
$126. I spent one hundred and twenty six dollars at Blick yesterday. Arrrgh! I never usually spent more than $20-$50 at one time but this time I went a little crazy. Yesterday was Blick Madness - an in store promotion where they had special discounts and free prizes. I won a
Canson Universal Sketch pad when I took a spin on the prize wheel. Wheee!
I walked in with two coupons. One for 30% of one non-sale item, and another for 20% off my entire purchase. The 30% coupon went towards a much needed
Prat presentation case for transporting my work. Regularly $56, I got it for $41. (Though I just noticed that Blick's online price was $14 cheaper than the in store price. Grrrr but at least I didn't have to pay shipping.)
I initially went there with the sole intention of replacing a few of my worn out
Pitt Brush pens and picking up a few new watercolor pencils. You can see from the image above how much restraint I was able to muster up. I just started tossing things in the basket without thinking... until she rang it all up. I did replace 7 ailing Pitt Brush pens, and then found two new colors. Anytime I go to Blick I pick up a few extra of the Fine black Pitt pens because they don't last long and I use them all the time.
A month or so ago when I decided to buy some
Faber Castell Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils, (at the suggestion of several artists that claimed them to be the best) I bought a selection of colors I thought I would use but I hadn't tested them in the store using any water. This time I went with a sketch pad, my own set of pencils, and a filled waterbrush and tested about 50 different of the AD pencils against the ones I already had. Luckily I got away with only buying 7 more.
I wanted to try the
Bombay White ink after seeing fellow blogger
Daisy Yellow create white mandalas on black paper. I want to try it with my
Herbn glass dip pen. I'll let you all know how that works out for me.
I like using the
Staedtler Triplus Fineliners and rather than just buy one or two, I decided to buy a small set since I previously enjoyed using most of those colors.
I bought yet another
Niji Waterbrush because even though I know I have 5 or 6 of them here in the house, for some reason, I can never find them. I absolutely love them but I do notice that after a while, the brushes do get a little raggedy.
I've recently gone back to trying the
Micron pens - the grip isn't as nice as on the Pitt pens, but they seem to flow rather nicely and I will see how they continue to hold up over time.
The Stabilo rollerballs were on clearance and an impulse buy. They are just ok. I'll probably leave them in the community pen jar for my husband to use. Blick had a ton of Stabilo products on their clearance shelf.
At less than $1 each, I found a few more cool colors of the
Uniball EX2 stick pens. I only like a rollerball pen that has a cap - I can't stand the flexing of a click pen so I really like these cheapie pens. To me, these are the closest thing to a fountain pen - flow is great and I don't have to worry about losing them if I take them out of the house.
I also picked up a small pencil sharpener with a wide opening for the watercolor pencils, as well as one more
clamshell storage box to hold all my completed artwork.
Even though I greatly exceeded my Blick budget, it was all (mostly) things I needed, or will definitely use. Now, I'm off to play!!!