What’s your LEAST favorite art material

Today’s question about what my least favorite art material is comes from Celia. You might remember her from my interview with her a few weeks back. Celia says: “Mine is charcoal—gets everywhere/I look like I’ve taken up coal mining if I use it, doesn’t even stay on the dang paper without sprayfix, terrible texture to touch, the results you get aren’t worth all the above, and I was forced to use it for two years worth of drawing classes.” While I don’t have quite such a strong reaction to charcoal as Celia, there are a few materials that really bug me.

I work very hard to keep this blog positive. Not because things don’t bother me or aren’t hard but because there’s enough anger and sadness in the world and I don’t want to add to that in this space. And talking about things I don’t like seems fundamentally negative. But as I was pondering this question, it occurred to me that talking about what doesn’t work for me is actually a decent exercise in talking about materials over all. How do we assess what we like? How do we respond to the way different materials work? What comes naturally to us? Then what pushes us to get better? What pushes us and just causes a lot of annoyance and frustration? These are some excellent growth questions and all things that I worked through when I started making art.

Supplies in every combination

Trying new materials is one of the joys of being an artist. It’s an unengraved invitation to play. When I first started out, I haunted the craft isles at Michael’s and Hobby Lobby and JOANN’s looking for new materials to test out. As a mixed media person it’s a special gift to not be limited to one medium. I can mix and match as I want which allows for even more possibilities.

I have a lot of supplies. Markers, pens, oil pastels, water-soluble crayons and pencils, powdered charcoal (It’s amazing! I don’t use it often but when I do, it’s exactly the right thing. Sorry, Celia!), watercolors, acrylic paint, yarn, books, so many kinds of paper, and five different kinds of glue.

And all of those supplies I’ve used in what feels like hundreds of ways. The layering can get a little dizzying if I think about it for very long. Seeing what happens when I try this or that is just a lot of fun.

Bleeding alcohol inks

One of the hot new trends early in my career were alcohol inks on yupo papers. They reminded me of the watercolor pooling I enjoyed so much in college so of course I bought some of these goodies and started testing them out. On their own they were fine. I liked them ok. Not as well as watercolors but they were interesting to play with. The breakdown happened when I tried to layer them. Disaster! Did you know that alcohol ink will bleed through anything, including gesso? Of course it took me a dozen tries to realize I couldn’t make them work in the way I wanted them to. Their inability to play well with the other materials in my work made them untenable for me.

I kept them in a box FOR WAY TOO LONG thinking I would find a use for them. Then finally I surrendered to the fact that here was a supply that wasn’t for me and I gave them to a fellow artist to try out.

What did I loose? Time and I guess, a few pieces that might have been good if they didn’t have alcohol ink bleeding through. But overall not much was lost to this supply.

What did I gain? I learned to wait to purchase the new hot trendy supply. And I ask people who are using it how it works for them. I watch tutorials and see if I think it will fit inside my existing practice. And I just skip it if I don’t think I can use it.

Eww, what is that funky smell?

There have been various paints over the years that I’ve stopped using because of the smell. I can’t handle strong smells for very long. That puts jelly gouache, oils, certain kinds of tempera paint, and even some brands of acrylic out of the running for me. I love encaustic but can barely tolerate the odor. (Yes, I know you are supposed to do encaustics in a ventilated space, which also makes it difficult for me.)

So these are some logistical issues more than process issues but when what you are using gives you a raging migraine, there’s not much to process.

I love spray paint. LOVE IT. I tolerate the odor because I love the process of using it so much. I’d definitely use it more though if there wasn’t such an odor debt to pay. When I use it inside of books the odor just stays contained inside so I don’t use it nearly as much as I’d like to.

I created this book out of multiple sheets of mixed media paper that I spray painted and then left to dry. I thought that by letting them dry thoroughly before binding the book that the smell would dissipate. Sadly, the answer to that is no.

So clearly not all smells are a deal breaker but I do have to proceed with caution when dealing with smelly supplies.

For further assessment

So those are my two biggies. Smelly things and alcohol inks. I double hate alcohol inks because I can’t type the word alcohol to save my own life. That first ‘o’ always eludes me and I have to back space to add it back in every single time.

I’m especially intrigued to continue to ponder the assessment questions I talked about in the intro. I know I’ll be thinking about them the next time I grab a new supply to test out. I think I did that assessment both intuitively and not at all systematically when I started. I was just throwing things together and enjoying the ride. So to be a tiny bit more methodical when assessing new supplies next time seems like progress?

What materials do you love? Which ones did you leave by the side of the road? I’d love to know your answers! Catch up with me on socials, email me, or go old school and leave a comment on this post to be immortalized for all of time.

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