Review of the Artful Box: Watercolor

I am back with another mystery/ subscription box review, this time it’s all about the Artful box, which is done by the same people who do the Papergang boxes too, so I had to test it out eventually 😉 The concept of both boxes is pretty similar, only that in the Artful box instead of stationery you get art supplies for a certain project and you don’t get it every month but one box every quarter of the year. I did not have the money for it in the first quarter of 2021, so I had now reordered the box and got it shipped in May.
Sadly same way with my Papergang boxes, there was a shipping/ delivery problem that led to the box that was shipped in May being lost. I did get sent a replacement box of course, but in the whole chaos, I kinda overlooked that instead of just buying one box, I actually made a subscription, so I got sent the next box already too. But to be honest, I am not mad about it, since it also sounds very interesting. Let’s have a look at it together!
So many things can be considered art, so there are many possibilities of what could be inside an Artful box. The people behind it thought it would be the best idea to highlight a certain type of art with every box, focus solely on that, and give the best supplies needed to start a project. This Mai box’s theme was Hand Lettering, which I actually did some years ago, so it was a great box for me to restart an old Hobby! The next box I got has watercolors as its theme and since the watercolor box actually arrived first, I will also review it first 😉

The box came with a set of 24 watercolor half pans, a 29.5ml masking fluid bottle, special watercolor paper, 4 blank greeting cards, 5 different brushes, a pencil such as a pipette, and a 100 pages magazine with tips and tricks. The book was actually what I was interested the most in since the last time I painted with watercolors was in primary school and I absolutely hated it. I really hoped to get new motivation and learn new techniques which helped me use this type of art in a different way. The artwork on the book and within is very pretty, they even show how to draw one of my favorite animals a red panda! They start with some pages of general information about watercolors, assuming that you don’t know anything about it, which was great for me! But this information only uses up about 10 pages in the book, so if you already know how to work with it, you could start right away and still have enough input and ideas for your new projects 😉 So only judging from the book, I would say the box is both beginner-friendly, but also useful and interesting for people who search for art prompts, step-by-step guides, or interviews with artists who work with that particular craft.

Like I mentioned, working with watercolors always felt like a chore to me, since it was the go-to color technique in almost all of my art classes and I still never seemed to fully master it. I also don’t think we were really introduced to how to work with them properly. For example, I never heard of a masking fluid before, even though it does sound like a cool way of creating certain patterns and would have been surely helpful!
As I am writing this part of the review, I still have not used the art supplies yet, but I wanted to let you know what I am planning on doing and later I can tell you if it has worked out of not 😉 I am actually a bit scared to try the very professional-looking animal drawings in the magazine and wanted to try something more abstract first. Since I also like to design greetings cards for my friends and family and there were some birthdays recently, I wanted to play around for a bit with the blank cards and use the watercolors to create an interesting background. Sadly there seems to be no real chapter on how to do that, only on some blending ideas in general. So I guess I will have to look for some other tutorials on the Internet. Maybe a small negative point: I would have loved to not only see realistic drawings, but some guides create abstract art too.

When starting to use the appliance from the box, I opted for watching videos on youtube in the end instead of using the magazine itself. I just learn better with visual input and the guides in the books were a bit too advanced for me. I watched a video by Shayda Campbell and tried to recreate a flower greeting card she made, testing out different colors and trying to blend them together.
One of the things I learned right away is that the colors are way more potent than anything I have used before! When using watercolors at school, we would mix them in the pan with the pigment itself and put it on paper, repeating the process over and over when the brush was dry again. With these watercolors, I take a bit of it on my brush, use the pipette to get some water on the mixing palate, and mix the puddle with my brush. Then I use this puddle for my illustrations and I only use the color again, when I am mixing a new one. It might sound kinda dumb to you, if you have worked with good watercolors before, of course, that’s how you would use it, right? But I have never done that, so it was all new to me xD What I realized because of it is that the half pans you get, which might seem very small at first, last longer than expected^^
The brushes felt like very good quality, but when working with watercolors, the liquid has a mind of its own. So even though they did not shed, but glide over the paper, the water often finds its own way xD If you will be more trained to use it, things like that won’t happen that often I guess, but for a beginner like me, it was not avoidable. The paper was really great to work with too! I did use a lot of water on it, because I wanted to try out different techniques and it never leaked or ripped, it only warped a bit, nothing some heavy books couldn’t fix. I did not get to test out the masking fluid, since it felt a bit too advanced for me yet, but I still appreciate having it in there for future use, when I got better 😉

I would say I was pleasantly surprised by the box! The contents were very high quality, though all of them are produced especially for the box, which some people seem to be mad about(they even talk about it in the magazine). The way I understood it, there are certain brands being associate with “good art” and if you use any other brand, your art might not turn out as good, in some people’s opinion. I can’t really speak for them, since I have not used many different art brands when it comes to watercolor, but I would say it’s always good to try out new things 😉 And what I can say is, that the contents: brushes, colors, and paper were lightyears better than everything I have worked with so far and I can highly recommend it^^ The magazine itself is pretty interesting, especially the interviews, the guides are a bit to advances for a beginner. Of course, you could say that this box is just not made for beginners, but I do think it’s made to suit everyone. They are releasing a new box every quarter and it’s all about learning new things, so maybe there should be more projects for people beginning the craft. So I am looking forward to using my next box!

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress