Last week I was given a gift voucher to Premier Art Supplies for winning an art award. I have a pretty terrible memory for such things, so I decided to go out and spend it today before I put it away somewhere safe and forgot all about it. I spent at least an hour examining everything in the store before finally deciding to extend my range of colours in oil paints. I also purchased a fine tip tjanting tool to work with wax resist in ink paintings. Here they are:

Look at all the gorgeous colours! Yum yum, can’t wait to start a new oil painting now. Here they are together with my original collection, as you can see it’s just about doubled.

Always heart warming to have new art supplies. And, in case you’re interested, here’s my lovely Chinese painting pallette, all set up:

I purchased the paints very cheaply while in Singapore last year, and have designs on some more for Christmas this year. I used these together with the sepia ink for the first time recently to paint the illustrations for a talk about creativity and mental health. They are gorgeous, a little more opaque than western watercolours with lovely soft blending. These paintings are done entirely in the sepia ink, dried, and then the Chinese paints are painted on top to add gentle areas of colour.

This one depicts using creative arts to express grief, fear, anguish and pain.