Art Retail Therapy at the Dollar Store

 

Most of us are experiencing a greater-than-usual sense of cabin fever this year due to the pandemic. With stores having reopened, I donned a mask and gloves, and headed to my favorite Dollar Tree store for an inexpensive dose of what I call "A.R.T." --- Art Retail Therapy! I always find loads of fun and useful studio items here, and everything at Dollar Tree is truly $1, unlike many of the other "dollar" stores. They carry two types of metal clips I cannot be without in the studio or outside painting, plus a bunch of other art related items I use all the time. The little 6-packs of white paint palettes will come in very handy during Holidays in Ink, when working monochromatically with different dilutions of a color, or for limited palettes. I also love the challenge of finding things that I can repurpose for art use.

The watercolor palette at the bottom of the image above was made from one of the $1 Colormates eye

shadow palettes above it. I reconfigured this palette a couple of weeks ago for a visit to the Bronx Zoo. It is so flat and light, can slip into any pocket or bag, and easily clip onto a sketchbook for quick gesture work with a water brush. 

The eyeshadow palette on the lower left of the top image will probably be turned into a grayscale palette for value sketches. I love having a little grayscale palette in my bag for landscapes and wildlife, like the top three Kingfishers in the sketch page below. (The bottom one was done with felt-tipped brush pens.)

By the way, you can convert those glimmery eyeshadow colors into iridescent paints for sketchbook play. Who knew! There are a bunch of cool YouTube videos all about how to do that. Here's one of them. That gets you even more from your one dollar purchase!

I want to use these little nail polish bottles to hold calligraphy inks for use with dip pens. My thought is that I can use the included brush to reload ink onto my dip pens as I work, instead of having to constantly redip them. The plastic inserts above on the left may come in very handy for holding water while sketching. I've gotten used to a three-well water container, always keeping one well clean. This could prove to be a good mini version.

I was planning to just dump out the nail polish, but a friend suggested I try using them to decorate sketchbook covers and pages. What a great idea! I did some experimenting on the covers below (not completely successful, I might add!) and think I'll incorporate them into some page borders too. 

Since I liked the concept of finding a way to use the nail polish, I decided to also try some of this kids' paint in sketches before repurposing the containers. In the process, I discovered that the plastic that covers the package made a fantastic palette! I put strips of double sided tape down on the styrofoam plate -- one to hold the paint strip and one to hold the palette. The paints are terrible in terms of pigment load, but I had fun with quick portraits of just a few minutes each, splashing down some color straight from the paint pots, then briefly sketching over the top when the paint dried. The poor pigment load worked just fine as a mid-tone for the sketches, and it was fun to use them to experiment with some process ideas.

Oops! Just as I thought I was done, I realized that there were two other things I got on my Dollar Tree expedition that I really like, and forgot to put out in the first photo:

We never have enough empty palettes. These two white ones will come in very handy for acrylic, watercolor or gouache. The metal pencil case now holds my calligraphy pen holders and some nibs. It's the perfect size for them, and just in time for Holidays in Ink!

Much of this is in preparation for my Holidays in Ink challenge, which you're welcome to take along with me. I'll be posting more about that on Sunday, November 1, which I cannot believe is already right around the corner. If you want to be sure not to miss that post, you can subscribe with your email address on the upper right side of this page.