper

8. Not worth it: Arteza Black Drawing Pad, Faber-Castell Black Sketchbook, Conda Black Sketchbook

9. Best for guestbooks or sketching: Fabriano Hardcover Black

10. Summary

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The top two picks are great, but there are a few more pads that we recommend and might work for you in the studio:

Stonehenge Aqua Coldpress Black Watercolor: Best for Watercolor / Ink / Wet Media:

The Stonehenge Aqua Coldpress is a really interesting black watercolor paper that is great for wet media and collage.

Another great upgrade / professional grade pick is the Stonehenge Aqua Coldpress Black watercolor paper from Legion Paper. Advertised at 140 lb / 300 gsm, the paper is 100% cotton, acid free, and feels and handles just like a high-grade watercolor paper, except it is black. Try this with watercolor, gouache, metallic inks and pens, or acrylics, this is a heavyweight paper that can do it all. It feels thicker and more absorbent than our top upgrade pick, the Strathmore 400 Mixed Media paper, but it’s great for wet media.

Each pad is glue bound on the top edge with a cardstock cover and heavy cardboard back. During testing, the final few pages got a bit hard to remove from the glue top so definitely plan to cut them off and you may need to cut off the glue edge so that it matches the look and feel of the other three edges. The pads typically cost around $18 for a 9x12 inch which is a lot for a drawing pad, but a fair price for watercolor at about $1.20 per sheet.

Stonehenge Aqua Black Watercolor Pads
Glue bound, Cold press available in 7 sizes, square or rectangular, ranging from 2.5x3.75” to 10x14”
Glue bound, Hot press available in 4 rectangular sizes ranging from 2.5x3.75” to 10x14”
15 sheets per pad
140 lb / 300 gsm paper
9x12” generally retails for $18.00 or $1.20 per sheet

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Fabriano Black Black: Thick and smooth cardstock that is great for drawing

The Fabriano Black Black pad is a great option for dry media, pens, and has a similar feel to cardstock.

The Fabriano Black Black is a great option for a thicker drawing paper that feels like smooth cardstock but still takes dry media really well. A word of advice: don’t use any wet media on this paper as it will buckle and bubble when exposed to water or anything wet. But it’s still great for pens, markers, colored pencils, and crayons. It doesn’t work as well with glue if you were thinking of using it for collage though, as the smoother paper really resists any glue.

Made in Italy, the Black Black pads are glue at the top and have a thin paper cover and cardboard back. Each sheet peels out quite cleanly from the glue top.

Fabriano Black Black pads
Glue bound, available in 8x8”, 9x12”, and 11.75x16.5”
20 sheets
300 gsm
9x12” generally retails for $12.50 or $0.63 per sheet

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Clairefontaine PaintOn Black Pad: Another great option for thicker paper

The Clairefontaine PaintON Black Mixed Media Pads is a great option for finished, pro grade drawings, paintings, and collage.

The Clairefontaine PainON Black Mixed Media Pad is another great option for finished or professional grade artworks. The paper is double sized and works with wet or dry media, and is great for sketching, ink, watercolor, gouache, acrylic, pastel, or for glue / collage. The paper is made in the Netherlands but the sketchbook also says “Made in Morocco” so maybe it is assembled there.

The pads are glue-bound at the top and each pad features 20 sheets of 250 gsm paper. It’s a bit lighter than the other “pro grade” papers, but the paper is still thick, heavyweight and is absorbent. It’s really a great pad but it is on the expensive side, around $19 for a 9x12 inch pad or almost $1 per sheet.

Clairefontaine PaintOn Black Mixed Media Pads
Glue bound, available in 6x8”, 7x10” and 9x12”
20 sheets per pad
115 lb / 250 gsm paper
9x12” generally retails for $18.99 or $0.95 per sheet

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Strathmore 400 Artagain Drawing Pad: Great drawing paper made from recycled content

The Strathmore 400 Series Artagain drawing pad has black paper made from 30% post-consumer fiber.

The Strathmore 400 Series Artagain Drawing Pad is a great recycled paper option for an everyday black paper sketchbook. Made in the USA, it has acid-free, 60 lb /160 gsm paper made with 30% post-consumer fiber. It has a slightly glossier, smoother finish than the Canson XL Black paper and even though it is 60 lb weight, it is still a decent thickness for drawings and sketches. This paper is best with dry media.

Each pad is glue bound at the top edge and pages remove easily. If you like this paper, you can also find it in rolls, which is great for banners, huge drawings, or if you want to work with a custom size.

Strathmore 400 Artagain Black Drawing Pads
Glue bound, available in 6x9”, 9x12”, and 12x18”
24 sheets per pad
60 lb paper
9x12” generally retails for $6.50 or $0.27 per sheet

This paper is also available in a 42” wide, 10 yard roll (shop at Amazon)

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Canson Mi-Teintes Black Pastel Paper: Best for pastel / charcoal or for textured paper

The Canson Mi-Teintes Black Pastel Pad features 24 sheets of black paper with one side more textured.

The Canson Mi-Teintes Black Pastel Pad is your best option for a more textured paper. It features a dual sided paper with a woven texture on the top side and a flatter surface on the back side. The paper is matte black and not shiny. It’s made in the USA with materials from France, including some cotton.

The pads are glue bound on the top edge and have 24 sheets per pad with 98 lb / 160 g paper.


Canson Mi-Teintes Black Pastel Pad
Glue bound, available in 9x12” pad or loose sheets
98 lb / 160 gsm paper
24 sheets per pad
9x12” generally retails for $8.50 or $0.35 per sheet

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Not worth it: Arteza Black Drawing Pad, Faber-Castell Black Sketchbook, Conda Black Sketchbook

The next three pads didn’t stack up to the quality and affordability of the Canson XL Black Drawing pad. They feature fewer pages with thinner paper, but if you prefer a ring binding on the top edge, a few of these may be right for you for an everyday pad that you can carry around for sketches or prepatory work.

Arteza Black Drawing Pads

The Arteza Premium Black Paper Sketch Pad is a good competitor to our top everyday pick, but generally is more expensive.

The Arteza Premium Black Sketch Pads generally come in a 2 pack and feature 30 sheets of 9x12 inch paper with a ring binding and perforation at the top. The paper is matte black, a bit absorbent, and best for dry media such as pastels or colored pencils. The paper and notebook are a great option if you like ring binding at the top, but even in a two pack, they are slightly more expensive than the Canson XL Black Drawing Pads. These pads were manufactured in China for the US-based Arteza company.

These pads are great option for students, kids, or anyone looking for an everyday black paper sketch pad.

Arteza Black Drawing Pad
Spiral bound, available in 9x12”
90 lb / 150 gsm paper
30 sheets
9x12” two pack generally retails (60 sheets total) for $20 or $0.33 per sheet

Faber-Castell Black Sketchbook

The Faber-Castell Black Paper Sketch Pad had the thinnest paper tested and while it might be ok for kids, artists of any age will be better served by getting a higher quality sketch pad.

The Faber-Castell Black Paper Sketch Pad was the thinnest paper tested. Made in China for Faber-Castell USA, it doesn’t indicate the paper weight but it’s not much thicker than printer paper. It is, however, made with 50% post-consumer recycled fiber. Advertised mostly as a sketch pad for kids, I think they’d be better served with the Arteza pad above, or our top pick the Canson XL. But at 25 sheets with a tape binding, this is lightweight and easy for anyone to carry around.

Faber-Castell Black Sketchbook
Glue bound, available in 9x12”
25 sheets
9x12” generally retails for $7 or $0.28 per sheet

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Conda Black Sketchbook

The Conda Black Paper sketchpad has 40 sheets and is ring bound at the top.

The Conda Black Sketch Pad is another cheaper option with thin, somewhat glossy paper. Advertised as 90 lb / 150 gsm paper, it feels thinner and lighter than that. The 40 sheet sketchbooks are ring bound at the top with unperforated pages. The Arteza or Canson XL are better options. There is no indication on the pad as to where it is manufactured.

Conda Black Sketchbook
Spiral bound, available in 9x12”
90 lb / 150 gsm paper
40 sheets
9x12” pad generally retails for $11 or $0.27 per sheet

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Fabriano Hardcover Black: Best for guestbooks or sketching

The Fabriano Hardcover Black Drawing book is a premium landscape-style notebook (or a relatively skinny page on the tall side) that is marketing as a drawing pad but most likely conceived as a guest book for signatures. It has a premium front and back cover that feels like fabric-covered cardboard, and 40 pages of slightly textured 90 lb / 190 gsm drawing paper. The paper itself is nice and great for drawings, but at this price, you’d be better served by any other cheaper sketchbook or just going for one of the premium pads. But if you like the nice cover (it is really nice and a fun sketchbook to use!) then go for it.

Fabriano Hardcover Black
Spiral bound, available in 6x6” or 8.25x11.75”
90 lb / 150 gsm paper
40 sheets
8.25 x 11.75” generally retails for $35.00 or $0.88 per sheet

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Summary

There are a lot of great options for black sketchbooks and drawing pads. After testing, the top two favorites were the Canson XL Black Drawing Sketchbook for it’s mix of quality and low price, and the Strathmore 400 Mixed Media Paper for it’s great quality, low price, and suitability for professional-grade artworks. But there were a variety of options for every budget. No matter what you go with, black paper is a great thing to experiment with and may just become your favorite type of drawing paper.

What is your favorite black paper for drawing, sketching, or painting? Let us know in the comments.

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Cone 6 Bisque Crackle Slip

This is a test of the bisque crackle slip commonly known as Rhodes Crackle Slip or Oestreich Slip. It is typically recommended as a Cone 10 recipe, but I noticed the same recipe was listed in John Britt’s Complete Guide to Mid-Range Glazes without zircopax (It’s also in Britt’s high fire book but with zircopax). To determine the difference, I tested the slip with and without zircopax in a cone 6 oxidation firing, on two different clay bodies, and with both brushing and dipping. Zircopax is typically a whitener / opacifier but can also stiffen glazes, so I was interested to see what it did in this recipe.

Results:

The recipe without zircopax appears to be more suitable for cone 6. It doesn’t crack quite as much, but it also didn’t flake off. The slip with zircopax was more stiff and a bit flaked off the thickest brushing tests, and larger pieces flaked off the extra-thick parts of the dipped test, especially on red stoneware.

Your results will vary, so definitely test! Also, this bisque slip is often recommended for use underneath other glazes. In that case, mixing it with our without zircopax may not make much of a difference as the other glaze can help attach pieces to your ware. The slip can also be mixed with oxides and stains. You could also vary the borax to see what happens with melting and adhesion, or try substituting gerstley borate for borax.

Cone 6 Bisque Crackle Slip

Ingredient	Percentage	1000g batch
Custer Feldspar	20	200g
Glomax (Calcined Kaolin)	20	200g
Silica	20	200g
Kaolin (EPK used in these tests)	15	150g
OM4 Ball Clay	15	150g
Borax	5	50g
For a stiffer or cone 10 slip, add:
Zircopax	5	50g

Methodology:

Two slips were mixed, one with the added zircopax.

Slip was brushed on flat tiles made with Standard 112 Brown Speckle Clay. From left to right, 1, 2, 3, and a 4th layer of slip was brushed on the tiles.

Slip was dipped on cylinders made with Standard 112 Brown Speckle and 308 Brooklyn Red clays. Slip was dipped in 3 second dips and allowed to dry, from bottom to top in 4 layers, with the top having the heaviest application. The heaviest application in both brushing and dipping resulted in the biggest cracks.

In general, the slips appeared to get a nice crackle with 3 layers brushed, and 2-3 layers dipped.

Images

The slip was brushed on test tiles made with Standard 112 Brown Speckle Clay, ranging from 1 to 4 layers. The slip with zircopax was more prone to cracking (see the difference on 2 layers) but as it got thicker, the with zirc slip did flake off a bit.

Slip was dipped onto test tiles made with Standard 308 Brooklyn Red and 112 Brown Speckle clays. Dips were 3 seconds each and ranged from one dip at the bottom to four dips at the top. The slip with zircopax was drier, cracked more, but was also more prone to flaking. A few large pieces simple fell off the red clay test tiles.

The test tiles together.

References and Summary

The recipes for this crackle slip can be found in two John Britt books:

Complete Guide to Mid-Range Glazes (shop at Amazon) (shop at Bookshop.org)

Complete Guide to High-Fire Glazes (shop at Amazon) (shop at Bookshop.org)

Or on Glazy.org, look at these pages:

Rhodes Crackle Slip

Oestreich Slip

Oestreich Bisque Crackle Slip With Colors

Borax can often be found in the laundry section of your local market. Or shop borax at Amazon.

Do you have a favorite crackle slip? Let us know in the comments.

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Gift Guide for Artists who Paint and Draw

This guide has more than 30 ideas for artists who paint, draw, and create. Most suggestions are priced between $25 and $100, along with a few higher ticket items. There are plenty of ideas for the painter or artist in your life, or perhaps you’ll find a gift for yourself. In general, this guide focuses on high-quality art supplies, equipment, and books.

Note: This site uses affiliate links for sites such as Amazon and Blick. If you click the links and complete a purchase, we may receive a percentage at no extra cost to you.

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Blick Noir French Easel

The Blick Noir French Easel.

Perfect for in the studio or on the go, this black French-style wooden easel from Blick is stylish, functional, and a great deal. The easel combines a sketchbox, easel, and canvas carrier into one unit. Folded, it measures a compact 22 x 16 x 6.5 inches, and it can extend up to 73” tall and accommodate canvases up to 34” tall. It weighs about 10 lbs. This is a great easel for someone setting up an at-home studio and can be carried or folded down for painting in plein air. It retails for around $100.

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Golden A-Z Acrylic Explorers Kit

The Golden A-Z Acrylic Explorer Kit.

This popular set introduces artists to a variety of products Golden Acrylics—the company bills it as a workshop in a box and it basically is. It includes heavy body (i.e. thick) acrylics, fluid acrylics, high flow acrylics as well as pastes, gels and mediums. It’s a great intro to Golden’s high quality product line, and can really expand an artist’s skill set. The kit retails for around $28 and includes 4 tubes of paint, 5 small bottles of paint, 4 tubes of different mediums and a bottle of clear painting medium.

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Aquabee Super Deluxe Sketchbook

The Aquabee Super Deluxe Sketchbook.

The Aquabee Super Deluxe Sketchbook from Bee Paper is a favorite mixed media pad that came out on top in our recent review of mixed media pads. It can do everything from light watercolor to ink to marker, colored pencil, and anything else. The sketchbooks are available in a variety of sizes (9x12” is a great option) and has a stiff cardboard back and a leatherette cover with a wire binding for easy turning of pages. The 93 lb / 150 gsm paper is light cream color and is a pleasure to use, and the books range from 6x4 inches to 14x17 inches, with 50 or 60 pages per book.

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Williamsburg Oil Paint Sets

The Williamsburg Oil Paint Signature Series has 9 colors in 11 ml tubes.

Williamsburg is known for its intensely pigmented, handmade oil paints that are the favorite paints of many professional artists. Available individually or in a variety of sets, try the Signature Series set of 9 for an introduction to these wonderful oil paints. An oil painter will appreciate this, or any set of the high quality Williamsburg paints. The Signature Series set has 9 tubes with 11 ml of paint each, or about 1/3 of an ounce.

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The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

This classic, first published almost 30 years ago, helps artists, writers, and creative types unlock their full potential. Through a series of exercises, such as a letter to yourself and the famous “morning pages” of free writing (visual artists can just substitute sketching) everyone can discover their creative path in an open-ended way that accommodates everyone. At times a bit new age-y, this book is still worth a read for the ideas and exercises. The book grew out of a series of workshops that Cameron ran, and the book feels like you are in the room with Cameron’s gentle but insistent guidance.

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Faber-Castell 9000 Series Drawing Set

Faber-Castell 9000 Series Drawing Set.

Faber-Castell makes some of the best pencils and is the choice of professionals and serious artists. It’s easy to just reach for the signature green pencils first. This set of 12 pencils from F-C’s signature 9000 series has one pencil each ranging from the soft and dark 8B up to 2H. There’s also a set for designers that ranges from 5B to 5H. The sets come in a hinged metal tin or a soft bag and usually retail for around $15-$20. This is the perfect set for anyone who loves to draw. Pair it with a sketchbook and a sharpener for a perfect gift.

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Tote Bag for Tools, Pencils, and Brushes

JJRing Nylon Tote Bag

Every artist can use a little organizational help, and a tote bag keeps everything is at hand and easy to find. The JJRing nylon art/craft bag is has a 16 pockets, is available in eight colors, and is a great value, typically priced at $15 to $25.

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Caran D’Ache Luminance Colored Pencils

The Caran D’Ache Luminance pictured here in the 20 pencil box.

The ultra-premium Luminance colored pencils are a joy to use and the entire set is 100 percent lightfast, which means that the pigments are designed to withstand UV rays. Under museum conditions, these colors will hold up for at least 100 years. The Luminance (and the Derwent Lightfast) were our top picks in a recent test of colored pencils based on the color intensity, quality, and the lightfast ratings. The Luminance also has an easy-to-use cardboard box where each pencil is inset into foam, so the pencils don’t jumble around. Prices range from a set of 20 pencils for $55 to a set of 76 pencils for around $225.

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The Story of Painting: How Art Was Made

The Story of Painting: How Art Was Made from DK.

This 2019 book covers the entire 25,000 year history of painting with illustrations, texts, and guides to technique, composition, and subject matter. It’s a great overview for a beginning painter, or a wonderful reference book for the more experienced artist. The details, images, and texts make this more than just a coffee table book. It’s available in hardcover for around $25.

The book includes detailed examinations of numerous paintings.

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Utrecht Artists’ Watercolor Paint Box

The Utrecht Watercolor Box is a complete painting kit.

This set has everything an artist needs to get started with watercolor painting and it’s made by Utrecht, the Brooklyn, NY company known for high quality, artist-grade paints and mediums. It comes in a beechwood box and includes a 9x12” watercolor block, four brushes, a flat knife, a needed eraser, plastic palette with 24 wells, and 18 tubes of watercolor paint. The box usually retails for around $225.

Utrecht also sells smaller sets of just watercolor paints.

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Anker Soundcore Q20 Noise Cancelling Headphones

The Anker Soundcore Q20 Noise Cancelling Headphones.

Over-ear noise cancelling headphones can really help you focus on your work, especially if you work in a shared or noisy environment. There are a lot of options for this type of headphone, but the Anker Soundcore Q20 strike a balance between quality and affordability, especially considering they will probably get covered in paint at some point. These headphones have an impressive 40 hour playing time, and a dynamic sound quality that while not quite audiophile level, really deliver a lot for the $50 price tag.

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Liquitex Acrylic Gouache

The Liquitex Acrylic Gouache 12 color essentials kit.

Gouache is a type of opaque watercolor paint, and the Liquitex Acrylic Gouache is an interesting twist on this product that is really nice to use. Think of it as a matte acrylic paint that is fluid right out of the bottle and will result in a matte finish that doesn’t show brush strokes or cracks. It’s become a favorite acrylic paint of many. It’s available in small squeeze bottles—to use, just press out what you will need on a tray or palette. The colors are available individually or in a variety of sets. Try the 12 color essentials set for around $55 or the fluorescent set is also fun.

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Blick Super Value Bulk Canvas Pack

The Blick Super Value Bulk Canvas Pack has 40 16x20” pre-primed canvases.

Almost a gag gift for the extreme size, this bulk pack of 40 stretched canvases are great for anyone who paints a lot. These 16x20” canvases are pre-primed with acrylic gesso on 5/8” thick stretcher bars. At around $120, these canvases work out to about $3 each—an incredible value. And a gift like this will provide plenty of surfaces for an artist to get to work.

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Winsor & Newton Artisan Water Mixable Oil Paint

Winsor & Newton Artisan Water Mixable Oil Paint.

Water mixable oil paint is an interesting innovation made by a variety of manufacturers. It allows you to thin paint with water (although most companies do make some mediums as well) but more importantly, you can clean up this paint with water and soap. This makes it so much easier to keep hands, brushes, palettes, and everything clean, especially if you are painting at home. Winsor & Newtown makes a great line of water mixable oil paint called Artisan, and it’s available individually and in sets. The set of 10 colors in the smaller 0.7 ounce tubes is a great introduction to this line.

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Foam Daubers

Foam daubers aka sponges on a stick.

These sponges on a stick are a fun craft tool for artists of all ages. Variously known as spouncers, daubers, or stick sponges, these are a great way to add polka dots and round shapes to any surface. Use with acrylic, watercolor, or inks. Available in bulk packs for around $10–20, they are a great tool for any artist.

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Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist by Albert Camus

Create Dangerously by Albert Camus.

This 1957 speech by the Nobel Prize winner was first published as a standalone text in 2019 in this small, pocket-sized book. A call to arms for artists to participate in society, it’s an interesting read for anyone considering a career in the art or who is interested in what role artists might take in civic discourse. The paperback usually retails for $8.

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Canson XL Black Drawing Pad

The Canson XL Black Drawing Sketchbook

A sketchbook with black paper is a fun way to mix things up in the studio. Pair it with opaque colors from pens or pencils, and you’ve got a whole new way to approach color and design. A studio favorite is the student-grade Canson XL Black Drawing Pad. Each pad features 40 pages with 92lb black paper, with micro-perforations at the side if you want to remove a drawing for framing or other purposes. Available in 7x10” or 9x12”, expect to pay $7 to $10 for these pads. For a great gift, pair this with gel pens or colored pencils.

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X-Acto Basic Knife Set and Case

The X-Acto Basic Knife Set with case.

Every artist needs X-Acto knives at some point, and this basic set of 3 knives and 10 replacement blades is a great introduction to the variety of blades from this venerable company. Use this for trimming watercolor paper, collages, or any art and hobby purposes, these will get used all the time. This set typically retails for around $23. Pair it with a cutting mat (see below) for a great gift.

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Self-Healing Cutting Mat

Alvin Cutting Mats are one option for self-healing cutting mats.

Self-healing cutting mats are a great way to protect both your tables from cuts and it helps your knife blades stay sharp longer. Available from a variety of manufacturers (Alvin, Blick, Cricut, X-Acto etc) the main thing is to pick the size and color that works for your space. Traditionally available in green and black from Alvin, there are now a variety of colors and sizes. For at-home use, an 18x24” mat or 24x36” sizes are usually best, but you can go bigger or smaller. In addition to cutting, these make great surfaces for using liquid or hot glue, or for moving around drawings or paintings that are not yet dry. The larger sizes are also useful for covering tables used for drawing, painting, and crafts.

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Arches Watercolor Blocks

Arches watercolor blocks come in a variety of paper thicknesses and finishes.

Arches makes some of the best watercolor paper and watercolor blocks are a great way to try out their paper. Sealed on the side with glue, each sheet stays in place and won’t warp, and can then be cut off using a dull knife. Then the next sheet is ready to go. These come in hot and cold press in a variety of thickness. Cold press paper has a bit more texture and the mid-weight 140 lb / 300 gsm paper is a good place to start, such as an 8x10 block of 20 sheets that retails for around $33. Pair this with a high-quality set of watercolors (such as Sennilier, Utrecht, etc) and you’ve got a great gift for a watercolor artist.

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Sennelier Watercolor Travel Set

Sennelier La Petite Watercolor Travel Set

Sennelier makes some of the best watercolors that are rich in hue, depth, and just enough transparency. They are a pleasure to use and when paired with a watercolor block (see above) make a great gift. This travel set includes 12 tubes of watercolor paint and a small palette for adding water. The tubes hold 10ml or .33 oz of watercolor paint, which can go a long way—especially if they are mixed with water and used wet on wet. It’s a great introduction to the Sennelier line of watercolors, and generally retails for $35-$40.

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JBL Bluetooth Speaker

The JBL Flip 4 portable bluetooth speaker.

It’s always great to have music or podcasts in the studio, and a portable bluetooth speaker makes it easy to play anything from your phone, tablet, or laptop. The JBL Flip 4 is slightly older (meaning it’s available at a discount) but is still a great option that sounds great, is easy to pair with devices, and comes with long-lasting build quality. For something bigger and louder, check out the JBL Charge line of speakers. The JBL Flip 4 is waterproof, available in a variety of colors, and usually retails for around $90.

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Studio Designs Fusion Center Drafting Table

Studio Designs Fusion Drafting Table and Stool. (Cabinet is not part of the set).

Studio Designs is known for high quality but affordable studio furniture (I’ve been using the Graphix II Workstation for years) and the Fusion Center is a great introductory table and stool for artists who draw, paint, or craft. Featuring a work area that is just under 24 x 35 inches, the table can adjust from flat to a 60 degree angle. There’s also a pencil and brush rack, and a slide-out side table, giving the table an overall potential footprint of 24x48 inches, and the table is adjustable from 26.75 to 35.35 high. It’s a great first desk for the serious hobbyist or art student who is ready for their own dedicated table. It typically retails for around $125.

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Daybook: The Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt

An older edition of Daybook by Anne Truitt.

This classic journal by the American sculptor has been in print continuously since it was published in the early 1980s. In it, Truitt details her daily observations about artmaking as well as her history as an artist and mother. It’s an enlightening read that ranges from the mundane, to money concerns, to the theoretical underpinnings of her works and how she made them. It’s available new and used, including a recent digital edition that includes Daybook and two more books of Truitt’s journals. For more, check out this excerpt of the book. Daybook is available in paperback for around $15.

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Holbein Artist’s Gouache Set

The 12 color set of Holbein Artists’ Gouache.

Gouache is the opaque version of watercolors and Holbein makes some of the finest gouaches around. These professional grade paints are vibrant, dry to a matte finish, and can be thinned with water if less intensity is desired. The colors are available individually or as sets, ranging from five colors for around $30 to all 84 colors for over $700. A set of 12 or 18 colors makes a great introduction to this line of colors and in the smaller .2 ml tubes, these sets range from $44 to $53.

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Pentel Pocket Brush

The Pentel Pocket Brush Pen with two refills.

The Pentel Pocket Brush is a portable, easy-to-use, and refillable brush pen that can lay down a super-fine line or a heavier stroke. Perfect for travel and on the go ink sketches, it can also be used in the studio for finished work. It’s good for painting, cartooning, and more, and is available with gray, black, or sepia-colored ink. The brush and two refills typically retails for around $13, and refills are about $3 for a two pack. Pair this with a mixed media sketchbook (such as the Aquabee Super Deluxe Sketchbook) and you’ve got a great gift.

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Alice Neel: People Come First

Alice Neel: People Come First is a 2021 monograph published by the Met Museum.

This 2021 monograph focuses on Neel’s history, social activism, and portraits. Published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and based on the blockbuster exhibition there, the hardcover book includes high-quality reproductions and essays on Neel and her work. A sense of life was in every mark that Neel made and this book is a deep look into a fascinating artist and her body of work.

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Sennelier Abstract Kit

The Sennelier Abstract Acrylic Paint Kit with 8 tips.

Sennelier Abstract acrylic paints are a new twist on painting. The paint can be squeezed out on a palette like any other paint, or try the various tips directly on these plastic pouches to squeeze paint right out of the bag. It makes the act of painting physical and immediate, and can open up a new way of working for any artist. The set includes 5 paints and 8 tips, and typically retails for around $35.

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Blick Studio Black Cotton Canvas

Blick Studio Black Cotton Canvas are pre-primed and stretched and ready to paint.

Black primed canvases are a completely different way to approach painting, and these pre-primed and stretched cotton canvases from Blick allow you to get right to painting in acrylic or oil. Available in 5 sizes ranging from 8x10 inches to 20x24 inches, these canvases have a traditional 3/4” deep stretcher bar and are suitable for hanging or framing. Pair these with an acrylic or oil painting set for a great gift.

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Golden Fluid Acrylics Set

The Golden Fluid Acrylic Set includes 10 paints.

Golden fluid acrylics are high flow, thin paints for artist that spray, brush, stain, or paint. They are highly saturated with pigment and they are almost ink-like in how they lay down and dry. They are a great way to mix things up and can be used with various mediums or thinned even further with water. The set of paints includes 10 colors in 1 oz jars and usually retails for around $42

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Blick Super Value Hardbound Sketchbook

The Blick Super Value Hardbound Sketchbook two pack.

Hardbound sketchbooks are great ways to keep all your sketches, thoughts, and notes in one place and this 2 pack is simply an incredible deal. At around $12 for two sketchbooks, it’s the same price you’ll pay for one hardbound sketchbook at other stores. The 65 lb paper measures 8.5x11 inches and is smooth, white, and acid free.

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Caran D’Ache Pablo and Supracolor Gift Box

The Caran D’Ache Pablo and Supracolor box set.

This handsome wooden box has a full set of Caran D’Ache Pablo colored pencil and Supracolor water-mixable colored pencils. The two lines blend together easily, giving you an unlimited range of possibilities for drawing, shading, blending, and working wet. At $464, it’s quite the statement gift but it includes 180 pencils, for an average cost of $2.58 each.

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Other Gift Ideas

Classes: A set of classes at a local studio or art studio can be a great gift.

Magazine Subscriptions: Magazines are great sources of ideas and inspiration.

Tours, Trips, or Conferences: Look for painting-specific travel tours, retreats, or conferences.

What are your favorite gift ideas for artists? Let us know in the comments.

Gift Guides

Check out these posts:

Gift Guide for Potters

Gift Guide for Young Artists and Creative Kids

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"If you can walk, you can dance" Louise Nevelson on making art

Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow by Laurie Wilson

Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow is a 2016 biography of the artist by Laurie Wilson. It’s a comprehensive, detailed overview of Nevelson’s life and approaches to art and is a great read.

From a young age, Nevelson was always making art but a combination of factors kept her on the margins of the art world until her late 50s, when she began to show in New York City and then, around the world. In her 60s and 70s, Nevelson became one of the most prominent sculptors in the world, working with installations, public art, and making numerous museum and solo gallery shows with her sculptural works.

It’s an inspiring story, and one that probably rings true to most artists in both the joy of art making but also the struggles to forge an artistic life and create your own path.

Below are a few excerpts from the book, with words by Wilson and quotes from Nevelson. The book is available in hardcover or digital editions.

Nevelson on making art:

“I’d rather work twenty-four hours a day in my studio … than do anything I know. Because this is living. It’s like pure water…. The essence of living is in doing, and in doing, I have made my world, and it’s a much better world than I ever saw outside.”

Sculpture is like a person…

One of Nevelson’s observations about this work could describe her aim as an artist: “I tell people who ask, that I don’t use wood; I don’t use black; I don’t make sculpture. If the sum of this wall doesn’t transcend wood and black and making something, then I’ve failed. Sculpture is like a person, who adds up to a lot more than a few cents worth of chemicals. I’m trying to communicate. Not to make something.” For Nevelson, this went beyond a statement about art; she was trying to articulate what she knew about the human condition: We are all alike and we are all different. And she saw her mission as expressing these contradictory truths, not in so many words, but through the formal decisions she made in her art.

On terra cotta clay, and approaches to different mediums.

Nevelson claimed that she worked on stone only when she was “a little exhausted creatively.” When she felt in full power, she preferred terra-cotta because “it gives flight and does not retard or restrict … the quick response of the clay to each idea; it permits a simplicity of approach.

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It seems Nevelson was repeatedly driven to create new formats and new versions, when she approached a familiar medium, as though the tried-and-true was never quite so satisfying as what had yet to be attempted or seen.

From the book: a 1944 experiment with found wood and a tire.

On sexism in the arts:

When asked if men treated her as an equal, Nevelson was quick to answer. “Originally, no—at 70 years, yes.”

“When I first started, nobody took me seriously. In the galleries—a woman! I’d look in the mirror and see the gestures they made behind my back. Meshugganah! A woman wanting to be a sculptor. A man sculptor said to me, ‘Louise, you don’t want to be a sculptor. To be a sculptor, you’ve got to have balls.’ ‘I’ve got balls,’ I said. But it hurt inside.”

Ferocious Bull, 1942. Another sculptural experiment that was lost.

If you can walk…

Jean Lipman, who had written Nevelson’s World a few years earlier, recalled a moment when Charles Kuralt asked Nevelson toward the end of the TV interview how, at age eighty, she could possibly maintain the energy and quality of the work that had made her famous. Nevelson paused for a full minute and said: “Look, Dear, if you can walk, you can dance.”

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Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow

512 pages, 2016, by Laurie Wilson.

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The "Arena of My Own Spirit." Anne Truitt on Finding Certainty in Her Work

Daybook by Anne Truitt, the 1984 Penguin paperback edition.

This text is from Anne Truitt’s journal Daybook. First published in 1982, it’s been in print since and is a wonderful book that should be on every artist’s bookshelf. Truitt was known for her minimalist sculptures and paintings. She also published three journals, including Daybook, Turn, and Prospect, that chronicled her approaches to art making, parenthood, memories, and thoughts on life as an artist.

This journal entry is from 1975, but is reflecting on 1961, about a year after the birth of Truitt’s son. In this passage, she describes how she started making the work that became her signature style.

From Daybook, by Anne Truitt:

27 March, 1975

It was in this familiar context that, one year after Sam’s birth, my work suddenly erupted into certainty. I was taken by surprise and to this day do not know why it happened.

When Sam was a few months old, fairly launched, I rented a room at 1506 30th Street, across from our house. On the third floor, looking west from a sort of turret that jutted out into the air, it was rather pokey but exceedingly convenient as I could run back and forth easily. I picked up my work where I had left off in San Francisco and continued to make loose drawings with black and brown ink. These were done very fast, on sheets of newsprint paper into which the ink was absorbed in such a way as to make them look more expressionistic than they were in my mind. I was on the track of square and rectangular shapes, articulated back into the depth of the ink, echoing the structures I had seen on archeological sites in Mexico, most particularly those of Mayan temples. I began making these obsessively repetitive shapes in the summer of 1958 after Mary’s birth, not only in drawings but also in three dimensions. I used very dark brown clay, heavily grogged, and built up the sculptures from the inside out, using the classical method taught me by Alexander Giampietro. I still sometimes miss the marvelous feeling of rolling the clay between my fingers and thumb and then pushing the warm, full shape against its fellows to swell the unity of a structure growing slowly under my hand. This satisfaction with the certainty of a familiar and compatible process was one of the pleasures I had to forego when my work changed direction and forced me to go against the grain of my own taste and training.

On a visit to my studio early in 1961, Kenneth Noland pointed out to me the possibility of enlarging the scale of these sculptures. I remember my reluctance to absorb this idea, partly because I was afraid and partly because of my pleasure in using clay in a way that gave me such satisfaction. I think, however, that his suggestion opened up my thinking and combined with my obsessive concern with the weights of squares and rectangles to pave the way for the change that took place some months later.

The change itself was set off by a weekend trip to New York with my friend, Mary Pinchot Meyer, in November 1961, almost one year to the day after Sam’s birth. We went up on Saturday and spent the afternoon looking at art. This was my first concentrated exposure since 1957, when I had moved to San Francico, and I was astonished to note the freedom with which materials of various sorts were being used. More specifically, how they were being put to use. That is, I noticed that the materials were used without particular attention to their intrinsic bent, as if what I had always thought of as their natural characteristics was being disregarded. For the first time, I grasped the fact that art could spring from concept, and medium could be in its service. I had always rooted myself in process, the thrust of my endeavor being to seek patiently and unremittingly how an idea would emerge from a material. My insight into the art I saw that afternoon reversed this emphasis, throwing the balance of meaning from material to idea. And this reversal released me from the limitations of material into the exhilarating arena of my own spirit.

At the Guggenheim Museum, I saw my first Ad Reinhardt. I was baffled by what looked to be an all-black painting and enchanted when Mary pointed out the delicate changes in hue. I remember feeling a wave of gratitude—to her for showing me such an incredibly beautiful fact and to the painter for having made it to be seen. Farther along the museum’s ramp, a painting constructed with wooden sticks and planes also caught my attention, setting off a kind of home feeling; I do not remember the artist’s name but liked his using plain old wood such as I had seen all my life in carpentry. And when we rounded into the lowest semicircular gallery, I saw my first Barnett Newman, a universe of blue paint by which I was immediately ravished. My whole self was lifted into it. “Enough” was my radiant feeling—for once in my life enough space, enough color. It seemed to me that I had never before been free. Even running in a field had not given me the same airy beatitude. I would not have believed it possible had I not seen it with my own eyes. Such openness wiped out with one swoop all of my puny ideas. I staggered out into the street, intoxicated with freedom, lifted into a realm I had not dreamed could be caught into existence. I was completely taken by surprise, the more so as I had only earlier that day been thinking how I felt like a plowed field, my children all born, my life laid out; I saw myself stretched like brown earth in furrows, open to the sky, well planted, my life as a human being complete. My yearning for a family, my husband and my children, had been satisfied. I had looked for no more in the human sense and felt content.

I went home early to Mary’s mother’s apartment, where we were staying, thinking I would sleep and absorb in self-forgetfulness the fullness of the day. Instead, I stayed up almost the whole night, sitting wakeful in the middle of my bed like a frog on a lily pad. Even three baths spaced through the night failed to still my mind, and at some time during these long hours I decided, hugging myself with determined delight, to make exactly what I wanted to make. The tip of balance from the physical to the conceptual in art had set me to thinking about my life in a whole new way. What did I know, I asked myself. What did I love? What was it that meant the very most to me inside my very own self? The fields and trees and fences and boards and lattices of my childhood rushed across my inner eye as if borne by a great, strong wind. I saw them all, detail and panorama, and my feeling for them welled up to sweep me into the knowledge that I could make them. I knew that that was exactly what I was going to do and how I was going to do it.

Anne Truitt, First, 1961. Acrylic on wood, 44 1/4 x 17 3/4 x 7 inches. Image via annetruitt.org.

Mary Meyer and I returned to Washington the next day, and early Monday morning I bought some white shelf paper and went to my studio. There I drew to full size three 54” irregularly pointed boards, backed by two rectangular boards, placed on a flat rectangular board. I went straight down 30th Street to a lumber store and ordered the boards cut to the size of my drawing; I bought clamps and glue and some white house paint. When the boards were ready, I glued them together, painted them, and there was my sculpture: First.

I returned immediately to the lumber store with two more drawings. While I was explaining to the man what I wanted and what I intended to do, he said mildly, “You can have them put together across the street if you want to, in our mill.” “Oh, can I?” I said. “Thank you.” And I seized my daughter Mary in her dark blue snowsuit from the counter where she had been perched to watch what was going on. I had to rush off for a carpool and hadn’t time to go to the mill right then, but I remember stopping outside the store and going down on my knees in the snow to hug Mary and tell here that I could make whatever I wanted to now, overcome by the possibilities that surged into my mind. I had seen that size would be a problem and had had no idea how I was going to make what I saw in my mind in that little studio with my meager equipment, time, and strength.

When I got back to the mill, I went in to see the manager. He placidly looked at my roll of drawings and allowed as how he could make them up for me. But, he suggested, I could make scale drawings and that would be easier for us both. So off I went and bought a scale ruler. A young architectural student was buying something at the same time and showed me how to use it. So I set up a system: scale drawings and mill fabrication. I also telephoned the financial advisor who had charge of the money I had inherited and asked him to transfer five thousand dollars into a new, special checking account. I used this account exclusively for my work from then on, replenishing the funds from my capital without giving it too much thought.

Anne Truitt, 1978.

In 1962, I made thirty seven sculptures, ranging in size from that of the first fence up to around ten feet tall. Most of these I made in Kenneth Noland’s studio in Twining Court, which he generously allowed me to rent for ten dollars a month after his departure for New York. It was a ramshackle old carriage house with a huge hayloft equipped with a large hay door and hooked lift, which I used to hoist the larger sculpture in and out. There were also four other rooms, two crammed with rusted bedsprings; I had these carted off, and then whitewashed one of the rooms so I had a place for finished work. No heat, no water, rats—I used to stamp my feet when I came in—and the place was dismally damp. No matter.

— Excerpt from Daybook by Anne Truitt, 1984 paperback edition, pages 148–153.

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“Is that enough?” Richard Hamilton on Painting, Representation, and Skill, from 1971

British artist Richard Hamilton gave a talk to students in 1971 during his show “Metamorfose van het object” at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The talk was recorded by Jef Cornelis and a transcript was first published in a 2014 catalogue that accompanied a Tate Modern retrospective of Hamilton’s work. Here’s an excerpt of that text along with part of the introduction by Mark Godfrey. The whole text can be found in the catalogue.

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Richard Hamilton at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1971

From the introduction by Mark Godfrey:

Hamilton begins with a succinct analysis of four categories of painting that he deploys in his work: figuration; diagrammatic representation of information or space; painting which foregrounds the material qualities of paint; and semiotic painting, where a work might include signs or words. Remarkably, Hamilton shows that each kind of painting can be useful (and deployed without parody or quotation) even if he does not subscribe to the belief system around it. He acknowledges the Abstract Expressionist mark for instance, even though he does not find a drip of paint to be “sensuous.” Other European artists were beginning to juxtapose different kinds of abstract strokes to represent modernism as an exhausted set of options (for example Sigmar Polke) but no one else was putting together these four kinds of painting to explore their different functions.

Another still image from the film of Richard Hamilton’s 1971 talk.

Hamilton later connects his tendency to make different versions of a work and his skepticism towards a signature style…Many of the Conceptual artsist would have criticized such a work, and painting in general, but at the end of this talk Hamilton comes up with an extraordinary justification of painting through the language of Conceptual art. If anything that documents an artist’s thought is a work of art, then ready-made, a neon text, or photostat of a dictionary definition is no more or less valid an art work than a painting. With razor-like thinking Hamilton cuts through the discourses of the tie that would deny works like his own their place among radical practices.

Richard Hamilton:

I find that everything I do is concerned with one of four means of representation, that is, concerned either with one way of doing something or with a number of ways superimposed on one another. The first way is probably pure figuration, pure photographic rendering—the kind of traditional way in which people perceive the world and the way they perceive and experience of the world through a two-dimensional surface. A lot of the work that I have done is concerned with photography. Rather than paint it in a laborious kind of way, I say: “All right, I know that we can paint it but the camera can do that kind of job perfectly well.” So very often I find myself using the camera at the one level: information about imagery.

Then I find that there’s a geometrical approach, a diagrammatic way of providing information or receiving information—so that perspective is sometimes elaborated in a very precise way. Then there are occasions when I remember that paint itself has some quality, that the medium of paint is important; American Abstract Expressionism was concerned almost entirely with that plastic quality of paint. So I put paint in a very direct way onto a photograph or onto a drawing. But I don’t think I use it for a sensuous enjoyment of the paint. I’m saying that there is that other response to paint, and if I put it on, on a print or on a painting, I feel that it’s kind of token, it’s a representation. It simply signifies that kind of mark is a category: the plastic quality of the paint.

There are also other ways of receiving information. For example, a cross is a mark which has some plastic quality, but it also means something—it has a meaning as a sign: it means “no”, so a tick means “yes.” I think that signs appear sometimes in my work. Sometimes I’m interested in language expressed in a literary form. So some of these prints have words attached to them, and what I think they’re all about, really, are ways of communicating at a visual level. The interest for me in painting is to explore the whole of that territory, rather than to find a style which I can say is my own and to go on working in that vein. In a way, I try to exploit my talents: I think that it’s possible to use any kind of technical facility, any skill of handling that I might have received from institutions, even those which have a rather bad reputation. These days no one has any respect for the Royal Academy in London, but I have a very high regard for the skills it gave me, because I like to think that I can do a certain number of things. I feel I can do what I want to do because I have this technical facility given me by an education in a very stuffy academic art school.

And from the end of the talk:

A lot of artists now, I think, don’t look at the world directly. The paintings up to the end of the nineteenth century were all a direct experience of the world. People looked at the world and they experienced something and they tried to record that experience. But now I think the general experience of the world comes through magazines, through television, through cinema. There are many ways of experiencing the world, but the most important ways now are these secondary ways. The direct way of perceiving the world is of less importance to everybody, and I think that’s very significant…

Pages 206-207 of the Richard Hamilton catalogue, published in 2014.

There’s an exhibition in Nuremberg at the moment and I suppose a lot of conceptual art will be there. The theme of the exhibition, because it’s on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Dürer, is a statement they’ve taken from Dürer: “What beauty is, I don’t know.” And so I’ve tried to think not only what beauty was but also what art was and is now, at this present time. I decided first of all that a work of art is really no more than evidence that somebody has thought of a work of art. I think Duchamp establishes that the work of art itself is of no importance, because the work of art can change. It changes after its production through , in the first place, decay, and it also changes because the people who look at it change. This is one of the facts that one accepts about a work of art, now that we understand that it isn’t a permanent, timeless thing. So that you can say only that the work of art is telling you something about what the artist thought. What is important about the work of art is that it carries some thread, some information, from the mind of the artist.

One has to say: “This is what’s important—it’s what happened in the artist’s mind that is important, not what happened on the piece of paper, or that canvas, or the object. This is an intermediary vehicle.” I’ve carried this process further and said that anything that communicates an artist’s thoughts is a work of art. It doesn’t need even to be made by the artist—it doesn’t need to be in any particular style, because you can work in another person’s style and it will still be a work of art. You can work ironically or seriously you can do anything—anything is possible. The only thing that’s important is that what is produced is a document which relates to an idea. I ended up by saying that a painting is evidence that an artist has proposed a work of art. And I don’t see why a painting isn’t just as good evidence that a work of art has been produced as, well, any other kind of activity that artists can engage in.

… Is that enough?

The cover of the book.

Read the entire statement in on pages 201–207 in the catalog Richard Hamilton, 2014, published by the Tate Modern.

The catalogue includes numerous images and reproductions of Hamilton’s work, an introduction by Paul Schimmel and essays by:

• Victoria Walsh

• Benjamin Buchloh

• Alice Rawsthorn

• Hal Foster

• Mark Godfrey

• Fanny Singer

What do you think about Richard Hamilton’s statement? Let us know in the comments.

You may also be interested in:

• A Time For New Dreams by Ben Okri

• Shoji Hamada on making pots.

• Centering by M.C. Richards.

For more posts like this, click here.

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Best Glues and Adhesives for Ceramics

Glues and adhesives are a vital part of any ceramics studio. Used for repairing and creating, it’s important to have the right glue for the job. This post will cover a variety of glues and adhesives, each with their own features and drawbacks. There’s no shame in using glue, some prominent ceramic artists are even known to say that epoxies and glues are “one of their mediums.”

TOP PICK: E6000 Industrial Strength Adhesive

E6000 is the one glue that should be in every studio. It’s ready to use right out of the tube, dries in a relatively short amount of time, and can be used with ceramic, metal, wood, fabric, glass, and polymer clay. It’s equally at home for making jewelry as it is for repairing things like ceramic mug handles. And it can often be found with precision tips so you can apply just the right amount.

E6000 also dries quickly, staying tacky for 4 to 5 minutes. Then, allow at least 24 hours to cure to full strength. When fully cured (may take as long as 48 to 72 hours) it has a strength of 3,500 PSI or pounds per square inch. E6000 also can be painted, sanded, or scraped away, and it is resistant to water upon application. It’s also available in a variety of sizes, including small 1 oz tubes suitable for precision work.

For info on more glues and adhesives, keep reading.

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Table of Contents

• Top Pick: E6000

• Devcon and other 2-part epoxies

• PC-7 and PC-11

• JB Weld

• Magic-Sculpt

• Gorilla Glue

• Modge Podge

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Devcon 2 Part 5 Minute Epoxy

Devcon 5 Minute Clear epoxy is a two-part adhesive that can be found in plungers (pictured) or larger volumes in separate bottles.

Two-part epoxies are strong and are a better option than the various “super glues” found everywhere. The clear versions of these epoxies also do a great of mimicking the shiny look of a fired glaze, although they are available in off white as well. My go to brand is Devcon, although any clear two-part epoxy will get the job done. Look for plunger barrel option (pictured) although some come in larger sizes in two bottles. Also be sure to pick a “5 minute” epoxy. Some have longer set times up to 30-60 minutes, and than can be frustrating to use with a runny glue.

To use, squeeze out equal amounts of the resin and hardener on something disposable such as a piece of scrap paper, and mix with a kraft stick or even just a twisted up piece of cardboard. Then apply to what needs to be glued and press together. You may need to hold it in place for 5 to 10 minutes (tape or rubber bands can help) and then you should be good. The pictured Devcon Home 5 Minute Epoxy has a 5 minute handling time, an 8-10 minute set time, and a 60 minute curing time, with a strength of 1500 PSI when it is cured. Fast and strong! That’s why 2-part epoxies are handy to have in the studio. Below are links to the Devcon (pictured) and Gorilla 2 part clear epoxies.

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PC-7 and PC-11

PC-7 is a charcoal gray 2 part paste epoxy. The smallest 2 oz (56g) option is pictured.

PC-7 and PC-11 are really interesting two-part paste epoxies that bond to ceramic along with wood, metal, glass, tile, masonry, rubber, fiberglass, and some plastics. PC-7 is charcoal gray, while PC-11 is white and rated for underwater uses. (PC-11 will even cure underwater.) Both are great options for working with sculpture as they will fill gaps, hold things in place on a vertical or upside down surface, and just do things that other adhesives won’t do.

PC-11 is a two part white, marine-grade paste epoxy.

Described by the manufacturer as “thicker than peanut butter but less thick than bubble gum,” these products can be a bit of a pain to work with because they are so sticky. My technique is to scoop out equal parts (eyeball measure) with kraft sticks and mix on a piece of cardboard until the colors are homogenized, wait a bit for the epoxy to thicken, and then apply. For cleanup, I’ve found that a small bowl of vinegar with quickly clean up any PC-7 or PC-11 on my fingers, although be careful to not get vinegar on your working surfaces or the adhesive won’t stick as well. If you have excess epoxy on a sculpture or anywhere, it can be wiped away with a cloth or paper towel.

Both epoxies have a working time of about 30 minutes, and will fully cure in 12 to 24 hours for a strength of 2150 PSI (PC-7) or 1710 PSI (PC-11).

I stock both of these in my studio, usually in the small 2 oz package. They always come in handy and can be used to attach tiles to mounting wire or cleats, and are paintable when cured. I even had a friend who (not recommended!) bisque fired PC-11 as a gap filler and then would glaze over it. It’s a crazy adhesive that you can push to the limits.

PC-7 and PC-11 are available in a variety of sizes, ranging from 2oz to 10 gallons.

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J-B Weld

J-B Weld is a two-part, paste epoxy pictured here with the smallest 2 oz package (I oz per tube).

J-B Weld is similar to PC-7 (both are made primarily with bisphenol-A) but it is a bit runnier when mixed and has a much higher strength, rated at 5020 PSI. Invented as an alternative to welding plumbing, it bonds to ceramic, metal, wood, plastic, PVC, fiberglass, and more. It also has some metal in the mix, so it can withstand temperatures up to 550 Fahrenheit when fully cured. For many, it’s their favorite epoxy.

After mixing, J-B Weld has a set time of 4 to 6 hours, a cure time of 15-24 hours, and is dark grey, just a bit darker than PC-7. J-B Weld is a paste epoxy but it’s a trade off between it’s much higher strength versus PC-7, while having a slightly less pasty quality and a longer set time. But for the right job, there’s nothing better.

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Magic-Sculpt

The 5lb Magic-Sculpt kit comes with 2.5 lb tubs of resin and hardener.

Magic-Sculpt is truly magic. A two-part epoxy, when the resin and hardener are mixed you have a non-sticky, almost clay-like substance that can be sculpted, be used as a gap filler, or even be used to attach cleats or other attachment. Once mixed, the working time is 45 minutes to an hour and in 12 to 24 hours, the material will be rock hard.

The material can be smoothed with a bit of water while it’s soft, and once hard, it can be painted, sanded or even drilled through. Magic-Sculpt is available in seven colors, including natural (gray), white, tan, light brown, dark brown, green, and black.

See below for pictures of how the natural gray color is mixed and the sculpting potential.

An example of how Magic-Sculpt can be mixed:

The resin and hardener in the tubs

Equal amounts are mixed by volume

Mixing the two parts together

After mixing, the color is still light gray

The material can take any shape

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Gorilla Glue

Gorilla Glue is a polyurethane adhesive that is most commonly used in woodworking but can bond a wide variety of materials, is waterproof, and expands after application, making it an excellent gap filler. Note that Gorilla now makes a wide variety of glues, but the original Gorilla Glue is what is being reviewed here. It’s a pretty original product that can bond wood, stone, metal, ceramic, foam, glass, concrete, and more.

Because Gorilla Glue expands after application (up to three times) it does take a bit of work. You’ll need to wipe away excess glue as it expands for about 15 minutes. As it expands, excess glue can be chipped or sanded off, and the object being glued should remained clamped for at least two hours, and a full cure is reached after 24 hours.

The original Gorilla Glue has a honey color, but it is also now available in clear. (Some reviewers have noted that the clear Gorilla Glue has less stickiness, so make sure to clamp pieces tightly.) Gorilla Glue can harden when exposed to air, so make sure to keep the glue squeezed to the top of the bottle and only buy the size needed.

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Summary

This post has covered a variety of adhesives and epoxies that are useful in ceramics studios, but can be used for sculpture, crafts, really just about anything. You may find that one glue, such as E6000, will cover most of your studio needs but you never know, the right glue or the right tool can make all the difference when you need it.

What adhesives do you use in the studio? Let us know in the comments.

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Special Effect Glazes by Linda Bloomfield

These days everyone seems to be interested in over-the-top glazes that drip, ooze, and crawl. Inspired by the work of artists such as Takuro Kuwata, Brian Rochefort, and Nick Weddell, many ceramic artists and potters are experimenting with glazes that push the limits.

If you are looking for an overall guide, Special Effect Glazes by Linda Bloomfield is a good overview and introduction. Published in 2020, the book details glaze materials, chemistry, and recipes to make your own glazes. The book is well illustrated throughout, and primarily includes glazes for mid range (cone 5-6) and high fire (cone 8-10), though there are some low fire recipes too. It’s a paperback with 160 pages, listed at $34.99 but often retails for less.

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The table of contents page for Special Effects Glazes.

Overview

The book includes 20 chapters, with the first half of the book devoted to understanding glazes and materials. If you have another book on glazing, such as John Britt’s Complete Guide to Mid-Range Glazes, this will largely be duplicate information. But it is necessary to include this information so that anyone can pick up this book and learn about glazes. Throughout these intro chapters, special attention is paid to how to push glazes outside of the “traditional” range of satin, glossy, transparent or functional glazes. There’s also a lot of information on the chemistry of glazing, including how to read a Stull map.

If you read and work to understand this info, you can begin to unlock the secrets of how to take a glaze and push it to get the effects needed for your work, and it will also help you understand things like crazing that many functional potters work to avoid.

Special Effects Glazes is beautifully illustrated throughout with full-color images.

The most interesting chapters for me were the individual sections on different types of glazes, including crackle, ash, copper red, drippy glazes, crystalline glazes, lichen / crawl glazes, lava, spotted, and metallic glazes. I don’t particularly think of all of these as “special effect” glazes. For example, most glaze books include sections on ash or copper red glazes. Some of the chapters are more in depth, such as seven pages devoted to crystalline glazes and their chemistry, and just four devoted to ash glazes.

When I bought the book, I was hoping for something that would unlock the secrets of the recent bombastic glaze trends of huge drips, inch-thick crawl “glazes” and the like. While there are pictures of some of these, they aren’t covered with specific recipes. Instead, there are hints such as on page 101: “To make a very thickly applied drips and globs of glaze, it may be better to use a slightly more viscous glaze with a higher clay content.” Ok…so give us some recipes!

Page 102 and 103 in the book.

On page 102, a picture of a Nick Weddell piece “Alien Gum Bowl” includes info that the piece was decorated with porcelain and glazes mixed to a thick paste with sodium silicate and fired to cone 10. The book also has a cover image of a 2018 piece by Brian Rochefort, but doesn’t detail any glaze recipes related to that piece.

So while the book did not exactly deliver on my desire for a guidebook to the recent extreme glaze trends, there is a ton of information and a variety of recipes in this book. If you are a frequent user of glazy.org, you may recognize some of these recipes (such as the venerable Marilee’s Lava glaze) but personally, I like to have a printed copy for handy studio reference and I’m sure I’ll be studying this book for hints as to how I can push glazes to extreme effects in my own work.

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A two-page spread from the chapter on spotted glazes.

Conclusion

Special Effects Glazes is a useful studio reference with a lot of information. You might be able to find much of this online in various forums, but I think it is useful to have it as one book. And while it didn’t include the super-extreme recipes I was hoping to find, there are many useful clues and ideas of how to test and push the glazes in a direction that works for your studio.

Special Effects Glazes by Linda Bloomfield
Published 2020 by Herbert Press, Bloomsbury, and The American Ceramic Society
160 pages, paper

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Tips and Ideas for Extreme Special Effect Glazes

And here are a few of my own thoughts on how to achieve your own special effect glazes:

1. Paint a thin layer of a crawl glaze on top of a glossy glaze, such as a black crawl over a pink transparent

2. Pick a bead / crawl glaze and make tests by pushing the percentage of one ingredient higher and higher, such as adding more clay content, or silica. Keep track of your experiements!

3. Think of clay and glaze as a continuum. Find that middle spot between clay and glaze for something that stays thick but melts a bit, and then mix it into a paste (with or without sodium silicate). Apply thickly.

4. Underfire a glaze, such as taking a cone 6 glaze and only firing it to cone 1. If you apply this as a gob, you may then get a nice fat “drip” on the side of your piece.

5. Reglaze and refire with glaze and /or underglaze. Commercial underglazes generally have gums that allow them to dry and stick to just about anything. Experiment with underglazes painted on top of crawl glazes

6. Buy fine silicon carbide (such as 400 to 600 grit) and add it to any glaze starting at around 0.3 percent by weight up to about 3 percent, to create a lava or bubble glaze.

7. Think about the contrast between matte and glossy, and textures. A contrast in the surface can accentuate certain parts of your piece.

8. Embed colored glaze fragments in your greenware for extra drippy runs.

9. Play around with double or triple layers of glaze. For example, a crawl glaze under a glossy glaze will give different results that a gloss over a crawl.

Any more thoughts on how to make extreme / special effect glazes? Please share in the comments.

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Gift Guide for Young Artists and Creative Kids

Art supplies make a wonderful gift for kids and this guide will cover a wide variety of quality tools and kits for kids of all ages.

As an artist and a parent, my philosophy is to provide quality supplies such as colored pencils and paper and let kids follow their own ideas. But it can also be fun to work with a kit or set, so I have included a few favorites here too. And sometimes a special tool or supply is just the thing to unlock a whole world for a kid, and for adults too.

This post has a variety of ideas for kids of all ages, including art supplies, kits, books, and supplies.

Note: This site uses affiliate links for sites such as Amazon and Blick. If you click the links and complete a purchase, we may receive a percentage at no extra cost to you.

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Faber-Castell Young Artist’s Essentials Gift Set

This kit, from the venerable German art supply manufacturer, includes 64 pieces in a handsome wooden box. The kit includes colored pencils, watercolor pencils, graphite pencils, oil pastels, markers, small sheets of watercolor paper, and a sharpener. Pair this with a drawing pad and your kid is set for hours and hours of drawing and painting. Kids love having these sets and it also helps organize their materials. This kit is listed at $50 but I’ve seen it on sale for half that.

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Strathmore Vision Sketchbook

Strathmore Vision Mixed Media sketchbook is great for anyone.

The Strathmore Vision Mixed Media sketchbook has great paper and a second, customizable cover in slate blue cardstock. Simply rip off the first cover and start drawing and painting! And the thicker, 98lb mixed media paper works well with pencils, crayons, markers, and can even be used with ink and light washes of watercolor. Any mixed media pad is better than a drawing sketchbook because of the thicker paper (check out our mixed media sketchbook review here) but this pad is a great option for kids, teenagers, and students. It usually costs around $10 for a 9x12'“ pad.

The customizable, blank cover is a great feature of the Strathmore Vision mixed media pad.

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Prismacolor Premier Colored Pencils

The Prismacolor Premier 24 count pack in a metal tin with two plastic trays of pencils.

Prismacolor Premiers are some of the best and most affordable artist-grade colored pencils on the market. They are great for adults but kids will also appreciate the soft cores and vibrant colors. And they are quite affordable too. They do cost more than Crayola or other school brands, but those pencils are have hard cores and inferior pigment. Go with the bold colors of Prismacolor Premiers, or click here to see our full review of colored pencils.

Prismacolor Premier Colored Pencils are available individually or in sets ranging from 12 to 150 colors. A 24-count tin typically costs around $25.

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Magic Clay Kit

This set of air-dry clay comes with 36 colors, 47 accessories including a few tools, and will generate hours of fun crafting and creating. The clay dries in about 24 hours and has mess-free clean up. There’s also a larger kit with 50 colors of clay. Recommended for ages 6 and up.

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The Original Spirograph

No childhood is complete without this classic geometric drawing tool, first released in 1965. It’s equally fun for adults and allows you to explore patterns, math, and hand control. Create endless designs and try it with pens, pencils, and any sort of drawing media. The sets do come with fine point pens as well.

There are a variety of sets including a Spirograph Jr., scratch art, or a small travel version, but the Original Deluxe for around $24 is a great option.

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Arnold Grummer Zig-Zag Books

These prefolded, acid-free, accordion-style zig zag booklets give kids a fun way to make their own books, stories, or extended drawing panels. Available in three different sizes, the packs come with 12 booklets. Pair these packs with colored pencils or markers for a gift that will provide hours of fun and creativity. The packs come with chipboard covers and insert pages too.

The Arnold Grummer Zig Zag book packs typically range from $16 to $23.

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Jovi Plastilina

For sculptors of all ages, Jovi Plastilina is a non-hardening modeling clay that holds fine detail and can be reused over and over. It’s great for model making, small sculptures, or can be used to make stop-motion animation.

The colors will blend, if desired, or you can work to keep them separate. The clay is gluten free, is non-staining, and cleans up easily. The recommended pack costs around $29 and comes with 30 bars, 2 each of 15 colors, but there are a variety of pack sizes available that range in price from $9 to $75. This is a great, basic art supply that provides amazing, open-ended sculpting possibilities.

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Dough Builders

These plastic body parts—essential generic Potato Head parts—pair well with Plastilina, Play-Do, or any sort of modeling dough. Make fun creatures, characters, monsters and animals.

Amazon sells a huge 260-piece tub for around $30, while Blick has a more modest sized set for around $6.50 with 25 assorted parts. The large tub has 26 styles of pieces with 10 of each, so a smaller set might be enough for most kids but the big tub is great for parties, classrooms, or larger gatherings.

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Alphacolor Biggies Tempera Cakes

These semi-moist cakes of non-toxic tempera paint respond immediately to a wet brush. These cakes will never spoil or dry out, making them a long-lasting addition to your craft drawer without dealing with a bunch of bottles of paint. These opaque colors will blend, and stay vibrant and velvety smooth when dry. Pair these with a pad of mixed media or watercolor paper, and your kid will have unlimited possibilities.

These are available as an 8 pack in a plastic tray, or as 12 individual cakes. There are some complaints about the tray (it can get messy) but consider putting the paints inside separate deli containers or styrofoam trays, or any sort of system that makes sense to you. For $20 for the 8 pack, they’re an awesome set of paints for young artists.

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ArtBin Sketch Board and Storage Bin

The ArtBin Sketch Board is great for drawing or watercolor on the go, or to simply organize art supplies at home. ArtBin makes simple, functional storage bins and this takes their basic bin to the next level with pencil storage, pocket, and a clip inside and on the top to hold a pad or paper in place. Note that the plastic molding is not perfectly flat, so plan to use this with cardboard behind your paper such as a sketchpad or watercolor block.

The ArtBin Sketch Board typically retails for between $26 and $30. It measures 11.5” x 16” x 1.5” deep, and will easily hold a 9x12” sketchpad.

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Canson XL Black Drawing Pad

Black paper really makes colors pop and pairs well with colored pencils, pastels, and gel pens. It’s a fun a way to switch things up and the Canson XL Black Drawing Pads have great quality at an affordable price. Available in two sizes: 10x7” and 9x12”, they typically retail for $7 to $10.

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Sakura Gelly Roll Pens

Gel pens look great on all sorts of media, including black paper or on top of other paints, and the Sakura Gelly Roll Pens are some of the best out there. These may not be best for younger kids, but older elementary school children and older should be able to use these without too much mess—just let the ink dry before touching. Available in a variety of sets, try the Classic set of 10 pens for a young artist for around $12 to $14. There are other sets available, including metallic pens or the complete line of 74 Gelly Roll pens retails for around $85.

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Arnold Grummer Dip Handmade Paper Kit

Turn your scrap and waste paper into beautiful homemade paper with this 8 1/2” x 11” paper making screen. It’s super fun to explore this process, and you can use the results to make more projects! In addition to this screen, you’ll need a tub that can fit the screen (such as a plastic dish tub or deep cake pan), blender, and recycled paper or buy speciality paper fiber. The kit does come with some dried botanical pieces to get you started.

The 8 1/2 x 11” screen is a great size to start, but there’s a smaller screen available, as well as a deluxe kit that comes with a variety of templates. Kids will love making paper but you might find yourself experimenting with your own paper.

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Jumbo Crayons and Pencils

Small hands will love extra big pencils and crayons, but even as an adult, these are some of my favorites. Here’s a few different quality options for jumbo-sized art supplies:

Stabilo Woody

The Stabilo Woody is a “3 in 1” pencil that combines the features of a colored pencil, watercolor pencil, and a wax crayon. It can even be wiped off flat surfaces such as glass windows or tiles. It has an extra thick, 10mm thick core. Available in sets ranging from 6 to 18 pencils.

Faber-Castell 9000 Series Jumbo Pencils

The Faber-Castell 9000 Series pencils have been in production since 1905 and they are an artist-grade classic. But hands old and young will appreciate the Jumbo version (these are my favorite sketching pencils too) that comes in a set of 5 with hardnesses ranging from HB to 8B. Be sure to get a large pencil sharpener that will accommodate these pencils, such as a Faber-Castell sharpener.

Jumbo Colored Pencils from Cretacolor, Jolly or Faber-Castell

There are a variety of jumbo colored pencils that are well made and will provide extra-thick, durable cores for hours of vibrant drawing. Some adults love these big pencils for coloring book work too!

For colored pencils, check out Cretacolor Megas or the Jolly X-Big options.

Faber-Castell Albrecht Dürer Magnus

For oversized watercolor pencils, check out the Faber-Castell Albrecht Dürer Magnus pencils. These are professional, artist-grade pencils with 5.3mm cores that will be appreciated by any artist including kids. Use dry as a colored pencil, or blend with water and brush to activate the line. Available individually or in sets of 12, 18, or 24.

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The Arts: A Visual Encyclopedia

Recommended for ages 8 and up, this visual encyclopedia from DK covers the history of art including painting, sculpture, and photography. The 9x11” book has 304 pages that are full of images and info on art history classics. Available in paperback or hardcover, it’s a great deal at $18 to $22.

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Elmer’s Slime Kits

Make your own slime at home! These are so fun for kids and get their hands moving and imagination going. Just be prepared for some cleanup, but the good news, is it’s all washable.

Add metallic glitter, confetti, and other fun effects to customize your slime.

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Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking by Jason Logan

Use this book as a guide to turn things you find inside or outside into ink. Beautifully illustrated and full of info and recipes, this book will show you and your kid how to make ink from flowers, plants, acorns, bark, copper, turmeric and more. Middle school and up will be fine with this book but elementary-age kids will need parent help.

The book is available in hardcover for around $26.

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Marbling Kits and Supplies

The Boku-Undo marbling dye kit is sold at Blick and Amazon, and Amazon also carries an option (linked below) with brushes.

Making marbled paper is fun for kids, teens, and adults. There are a variety of kits and supplies, some require mixing a thickener with water and waiting for everything to mix overnight. But the inks from Boku-Undo float on plain water and can be used right away. You will need some sort of tray or tub, inks, brushes, and paper such as watercolor paper. You will only be limited by the size of your tub and paper, and your imagination.

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Alginate / Plaster Casting Kit

The Luna Bean Hand Casting Kit is a foolproof way to make a mold in a bucket using skin-safe alginate, and then cast the mold with the provided gypsum plaster cement. But you don’t have to just make hands. Make a mold of a toy, a Playdoh sculpture, heck—make a mold of anything! Teenagers will be able to use this on their own (make sure they wear a dust mask) and you can work with younger children to introduce them to the casting process. It’s really fun, and if you’ve never made a mold, the resulting detail will astonish you. This $40 kit includes a bucket, alginate, and plaster. There are also larger and smaller kits.

If you are looking for your own skin-safe casting material without the bucket, try Smooth-On Alja Safe

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Blick Studio Table Easel by Jullian

This table top easel is stable, well made, and will hold canvases up to 24” tall. It also folds flat so it can be put away when not in use. It folds to 10 1/2” x 18” x 2” deep, making it small enough to take on the go too. For $18, this is a great option that will be equally useful to adults as kids. Inspire the painter in an artist of any age with this table top easel.

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Blick Studio Canvas Panels

Canvas panels are an economical way to introduce beginners to painting on canvas. Each panel is approximately 1/8” thick and features double-primed, 5oz canvas stretched over a stiff board. Lightweight, warp resistant, and acid free, these canvas panels are ready for acrylic, oil or any painting medium. Available in packs of 5 or larger classroom packs, young painters can make lots of work without taking up a ton of room with these. These panels are available in sizes ranging from 4” x 5” to 20” x 24”.

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Sargent Art Acrylic Paint Pot Set

This set of acrylic paints includes 6 or 12 paint pots with screw on caps. The pots are not removeable, so the paints all stay together and are less likely to be tipped over. And the pots can be refilled with other acrylic paint as needed. This is a great set for elementary-age painters or any artist looking for a bit of organization in their studio. These cost around $5 for 6 colors, or $10 for 12 colors.

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Klutz Friendship Bracelet Kit

Making friendship bracelets is a classic childhood activity and introduces ideas of pattern making, detail work, and craft skills. This book and kit includes everything a kid needs to make 12 bracelets. Recommended for ages 8 and up, the kit comes with 10 skeins of thread.

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Wear’m Denim Apron

This simple denim apron with a back tie and a front pocket comes in two sizes, the smaller is perfect for kids while the large will work for teens and adults. Easy to launder and long-lasting, just make sure to tie the string together before washing, or it may pull out. These are just about the cheapest aprons out there, and they work great. $6 for the small or $9 for the larger size.

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Lomida Flip Book Kit

Young artists can create their own cartoons with this complete kit! It includes six 4.5” x 2.5” flip books with 90 pages each, a set of 12 pencils, sharpener, and pencil. This is sure to entertain and inspire, and gives kids insights about cartoons and stop-motion animation. The kit is $15.

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Craft Bin

A craft bin full of supplies is a sure way to entertain kids. With glue, scissors, pom poms, and tons of other pieces, they can go crazy making whatever they want. The Funzbo bin is a good option, with a regular and mega size, but there are a wide variety of craft bins to choose from, typically ranging from $12 to about $30. Recommended for ages 4 to 10.

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Tempera Paint Sticks

Tempera paint sticks are sort of like markers, but with non-toxic, washable tempera paint. An easy way to paint with no need for water or brushes, these are great for when time is tight or clean up is a concern. Kwik Stix makes highly reviewed and recommended tempera paint sticks in a variety of colors and styles, including metallic, neon, and thinner sticks too.

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How to Draw Books

Kids often appreciate a guidebook for learning how to draw and there are a lot of books out there on learning how to draw animals, faces, or they might appreciate a book on comic book and manga drawing styles.

For budding comic book artists, check out our guide to making a booklet with a long-reach stapler. Kids love having their own little booklet to draw in, or a simple sketchbook to carry around.

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Scratch-Art Boards

Scratch art is a cool way to make colorful images. Typically black over a colorful base, the color is revealed by scratching through the black with a metal or wooden stylus, stick, toothpick, or anything that can pull off the top material. Kids really love this and the scratch art paper is typically available in packs of 5, 10, 30 or more sheets. I haven’t really encountered a “bad” brand so order what seems best to you but the links here are to Scratch-Art Brand.

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SunPrint Paper

Cyanotype is an early photographic process first discovered in 1842, and the SunPrint Paper is a great way to introduce this process to artists of all ages. To use, place flowers, objects, or anything on top of the paper and expose it to the sun where the exposed paper will turn blue. Then, rinse the paper in water to “fix” the image, although they may fade somewhat over time. A fun activity for all, this can get kids thinking about image making, materials, and the basic fundamentals of photography. Each pack comes with 15 sheets of 8.5 x 11” paper.

For larger sheets than SunPrint or raw materials to create your own cyanotype, shop Jacquard Cyanotype products at Blick.

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Blick Studio Adjustable Activity Easel

This easel is an affordable and flexible model that can be used on the floor or tabletop. It’s great for younger kids and it can be raised to a top height of 54”. The easel is 26 inches wide, and comes with a 25 foot roll of 18” paper. Typically priced around $90, this should provide years of use for painting and drawing.

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The Year of Knots by Windy Chien

Knots as art? Why not! (lol sorry). This book details Chien’s year long exploration of knots and while it is aimed at adults, older elementary school kids and up will appreciate it too. Beautiful illustrated with a ton of knots, plan to spend some money on rope to do these projects too. Knots and knot art touches on math, hand skills, macramé, craft, and so many other topics. It’s a fantastic jumping off point to explore more than just rope.

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U.S. Art Supply Adjustable Portable Easel

This compact wooden easel has a drawer for supplies and can accommodate paper or canvas up to 11” x14”. It measures 13.25" wide, 10.25" deep, and 2" high, and includes a wooden painters palette. It also includes a handle for carrying. For $30, it’s a nice little unit that should see years of use if treated carefully. It’s also a great gift for a young painter—pair it with a watercolor or acrylic set and they are ready to get to work at home or outside.

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Conclusion

Giving kids art supplies is a great idea as it sparks their creativity, introduces motor control skills, and gives them the freedom to make their decisions and follow their ideas. This gift guide has more than 35 recommendations of art supplies and kits. For the most part, these are supplies that can used in open-ended ways rather than a kit that can only do one thing.

What are your favorite ideas for kids art supplies? Let us know in the comments.

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Matisse on Drawing Trees

Study of a Tree, No. 19 by Henri Matisse, 1941

In a 1943 letter to the writer André Rouveyre on drawing trees, Henri Matisse outlined how he learned to draw with feeling rather than just observation. The letter begins with Matisse listing two ways of describing a tree:

1. by using the imitative drawing you learn in European art schools,

2. by using the impression suggested by the way you approach it and contemplate it.

Matisse continues:

Many times I have tried to draw trees and not succeeded. I started out by using imitation. No one ever encouraged me to go further down that route, because the result was always lifeless, and bore no relation to the feeling that had driven me to try and draw the tree. Then, when I only used my feelings and my emotions I was also so taken by the beauty of the trunk its power and its mystery, that I couldn’t get past the main branches.

Matisse then details how he was never satisfied with his drawings of trees, or that he was happy with the trunks but the branches and leaves were drawn as an afterthought, leading to an unsuccessful result. Then he writes:

Study of a Tree, No 3, 1941 by Henri Matisse.

So I had been constantly repulsed in my repeated attempts to study trees until a few months ago when, quite by chance, I took a pad of letter paper and tried to draw branches in leaf using the simplest means possible, and as the ink flowed from pen to paper, I saw the leaves take shape.

Using the simplest means possible, and not adding very many details such as veins, Matisse had found a way to draw trees that pleased him. This is decades into his career as an artist. Then he writes:

It’s rather like a juggler, who learns to juggle with two balls, and then moves up to 3, 4, 5, 6, and then adds a spoon, and his hat. You can’t work with nature until it has been filtered by your feelings.

This letter was republished in full in the wonderful book Matisse Cut-outs published by Taschen in 2014. It’s a large coffee table book with color and black and white reproductions throughout. It’s big, measuring 12 x 15 x 1.5 inches thick with 334 pages and weighs almost 8 pounds. In addition to letters and correspondence, it has sections on Matisse’s trip to Tahiti in the 1930s, studies for his mural The Dance, a section on his cutouts for Verve and Jazz, his Oceania cut outs, details on the planning and construction of the Rosary Chapel, and a final section on Matisse’s large gouache works. It’s truly a monumental publication that makes for an amazing coffee table book and presents Matisse’s work at a scale that really pops off the page.

Matisse Cut-outs
Taschen, cloth bound edition, 2014, 334 pages

Study of a Tree, No. 16 by Henri Matisse

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Handheld Clay Extruder Buyer's Guide

The Shimpo Nidec Handheld Extruder comes with 5 aluminum dies and one blank.

Handheld extruders or “clay guns” are useful tools for making small runs of handles, coils, and small hollow forms. If you are looking to make a repeatable shape in a quick, efficient way, then a handheld extruder is what you need.

These extruders work like a caulk gun: you fill the barrel with clay, screw the cap over the die form, and repeatedly squeeze the trigger to push clay through the die. It can be a bit of a wrist workout, so definitely use soft clay with these.

There are four options when choosing a handheld extruder: 2 sizes from Scott Creek, and one each from Shimpo and Kemper. There are also two miniature clay extruders such as the Kemper Klay Gun, for making extremely small shapes, which I’ll cover at the end of the post.

It’s really a coin toss as all four handheld extruders are well made, but for most studios and hand sizes, I would recommend the Shimpo Handheld Extruder. For about the same price, the Shimpo Handheld Extruder comes with a few more dies than the Scott Creek, and I prefer the circular handle at the back as opposed to the bar handle on the Scott Creek models. And as this is a handheld extruder, I prefer the shorter and wider barrel of the Shimpo because it is easier to squeeze out the clay.

A full review of handheld extruders follows, including the three options from Shimpo or Scott Creek, and two options for smaller decorative clay extruders. For larger extruders, check out our guide to wall-mounted extruders here.

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Table of Contents

1. Shimpo Handheld Extruder

2. Scott Creek Super Duper Clay Gun and Clay Gun XL

3. Kemper IKEG Klay Extruder

4. Small Extruders: Kemper Klay Gun and Bailey Clay Gun

5. Summary

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Top Pick: Shimpo Handheld Extruder

The Shimpo Handheld Extruder comes with 5 dies and one blank die.

The Shimpo Hollow Die Kit has 8 shapes. The middle of each shape is screwed on to the larger piece at the bottom.

The Shimpo Handheld Extruder is a quality tool that lets you easily make shaped coils, small hollow forms, or handles. It’s basically a caulk gun with an aluminum barrel and dies. The threaded barrel is 2 1/4” wide and about 10 inches long. The entire model measures about 13 x 9 x 3 inches, weighs just a few pounds, and can easily be stored in a drawer. It can be entirely submerged in water for cleanup, but you may want to oil the hinges and moving metal parts as needed.

Shimpo 4-in-1 Die Kit has 8 shapes of varying sizes and an isolator die.

The Shimpo Extruder is the top pick because the kit comes with five dies and one blank, and I prefer the circular handle. I also find the the shorter barrel makes it easier to squeeze out the clay, even though that means more frequent refilling. But it’s really a coin toss if this is better than the Scott Creek Clay Gun and the choice really comes down to personal preference. In my studio, I use a Shimpo Handheld Extruder along with a mixture of dies from Shimpo and Scott Creek.

Shimpo has two die kits: one with a selection of eight hollow forms and another with eight “4-in-1” shapes of varying sizes. You can extrude all four sizes at once, or use the isolation die to select just one. The hollow forms are what most people go for, as those shapes would be extremely hard to make without a die, but both kits would really expand the options in your studio.

The Shimpo Handheld Extruder generally retails for around $60 and the die kits are about $40 each. You can find this tool at ceramic supply stores or online at Blick.

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Scott Creek Super Duper Clay Extruder and Clay Extruder XL

The Scott Creek Super Duper Clay Gun.

The Scott Creek XL Clay Gun has a 15” barrel.

Scott Creek makes two handheld extruders and five die kits. The Super Duper Clay Gun has a 10 inch barrel while the XL has a 15 inch barrel. Both feature a bar handle at the rear as opposed to the circular handle on the Shimpo. The barrel is 2 inches wide, which is 1/4” smaller than the Shimpo. Note that the Scott Creek die kits will definitely fit the Shimpo Extruder, but the Shimpo dies may not work with the Scott Creek guns. Both Scott Creek extruders come with one coil die and two blank aluminum dies.

The Scott Creek Handle Die Kit features 8 shapes cut out of clear acrylic. The Scott Creek Dies are compatible with the Shimpo Extruder.

Scott Creek extruders are rugged, well built, and will get the job done. They are a bit harder to find in stores, but are readily available direct from the manufacturer. Scott Creek also makes a hollow aluminum die kit with the same shapes as Shimpo, along with an aluminum die kit of small forms. There are also three die sets made out of clear acrylic including a “shape and coil” kit, tile trim kit, and handle kit. The handle kit is my most used die kit and I would recommend that kit regardless of which extruder you purchase.

Although it might seem attractive to use the larger XL Extruder, keep in mind that the longer barrel may be harder to clean and store, and it is that much harder to squeeze clay out. (Any handheld extruder really relies on wrist strength.)

The Scott Creek Super Duper Clay Extruder usually retails for around $55-60, and the XL goes for around $70, and the die kits generally cost about $40 each.

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Kemper IKEG Klay Extruder

The Kemper IKEG Klay Extruder

The Kemper IKEG Klay Extruder is an interesting offering from the venerable clay tool manufacturer. It’s even longer than the Scott Creek XL, with a barrel measuring 20 inches in length by 2 inches wide. It comes with 3 aluminum coil dies, 1 blank die, and 2 plastic spouts.

As stated above, I feel that a shorter barrel is easier to use but if you decide to go with this option, you can always just fill the barrel with less clay to make it easier to use. Aside from that, the trigger of this gun is virtually identical to the Shimpo with a circular handle. Kemper has a limited offering of dies, but Scott Creek dies will work with this extruder.

The Kemper IKEG Klay Extruder typically retails for around $60 and can be found at ceramic suppliers such as Bailey.

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Mini Extruders: Kemper K45 Klay Gun and Bailey Clay Gun

These miniature clay extruders are useful for making texture or super small coils, such as for hair. They also work with polymer clay, so if you are working in miniatures, this is the clay extruder for you. For typical clay studios, these mini guns often sit unused in studio drawers but if you need a really specific shape, they may work for you. They are virtually identical but the Bailey set also comes with a handy plastic carrying case.

The Bailey Clay Gun is a miniature extruder.

Bailey Clay Gun

The Bailey Clay Gun has 19 dies and a carrying case. It typically costs around $13. Make sure that whatever you put in the barrel is very soft.

Shop at Bailey

Kemper Klay Gun

The Kemper Klay Gun also has 19 dies and typically costs around $13. It may be exactly the same thing as the Bailey Clay Gun, but it doesn’t have a case.

Shop at Blick

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Summary

Handheld extruders are a great way to make small batches of similar shapes, such as handles or hollow shapes. For a long time, I thought of them as an extraneous tool but once I started using them, I found that I really liked the look of extruded handles. Definitely don’t get one of these if it will simply sit unused in a drawer.

With only four models on the market, all are basically the same with just a few minor differences, so you can’t go wrong. For me, I prefer the slightly wider and shorter Shimpo barrel but my favorite dies are the handle kit from Scott Creek. You will find your own combination that works for you.

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