The best art supplies for absolute beginners

When you’re an absolute beginner, figuring out what art supplies you’ll need to start your journey may seem intimidating, but I’ve compiled all my best advice here.

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When you’re first learning to make art it’s important to try many different mediums, styles and ways of creating so you can truly find where what you love and what you’re good at intercept. In order to afford your art journey its important not too spend too much on advanced level art supplies when you don’t really know the right way to use them yet. Everything on this list will be on the more affordable side of art supplies, they may be slightly less quality but still perfect for beginner artists.

Some of the more affordable mediums to learn are acrylic and watercolour paints. These paints come in many different levels of quality so you’ll be sure to find some in your price range.

Acrylic paints:

Acrylic paints are some of the most common and affordable art supplies out there. That makes these an excellent medium for new artists.

The brands: Shuttle Art, Apple Barrel, and DecoArt are pretty affordable acrylic paint choices for the beginner artist.

You can also find super affordable canvases and canvas panels of all sizes at these same stores. You’ll also need paint brushes, it’s best to not buy the cheapest brushes because the hairs will get stuck in your paint. These paintbrushes by ARTIFY are a good option as the set includes many types and sizes of brushes which is important when you are first exploring art.

One of my personal favourite brands to use is Liquitex paints. I honeslty love Liquitex, they have such a wide range of acrylic products in many variations, including value sets with many colours as linked above. They make different levels of paints for every stage in your art journey and are priced slightly more than the above mentioned but have noticeably higher quality even without the higher cost of other professional paints. Liquitex also sells a sample pack of their art mediums. This pack is highly affordable and has 5 separate tubes of their different mediums. This is especially great for beginner artists to learn and get a feel for different mediums without spending tons of money or potentially wasting a bunch of art supplies.

Watercolour paints:

When it comes to water colours I believe opting for an intermediate quality level right from the beginning can completely change your experience with this medium. Many really cheap water colours are very very low quality, apply with a very chalky texture and are generally just much harder to use compared to ones priced higher.

When working with watercolours you’ll also need specific watercolour paper to paint on. . You can begin your watercolour artist journey with inexpensive paint brushes before upgrading to higher quality brushes once you’re confident that your watercolour journey will continue.

Taking your art to the next level

By adding embellishments and extras onto your artwork you can really make them pop. I adore using metallic gold foil paints on almost everything I make. You can also add pigment powders mixed in your paints or added on top. You can also change the look of your paintings by using different kinds of varnish to achieve different looks.

Art doesn’t have to be complicated

With just these simple supplies there are unlimited amounts of wonderful artworks that could be created. So if you are looking for a reason to start your art journey this is it.