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Take your protein pills and put your helmet on...	Aug. 1st, 2011 @ 10:54 am

The phrase, "You get what you pay for," is not always accurate, in a range of ways. This includes the fact that frequently, "more expensive" isn't necessarily "better". (Audio equipment is a spectacular example of this.)

However, I've been finding that art supplies are one area where it often *is* the case, to a sometimes startling degree. Hence when I started getting into painting, I spent about $15 on a couple of packs of synthetic brushes of assorted sizes and shapes. Now I have a couple of dozen brushes made of natural fibres, in a still greater range of shapes and sizes, with handles more than a foot long.

Because it actually can make a difference. Sometimes I want a stiff brush, sometimes I want the softest brush I can find. Fine brushes made of synthetic fibres can be a false economy - they're cheaper to buy, but the tips become splayed and useless in no time, where natural-fibre brushes last forever.

Paint gets complicated - for example, I use Windsor & Newton acrylics, which one of the ladies at my art supply shop hates.

W&N have come up with a binding agent for the paint that's clear, which means that the paint, when wet, is the same colour as it is when it dries. This is awesome and one of the things I love about them. However, in our climate, it tends to dry very quickly. A layer of paint can be dry inside ten or fifteen minutes.

She hates this; I love it. So you have different things about different brands, and then you have different *grades* within a brand, and... yeah, I don't know. That's one for people to find what works for them, I think.

But I've just in the last few days discovered that this can even apply to pencils.

I've been doing a lot of sketching and drawing lately, and the other day I wanted a B grade pencil. I bought a Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencil. I hadn't had one of those before. And they're amazingly better.

They also cost twice as much as other pencils - this just doesn't seem to be that significant to me, I think because this still leaves them costing not very much and a pencil lasts ages. I ordered a set of different grades online, because now I want more of them.

As far as sketching goes, the bigger expense is sketchbooks. Naturally, paper type and quality makes a difference there too, but for rough sketching it's not very important at all.