The Art of Now – Shopping List

Paint

In this online course, I only work with three colors of paint, and with black and white. You can choose your own, but make sure that one is ‘reddish’, one is ‘bluish’, and one is ‘yellowish’. You can use student or professional paint. In this course, I mix both. 

Don’t feel forced to buy professional paint. I know from experience that buying professional paint can be a big step. Don’t let the price of paints prevent you from starting! The only professional paint that I would advise is the Golden Fluid Acrylics – Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold. This paint has certain qualities that I haven’t found in student grade paint yet. 

These are the colors that I use:

• Golden Fluid Acrylics: the color Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold. This is a fantastic, very highly pigmented, brownish-yellow fluid acrylic paint. It’s very translucent and gives a beautiful warm atmosphere to your paintings. 

Of course, you can choose another less brownish type of yellow. But make sure it is transparent since that’s very important in this course – by using transparent paint, you can create beautiful layers and add depth to your paintings. If you would like a brighter yellow, you could try out Golden Nickel Azo Yellow. If you mix it with magenta or blue, it also gives brighter greens and oranges.

• Golden Fluid Acrylics: Quinacridone Magenta. You can mix it (for instance) with white to create pink, or with yellow to create a beautiful orange. 
• Golden Fluid Acrylics: Turquoise Phtalo. Sometimes I use a student paint in the same color: Amsterdam Acrylic – Standard Series Turquoise Green.
• Golden High Flow Acrylic: Carbon Black. Since I’ve discovered the High Flow Acrylics from Golden, I use them all the time, since they are perfect for making thin lines with a thin brush. They are very highly pigmented, so you don’t need to use a lot of paint. Also, I use the Golden Fluid Acrylics: Carbon Black, when I want a thicker paint. Also, you can use student-grade paint (for instance Amsterdam).
• Golden High Flow Acrylic: Titanium White – for small details. For bigger surfaces, I use Golden Heavy Body: Titanium White, or Amsterdam Standard Series: Titanium White. Of course, you can choose any brand you like.
• Student grade paints: next to the professional paints of Golden, I sometimes use the student grade paints from Amsterdam Acrylics, Standard Series. In this course, I use Green Turquoise, Quinacridone Rose, and Gold Yellow. They are all opaque.

In this course, I use very specific colors, that aren’t exactly the typical yellow, red and blue that are normally used to mix colors. Please, choose the colors that you like! Only make sure that you buy a yellowish, reddish, and bluish color – these gives you the best mixing possibilities.

To make a long story short: you need to buy at least five – or six – colors of paints: black, titanium white, a reddish color, a yellowish color, and a bluish color, and preferably also a transparent yellowish paint. 

If you don’t want to buy two kinds of yellow, then mix the transparent yellow to an opaque yellow with the titanium white to an opaque light yellow).

Paper

In this course, I use 250 g/m2 (115 lb) paper as a substrate. If you don’t have heavy paper around the house, or if you want to make a lot of quick study paintings, you can even use very cheap (copy) paper, as I do in one of the videos. 

I usually gesso the back of the paper – this prevents the paper from warping.

Crayons & Markers

• Caran d’Ache Neocolor II watersoluble crayons. These are very highly pigmented professional-grade crayons. In this course, I mostly use the colors Black, White, and Green Turquoise. You don’t need to buy a whole box of crayons—you can buy them separately, which is much cheaper.
• Molotov Empty markers, filled with Golden High Flow Acrylics. Contrary to the Neocolor Crayons that make for rough, natural lines, these markers give very clear and sharp lines. In this course, I use only black and white.

Brushes 

Of course, you can use any brushes you like. In this course I use the following brushes:

• Foam brushes. I use these brushes all the time: they are relatively cheap, you can wash them out very easily, and they make beautiful strokes. You can buy them in different widths. The ones I mostly use are 2 and 3 cm in width, but you can also buy foam brushes that are 8 cm in width. I use the brand ‘Poly Brush’ – I believe you can buy them in the hardware store in America, but in the Netherlands they are more difficult to find. I bought mine in a shop for boat paint accessories. You can also buy them in art supply stores, but I think they don’t have such good quality. 
• Simple, thin brushes.

Other tools 

• A foam roller. You can buy foam rollers in the hardware store. They are cheap, and perfect for painting large surfaces. But what I especially love about the foam roller is its ability to apply very thin layers of opaque paint (I often use titanium white), which gives a beautiful veiling effect.
• A toothbrush and a paper clip for spattering paint.
• Stamping material 
• Something sharp. I love to carve in the wet paint of my collages with something sharp, for instance, a sharp knife. Also, I use sharp things like screws or paper clips for scratching and carving.
• A hairdryer. I often dry my painting between two layers – to prevent the layers from smudging.