This month’s box arrived over 10 days before the end of the month and I think that’s how it will be all the time from now on since they changed the carrier recently! I am very happy about that and I am looking forward to my Papergang boxes even more from now on 😉 So let’s take a look into this months box together now 😛
This months box was designed by Clara LeRoy and it contained an A6 notebook with 128 pages of checkered paper, 2 embroidered patches with the texts “keep going” and “be nice” in different colors, 2 sections of sticky notes with different designs, and 30 sheets each, a special embroidery scissors and a multicolored marble pencil in a craft paper sleeve which writes in a mixture of blue, red and purple.
I don’t have much to say about this month’s box, to be real honest. It’s just not my kind of box, there is no real theme to be seen here, I don’t like checkered pages in notebooks and what would I need embroidery scissors for in a stationery box? I appreciate the patches, I guess I can always find a place for stuff like that, but I think there will be other people, who were expecting more pens and paper and who don’t really care about patched at all, let alone doing embroidery themselves, which they could need scissors for. The designs are okay(again just not m style, but not bad at all!), I especially like the sticky note with the circle on it, kinda like highlighting the notes you will take on it. But that does not really save the box for me. Hopefully, next months theme will be more my thing 😉 I would be so ready for another lettering box theme, with lettering paper, and maybe some stuff to put onto the paper or on envelopes. Maybe some post stamp-like stickers would be a great idea!
Since I will be tattooed again soon, I am in the mood for talking about one of my passions a lot currently 😛 I just wrote an article about some law issues concerning the artists in Germany, this time I want to focus on some soon-to-be clients, maybe it’s one of you 😉 I get some questions about tattooing asked over and over again, and since I think it’s only natural to ask them and informing people is important, I want to now present you exactly that: my most frequently asked questions and my personal answers to them. Enjoy and feel free to ask anything else related to that topic, if you feel like your questions, in particular, have not been answered yet!
Does it hurt, how much does it hurt and where does it hurt the most? I 100% get why you would ask that question, since how would you imagine that kind of pain if you never experienced it yourself? I was also very afraid of my first tattoo, which is why I went with a rather small one, to kinda dip my toe into the water and see if I would survive it. So that’s my tip in general for all of you who would want to get a tattoo, but you don’t know if you can stand the pain. You don’t have to get a big one the first time around, my first one was done in 10min 😉 But to fully answer the question: I actually can’t xD The problem is that pain is very different from person to person. Let’s compare me and my husband for example We got a partner tattoo on the same day from the same artist and for both of us, it was a tattoo after a longer period of not getting tattoed, so you say we were not used to it, as might be now. My husband did actually almost fall asleep while getting tattooed, he described the feeling as a kind of massage and not really a pain. I also think that tattoo was one of the less painful ones because it was in a good spot and was fairly small(the longer you get tattooed, the more even small movements will hurt), but I think I would never be able to fall asleep like that because it would be a way to irritating for me. And that’s exactly the problem you could feel either way or maybe even totally different, so it’s a very personal thing, you have to find out for yourself.
There are some pictures around the internet on which people try to describe areas in which the pain is harder and easier to withstand, but again that’s very personal. Looking at one of the pictures I found online, the chest area is highly sensitive and almost too painful for most people to get tattooed. My husband again got a tattoo on the chest. This time he actually spoke of feeling pain, but not in a hard way. He said it felt less than a massage and more like tattooing is supposed to feel xD So you can kinda look at the picture and see that most areas with less body fat, where the skin is almost resting on the bones, are more painful to get tattooed, in general. But that’s again, different from person to person. What most people I know actually describe as a very painful spot, most beginners(me too xD) choose for some reason is under the wrist where the veins are showing, that’s painful, but it’s blue in the chart, so… just don’t trust it too much 😉
Is it like getting a shot at the doctors’ office? I can say is that getting tattooed can not be compared to getting vaccinated. Many people seem to compare it since both things are done with the help of a needle but in totally different ways. When getting a shot at the doctors’ office, the needle has to go deep into your skin and has to be thick enough for the medicine to be pumped through. In a tattoo shop, the needles are fairly small and have no hole in them, because the ink is picked up not led through the needle. Also instead of going deep under your skin, a good artist will only pierce your skin about 3mm. So if you are maybe afraid of needles from doctors(which I actually am) that does not mean you have to be afraid of tattoo needles too 🙂
How much does a tattoo cost? Again, a frequently asked question: hard to answer or generalize. The “problem” is that it’s always hard to value art because it can have a different value for different people. Just look at Picasso’s paintings, do you find them artsy, or do they look like a toddler drew them to you? Everyone has a different perception of art, which is also why everyone would pay a different price for it. Tattoo artists have to find the right balance between getting paid for the work hours they put into designing and actually tattooing a piece, but also for the art value and the materials they use, and other costs they have. For example, a studio in Hamburg will have to pay more rent, than a studio in a small town would have to, meaning they have bigger costs which they have to compensate for more, which is why tattoos in Hamburg generally cost more money than in the town where I went to school. So In Hamburg for example, you would normally not get a tattoo under 100-120€(walk-in days* are an exception) because it would actually not make sense for the artist, since they would not get a win and maybe not even enough money to pay for their costs. The costs for tattoos I have gotten in Hamburg vary between 150€ and 900€(for one design) as of now. And there can be big differences! For example, I properly already have my new tattoo on the back of my right arm when this post goes online and I will have paid 350€ for it. But I already have a tattoo planned on the exact same placement on my other arm, which will cost me around 850€. I can’t tell you why one artist can offer their tattoo for that cheap and the other one can’t but they will have their reasons and most of the time, when you want to get a design, you have to accept the price that they give you. Please never take the design and search for a bad artist who would just do it, just to get the design for cheaper. If it’s important enough for you to go through such lengths to get it, please consider paying the right artist for it, it will be important to him too. And saving is also always an option 🙂
How do you decide on a tattoo? That’s always an interesting questions xD It might tie in with the next one… Actually, I am one of those people who decide on a tattoo kinda spontaneously. I will scroll through Instagram, not even really search for a new tattoo but always kinda stumbling upon one (a WannDo**) 😛 I will normally think about it for a few days, trying to either print it or position it on my phone, so I can hold it up to where I would want to get it, to see if it looks good or not. It’s a feeling, does it feel right, do I want to change it, will it fit with my other tattoos, what could it mean for me, and so on. And if this process is done and I still want to get it, I will ask for a price and then think about if I have enough money for it or not, mostly planning an appointment shortly after 😛
How can you be sure that you will still like it after years?(And how does it age?) That’s the question I was talking about, many people say they could never ever get a tattoo because they can’t decide on a design, since they can’t know if they will like it in 5-10 years or not. I also know someone who pins a design of a tattoo on their wall and looks at it for one year and if he still likes it, he will get it xD For me, that sounds kinda ridiculous since I know that if you overthink a tattoo, you will ALWAYS find something wrong with it, as you can do with everything. And also having a tattoo hanging on your wall is something completely different from having it on your skin, because a tattoo becomes a part of your body pretty quickly. It’s hard to explain, but it quickly feels as if you always had that tattoo even if it’s only one month old. Maybe that’s because you are constantly seeing it and your mind is kinda adapting to that. That means, that even if there is a small thing in the design you don’t like, you won’t think about it for too long, at least that’s my experience. I have a tattoo with some hands, that look kinda wonky compared to the rest of the design, but I never look at it that way, I just see the whole thing looking great on my arm, making me smile 😉 When it comes to tattoos aging, everyone handles that differently. For one, you can always prevent your tattoo from aging too quickly, wear sunscreen or long clothing for example, but there are many tips and tricks. You can also touch up a tattoo every few years, depending on where you get the tattoo you will have/ or you can let it be touched up more often or less often. Getting a tattoo on the hand, for example, requires getting it touched up every 2-3 years to make it stay sharp because the skin on the hand is always moving and being under a lot of pressure from washing your hands, touch things, and working with them. A tattoo on your arm might only have to be touched up every 20 years or maybe never(depending on how you take care of it). Also, some people never get their tattoos touched up and they love how they age with them, so there are multiple different possibilities, different from person to person again 😉
Is there something I should be aware of/careful with? That’s not exactly a question I get asked often, but since this post should be as helpful as possible, I would like to give you some tips on the way 🙂 Also because there are some things I gladly personally did not experience but heard about, which you can be aware of. The first thing obviously is not to get tattooed at home or in the backyard of a building or something. Tattooing always has to be a sterile process to make sure the open wound you get will not be infected. Therefore the artist and his workplace have to be clean and you have to feel comfortable to be tattooed in the environment. If you don’t feel comfortable, you have the right to leave, don’t feel obligated to get the tattoo, if the circumcises feel fishy. Another situation to be aware of would be that there are black sheep everywhere and recently I heard about a tattoo artist who used women and treated them badly. He offered them to get a tattoo but instead of paying with money, he wanted to be paid in sexual intercourse. Of course, sex is not a bad thing in general, but using it in exchange for something is mostly not a good idea and I know no serious tattoo artist who would ever offer that. So for me, that’s a red flag to look out for and a sign to leave and look for another artist. Also always look for other work that the artist has done to be sure that he can tattoo you the design you want. Instagram is a good platform for artists to show their previous work and I have always made good experiences with that. Some artists don’t have a big presence on Instagram, but they have their old work printed out in some books or on a website. Never let yourself be tattooed by someone you don’t know, have not heard about before, and can’t find anything on the internet or his studio. It’s not about not giving new artists a chance, but protecting yourself from people who have not actually learned the craft. You are not automatically a tattoo artist, just because you have got your hands on a tattoo machine, but some people think they are and they will proclaim the title. So be aware of that.
All in all getting tattooed is something really great for me personally and maybe it is for you too. If you think about getting one, but there are questions holding you back, I really hope that I was able to help you. Of course, thinking about a tattoo, in general, is not a bad thing, just don’t overthink it too much 😉 And not wanting to get one, is also a valid opinion, but maybe you were still curious to know about it and I was able to help you with that too! Anyway, I wish you good luck with your plan.
Greetings and good wishes The Mad Hattress
*Walk-In-Day: That’s an event which is often held at a tattoo studio, where the artists prepare some sheets with WannaDo with the goal of tattooing as many people as possible, basically everyone who walks in 😉 **WannaDo: That’s a design which the tattoo artist has come up with by themself, without clients wish behind it, so it’s basically just something the artist themselves wants to do^^
If everything goes according to plan, you have already read my review on this quarters Artfulbox with the theme: Watercolor. If you have not, but want to, just click on the unterlined text to get there 😉 If you are new to this: Artful is a quarterly subscription box from the UK, made by OhDeer the same people that came up with the Paperganboxes! Due to some Brexit issues most of my subcription boxes from April-Mai got lost in the mail, so did this one, which is why I am reviewing it only now. Gladly I got a replacement for all of my boxes and I was especially looking forward to this one, because I already have some experience on the fiel of Calligraphy and Handlettering. Though I have to say that the box itself does not really match it’s contents, I think Calligraphy has nothing to do with the ocean and fish, so I was a bit confused at first. The Artwork is great of course, but I would not have choosen it for this theme. But enough talk about the outside, let’s take a look inside!
The box was made together with the company Tombow from Japan, which is a well established brand in the community of letter art and it’s actually diffrent from the newest Box where they made their very own supplies. Just something I have noticed, maybe getting what is needed for a good watercolor set was easier than making theirown brushpens or it was a matter of money and they just had more to put into the watercolors box 😉 In this box we get 8 Tombow Dual Brushpens in a very limited color scheme(we don’t get a yellow for example), 5 Tombow Twin-Tone Dual Tipmarkers, a Tombow MONO Ereaser and a HB graphite lead pencil, aswell as an A4 Bristol 250gsm drawing pad and 4 blank greeting cards plus envelopes. Let’s talk about the 112 page magazine! Structuerwise it does not make a lot of sense to me… The table of contents begins on page 10 after a “the brief history of typography” and an editors note, after which the first thing we see is a making off of the boxart itself. A making off is always intresting to me, but not when I waited to get into the process of creating art, after waiting so long to get my box. Then comes the first interview and a tutorial which has nothing to do with Calligraphy or Hand Lettering at all. On page 30 we get the first glimpse of what creating letter art could look like with the first tutorial of blending colors together. But that also is a bit nonsensical because we get to know about the basics of how to use the brushpens and how to create letter art on page 50 and 66! Please tell me what was the thought behind that…? I guess you could argue that the box was not meant for beginners, but if that’s true we would not have needed the basic tutorials at all and could have used the space for some more interviews and advanced tutorials. Maybe they wanted to show first, what different kinds of letter arts could look like, but I don’t think they made the right call here and for a beginner that might even be a bit overwhelming. I know they already got better in the next box, so I don’t want to complain about it too much, since they seems to have noticed their errors, but I still wanted to mention it.
As I said in the beginning I have some experience when it comes to this topic, which is why I was confused again. When I think of Calligraphy I think of quill pens with metal nips tipped in ink, sliding across the paper. But I have to say, that’s western-style Calligraphy over in some Asian countries Calligraphy was always done with brushes. Calligraphy itself might be a kind of umbrella term, describing the art or lettering. So I would say they did nothing wrong with the title, but I would have loved to maybe let it be more specific. Because what we got in the box, were supplies for what I and many others call Hand Lettering. The difference for me really lies in the supplies you are working with and the different techniques you can use because of it. You can’t do the same strokes with a brush of course, that you can do with a metal nib and vice versa. I can’t really speak for Asian Countries and if their traditional style of Calligraphy is different from that, like maybe what I think is traditional western Calligraphy is, is using metal nibs and old fonds, recreating the traditional feel of it. Maybe traditional Asian Calligraphy is using special brushes, with only black ink, which might be why they too would say the supplies given are more for a modern type of Calligraphy. For me both of these types of letter art are cool, so I am okay with getting some great Tombow supplies, but I think some people might expect something different and get disappointed because of it, so maybe boxes like this could use a longer title like “Modern Calligraphy” or “Calligraphy: Hand Lettering”. And I would also love if maybe traditional wester and Asian Calligraphy could maybe be a future boxes topic 😉 The tutorials themselves are interesting, I will separate them into tutorials for beginners, advanced techniques, and tutorials that are not tied to the topic. The tutorials for beginners are very good, you can’t really go wrong with that, to be honest. But I would have loved to maybe get a separate sheet to practice on(there is one in the magazine, but maybe a separate one would have been better, since who likes to write in books, right?), since I to this day struggle with what the right amount of pressure to put on the brush to get he result I am imgaining. I think especially for beginners that can’t be hard and a sheet like that can always be very helpful. The more advance tutroials would be the ones talking about blending and using the special twin-tone markers, since that’s not something a beginner need to learn ASAP. You can go a long way just with the basics and being creative 😉 Since I have never worked with the twin-tonw markers before, I am looking forward to creating something with the help of the tutorials. The last typ of tutorials kinda used the brushpens in diffrent way to create drawings. Of course, you can use your brushpens for drawing, but including these tutorials felt like as if the people behind the box though using the markers only for lettering purposes did not do them enough justice. The lettering is not “real art” or something like that. I really did not get the need behind including them if I am honest. We could have used some more inspiration or maybe diffrent alphabeth and fonds to copy better, especially for beginners, but I am also up for learning new alphabeths even though I am lettering for some time now.
With my last box, I tried to make a greeting card for someone’s birthday and since many people’s birthdays are coming up, I made another one with this box too! For this one, I used the twin-tone markers and the faux calligraphy technique. I have to say I really like the bright colors(which we have not gotten with the big Tombow markers) but I might have used them wrong… when going over a certain spot multiple times, the paper flacked very fast, which was quite surprising to me, since it was specially chosen for this box. But I have to say, it might be a user error, still something I wanted to mention. The tutorial on how to use them did not help me much since actually the person in the “tutorial” also used them for the first time xD And the “tutorial” was more about using the thin tip for outlining and the bigger one for coloring in the lettering art. So I have to say it was not very helpful :/ The other tutorial about putting a shadow behind the letter, was as helpful to be honest. It basically goes like this: 1. Write a word(not showing hot to do that with the brush pen the best way) 2. Put shadow behind it in different colors. 3. Done I have to say I am a bit disappointed since that’s kinda what I could come up with myself, a tutorial would really take its time to guide me through the process step by step more, especially when I either have problems using the brush pens or have never used them before. I felt kinda let down. But I am still kinda happy with the card I have made, maybe I can put some more details in later, but I really like the colors, I have to say I rarely work with them, so it was nice to do that for a change.
“Alles Gute zum Geburtstag” is the long version of german people saying “Happy BIrthday” 😛
All in all, I have to say that I was pretty disappointed in the box. The supplies we got were high quality, but I can’t really understand why we got those limited colors for example(still kinda mad about not getting a yellow), why there was no blending pen or a sheet of a practice alphabet. It just kinda feels a bit random to me. As random as the order of the chapters in the magazines, to be honest xD The whole box did not feel very thought through or maybe put together by someone, who does not enjoy Calligraphy very much. Maybe that’s why I am so disappointed in it, because Calligraphy is something I always liked to do, which is why I was looking forward to it so much! But I have to say again, this box came out before the watercolor one and it feels like they found and fixed many of the mistakes they made in this box like for example having a more structured magazine and less random supplies! So I will keep an eye on future boxes and their themes and I will definitely try another one sometime in the future 🙂 So you too should maybe not only judge them on this particular box and keep an eye on them, if you are interested in the general idea of these boxes! Now that I think about it, I am quite happy that I accidentally bought the watercolor box too, so that I was able to review both of them and see how the company has improved^^
This will be the second post this week, just because it should have technically already been up two months ago xD As you might have already read, there was a problem with Brexit regulation in April and May which leads to many packages getting lost. This box was amongst them, but I am glad it got replaced and I am able to review it now! Hopefully, this will be the last you hear about the Brexit stuff, since all of the stuff that got lost, is accounted for now xD But maybe there will be some post talking about stuff I got, I apologize in advance 😛
It’s kinda funny to me how the Junes box was a bit to dull to me colorwise or better to put it: it was not rainbow enough for pride month xD The mays box is! This is just so funny to me because technically they just would have to switch out the box designs and to me, it would have made so much more sense xD But in general, I have to say this months theme is one of the prettiest ones I have seen so far 🙂 As for the contents we have a 256 pages linen daily planner with the beautiful color gradient, an A5 print designed by Steffi Lynn(as everything in the box is :P), a set of point sticker markers with 5 different designs, a large vinyl sticker, two pencils with holographic foil and a small bag filled with 40 multicolored paperclips (60 advertised in the booklet but maybe not delivered?).
When you follow me for a while and have read my other reviews on the previous Papergang boxes you know I love to look for a DIY aspect or a theme in the contents we are getting. This box weirdly does not feel as it has a theme at all, it more feels like a refill box: Is your planner from January already full? Here you get a new one! Have you lost your paperclips again? There you go! All of your pencils are broken again? We have some extra shiny ones for you and some point markers for good measure! 😉 And don’t get me wrong, refills are a good thing, especially if you frequently use all of your stationery, so I appreciate getting refills kinda automatically with every new box. But one box just with refills feels a bit lame. Maybe that’s just my point of view and others get to enjoy the box more, but I would have loved there to be a theme or DIY aspect to follow.
For me, the Mays box was a bit underwhelming, which might be due to the circumstances of already having received multiple boxes and comparing them to each other. I think the Januarys box actually did not look much different from what we got and I got to appreciate it more. And like I mentioned in June I might have celebrated the colorfulness of it more… Sounds kinda strange if I put it like that, but that’s just my opinion 😉 And I have to view the Papergang boxes as a subscription because I do think some people might get a single one if they really like the content, but in general, most people will get it as a subscription. And I think it’s completely normal to then view it that way and compare the different boxes with each other. I am looking forward to the next boxes still since I love the Papergang stuff in general, I just hope to be more blown away next time!
In Germany, there is currently a debate going on about if Tattoos are considered art and therefore the people making the tattoos are artists. That might sound a bit strange to you, but it’s actually a legal issue since if you are recognized as an artist in Germany you get certain insurance benefits. So it’s not only about the art itself but also about the people behind it. Since I am not designing tattoos myself, but I love having them and I will get some more this summer, I really want to speak about it here on my blog. And I want to start by telling you about parts my own tattoo journey. You notice that I will use the word “tattoo artist” a lot, which kinda seems to defeat the purpose here, but in English, that’s the only word I know and in Germany they are only called “Tätowierer”. Maybe that will change soon 😉
I actually got my first tattoo when I was only 16 together with my mother. In Germany, you are technically only allowed to get a tattoo when you are 18 years old, but when you have the consent of your parents and find an artist who is willing to tattoo you, you can legally do it sooner. For my first tattoo, I choose something small, because I was very afraid of the pain and I kinda wanted to test out what it was liked to get tattoed. It was a good idea, but I sadly did not have the best experience in general, because my artist back then was not very understanding… he was like: “If you cry about pain, you should not get a tattoo.”. He was really not the best example of what a tattoo artist should be, but we will come back to that 😉 My first tattoo took about 10min, but it felt way longer, but I felt so good after it.
Why get a tattoo with 16 you might ask yourself? I always was very fond of how they looked at other people, but it also was a psychological thing for me. I was bullied a lot in school and there was nothing I could really do about it. The short version of it was, that I felt like I lost control over my life, and getting a tattoo, making a lifelong decision like that, felt like I was taking back that control. So getting a tattoo is not always about aesthetics, it can also help people cope with troubles in their life, deal with trauma or grow their self-esteem. There is a popular meme about tattoo artists being lowkey therapists and I guess it’s not totally wrong. Sitting up to 8 hours next to a person talking can really connect people 😉
But that is only part of what they do, with their art. But what is art? That’s quite hard to define. “Art is a highly diverse range of human activities engaged in creating visual, auditory, or performed artifacts— artworks—that express the author’s imaginative or technical skill, and are intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power.” (lumenlearning) is one of the quotes you can find on the topic and they all sound poetic like this one. Art can be everything, is a statement as helpful as the last one. But in all of that, there is a piece of truth. Technically everyone can be an artist from a child with a crayon drawing on the walls, up to a person creating a doodle at school. But in this case, it’s about earning money with it, so it’s about creating visual, auditory, or performed artifactsthat express the author’s imaginative or technical skill, to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power by the client.
The Artists’ social fund which would grant the insurance benefits has a slightly easier to understand the definition of what to do, to get in. The requirement is “the exercise of a permanent, self-employed artistic activity on a commercial basis” and to be someone “who creates, practices or teaches music, performing or visual arts”. Now you would think, the problem here is not the art part itself, since tattoo artists do create visual art, right? Well in Germany they are seen as Artisans because tattooing itself “does not become artistic in that in individual cases not working according to existing patterns or stencils, but the motif itself is designed; because this is also typical for handicrafts.”. Basically, that means that the people who decide on who gets into the fund and who does not, think that tattoo artists only do the craft of tattooing, bringing a design onto a person’s skin. And maybe in the past, in some cases that was true since some tattoo people work with the designs from others, sometimes even without asking them. But the vast majority and what I personally think are the better tattoo artists, only tattoo their own designs.
Actually, I have a friend who, let’s say falls in love with designs easily and when she sees something, she really wants to have EXACTLY that design. But when searching for an artist who would tattoo her that, she has some problems since most artists will tell her, that they will try to recreate the design in their style or not tattoo her at all. Not because they are arrogant or just don’t want to work with her, but because it would not feel right for them. And if that’s not artistic, then tell me what is. A good tattoo artist should not only be good at their craft (technical skill), but also at helping the client get his design on paper(imaginativeskill), work on it until it’s ready(to beappreciated for their beauty or emotional power), and also give emotional support, for the process of tattooing but also in general. What I would have wanted to say to my artist who did my very first tattoo: If you don’t like to work with people, that have emotions, don’t become a tattoo artist. In Art, it’s never about you, but it’s always about them.
My tattoo journey is far from being over and I knew the answer to the initial question all along, of course tattoos are art and their creators are artists who should defently be taking in by the Artist’ social fund as soon as possible! Not only for support but also for apprechiation of they are and what they do. If you’d like you can let me know in the comments what you think about it, in a fair manner of course 🙂 And if you would like to know more about the topic or my tattoos in general, let me know!
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 😉
It’s was a birthday card, “Alles Gute” means “Good Wishes” in German^^
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!
