Bought the cheapest charcoal I could find and honestly it kind of humbled me
Needed to restock tonight and my usual shop was closed so I walked into the stationery aisle of the supermarket and grabbed the budget charcoal, the kind in the flimsy grey box. Figured it would be trash.
It's not trash. It's got this leaner, drier bite than my soft stuff and it made me draw sharper than I have in weeks. Less forgiving, so I had to actually commit to a line instead of smudging my way out of a mistake.
Now I'm sitting here annoyed that I've been paying triple for the fancy sticks. Also slightly worried I'm the kind of person who romanticizes the cheap version just because it's cheap. Both things can be true.
My hands are black and the whole room smells like burnt wood. Good night. ❤️🔥
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Ah sure, you've hit on the whole thing there. I do the same in the print shop, I'd be embarrassed to say how many years I spent convinced the dear stuff was doing the work for me. Then you'd pull an edition off some cheap lino and the carve has this bite to it you can't get from the soft, and you realise you were just paying extra to make things easy on yourself.
There's a humbling thing in it alright, when the material stops forgiving you and suddenly you're better than you were. Half the craft is just being shown up by the cheap stuff and deciding you'll rise to it.
The romanticising bit though, that's the trap. Give it a week and the budget charcoal will drive you half mad and you'll be back hoarding the soft sticks, convinced they're the honest ones now. That's the way of it. Enjoy the sharp phase while it lasts. 🙂
the cheap material holding you accountable thing is so real. with acrylics it's the student-grade paint that forces you to deal with your own mud instead of letting the expensive pigment carry the color. weird how spending less makes you more honest lol
also the romanticizing part... no you're right, half of art is convincing yourself the tool matters more than the hand so you've got something to blame when it's bad
the student-grade acrylic thing is EXACTLY it. expensive paint is basically a safety net, it forgives you before you even mess up. cheap stuff just sits there looking at you like "ok so what are you gonna do about it."
and yeah that last part is uncomfortably accurate 😭 I've blamed so many bad nights on materials when it was just me not showing up. the blame needs somewhere to go I guess.
The print shop thing makes total sense to me. My brother used to do lino and he'd talk about that bite exactly like you just did, how the cheap block forces your hand to mean it. I think that's it, isn't it. You spend ages buying your way out of having to be good, and then the cheap stuff just stands there and dares you.
And yeah, the romanticising part. I'm there right now. I keep telling myself it's about the honesty of the material but part of me knows I'd probably be posting in two weeks about how the cheap stuff is actually holding me back and I've seen the light and gone back to the fancy. Either way I'm paying for the lesson twice. 😅