Desacralize your art supplies (for gods' sake)

Especially when so much is falling apart, foreground pleasure in making

I’m a

Sandi Hester

addict. Her drive to find joy in making, her sense of humor, her bravery in the way she goes at her art, and her fearlessness with supplies and with changing up her practice have all taught me so much.

She’s not the only artist who talks about mucking up your supplies so that you feel less afraid to use them, but watching her YouTube channel has let me see what that looks like in action. So, the first thing I did when my spouse gave me some Neocolor Ones (they’re like fancy crayons) over the holidays was break them in half.

They were too pretty and pristine as whole crayons. But, as halves, I have felt additionally free to rip off the paper and use them on their sides, to take them out in my tiny bag where they’re surely getting smashed by other things (so far, not too badly), and to try out all kinds of layering possibilities without being worried about using them up (I still have the other halves, set aside in a repurposed tin, after all).

Look at all those delicious colors ready to go in my old sticker tin.

Some of my drawings, made while a passenger on road trips, using my Neocolor IIs.

Neocolors aren’t that expensive, as art supplies go. Removing the moneyed tinge from other supplies has been harder to do. Most especially this has been true for me with Sennelier oil pastels, which can cost almost $5 a stick. (I say “can cost” because they’re sometimes sold more cheaply if you buy them in a set or if you buy more than a certain number.)

Artist Sarah Dyer wrote about creating a little travel set of oil pastels and I went into my stash to see if I could mimic her choices with pastels I already had.

Pocket oil pastel kit.

Having a small number of oil pastels set aside like this has made me reach for them more, but I needed to figure out a few more things to make using them feel easier in the moment and on the go. So, I pre-cut pieces of paper to stick between my sketchbook pages so that the pastel wouldn’t transfer to everything else. I also collected small-ish pieces of oil-suitable paper and made a sort of “sketchbook” just for oil pastels.

My ad hoc oil pastels “sketchbook” made by clipping paper between two cardboard pieces saved from a sample pad of paper.

Taking these steps to prepare myself has helped me to avoid some of the hesitation. The other thing I’d like to try more is thinning the pastel on the page while out and about. I haven’t been able to do this yet, but I think that if I find a small enough container and remember to save it, I could put a bit of thinner inside and stow it away with the pastels, so I could grab it all and easily start.

I am also often precious about paper. It’s so lovely when it’s unused—all the potential of the fresh surface. To get through the hurdle of starting, I will pull out three different surfaces at once and make a mark on each.

This works especially well with watercolor and mixed media, since it also builds drying-time into the process. (I tend to be impatient and not give things enough time to dry, otherwise.)

I found this wonderful paper on a recent trip to Laguna Art Supply (shop your indie art stores!).

Showing my excitement outside Laguna Art Supply

It’s an unusually long pad of paper, made for fashion sketches, by one of my favorite papermakers: Bee Paper. The sheets are thick and rough in texture, and great for dry media (they can’t tolerate any water).

The magic pad of paper.

I’ve been tearing out a page at a time to make these little books I carry around with me. I think because they’re not prefabricated sketchbooks, and because of the toned paper, I’ve felt especially free to experiment.

Experiments in shapes and layering to convey shadows and foliage.

2025 has been an extraordinarily difficult year during which to try to stay hopeful about anything. At the end of April, I took and passed my PhD qualifying exams. I felt so relieved to have them over, and so pumped to research and write my dissertation. Then, two weeks later, the effects of federal and state budget cuts finally hit my department (and the School of Humanities more broadly) and effectively did away with much of the financial and employment security I’d been promised when I was admitted in 2019.

The future my family and I had been working toward feels very uncertain, and I’m honestly not sure if I’ll be able to finish my degree program, though I am determined to try. Given the state of things, creative work has felt both more urgent and more frivolous than ever. I’ve really had to work through my motivations over the last few weeks, trying to figure out what it is I care about doing and why. Trying to envision the futures of my various projects during this administration of tariffs and mass-layoffs.

Two things have helped me, a lot:

Jami Attenberg

’s #1000wordsofsummer challenge, which I’m doing with a few writer friends; talking through my hangups with my current book project with my amazing agent, Jo Ramsay; and listening to

Jessica Abel

’s Sketchbook Revival session, “What’s Stopping You,” and thinking about how I could create focus by choosing my big projects and working on fewer things for more concentrated amounts of time.

In other words: using my community and seeking out external motivation have gotten me through what has been a pretty horrible set of weeks (months! years!). What is helping you? I’d love to hear about what’s stopping you up or pulling you through.