Art Abroad

Obviously, space in suitcase is — unfortunately — limited.

While I’m not a heavy packer, I still had to pack clothes and things for the next ten months, meaning I had to be fairly selective with what art supplies I brought with me to Spain.

Though, because of my lighter packing status, I was able to be slightly less picky than I expected to be.

But I thought it would be fun to show you guys what made the cut to come abroad with me!

I wanted to start with my EDC (Every Day Carry; the pens and whatnot that I carry with me every time I leave the house, whether I’m going to class or just to the café). If you’d seen my pen case that I carry with me before I left, you’d know it was stuffed to the absolute brim, incredibly difficult to zip up at the best of times and literally impossible if the things inside weren’t arranged correctly. I did trim out a few unnecessaries from within, making it a much easier situation on both the pouch and myself.

Of course, the majority of space in my pen pouch is taken up by my Absolute Favorite Journaling Pen: Staedtler’s Triplus Fineliners. I have a veritable rainbow — with an emphasis on blues and greens — to suit my mood no matter what I’m feeling. These bullet-nibbed pens are so fun for bullet journaling, if you’re into that, but also for adding a pop of color instead of writing in black or blue-black. One downside I find that they dull more quickly than a lot of bullet nibs and I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t press particularly hard while writing.

As far as fountain pens, I carry three with me: a personalized LAMY Al-Star in Copper Orange, fine and inked with a corresponding copper orange cartridge; a Pilot Kakuno, fine and inked with Pilot’s Sepia (my absolute every day ink); and a Jinhao X750 in Shimmering Sands, medium nib and inked with Robert Oster’s Sublime ink. That Kakuno is the pen I reach for automatically if I’m looking to jot something down and I have to hold myself back from using it every day in my journal.

The pencil game is a bit slim in my EDC, just a Prismacolor Col Erase pencil in Carmine Red (my favorite sketching tool) with its own Blackwing Point Guard to protect it from dulling in my bag and also drawing on anything as well as the Tombow Mono Graph mechanical pencil. Which I grab to use for sketching depends on the content of the sketch; for cartoony drawings, I always go with the Prismacolor and for the more realistic stuff Tombow all the way.

Now the odds and ends! Mainly for lining my drawings rather than writing anything, except for that last one (sometimes). We’ve got a Faber-Castell PITT artist pen in Sanguine, size S; a Kuretake Fudegokochi in Extra Fine; a Sakura Pigma Micron in 02; and a Derwent Graphik Line Maker in Sepia. Those two in the middle are what you see on my art instagram anytime something is lined in black and the Faber-Castell I mainly use for accents and occasional inking. And I am just a huge sucker for sepia inks of all kinds that the Derwent has been a staple in my EDC for years. Also featured: the best eraser of all time, the Tombow MONO plastic eraser!

As for all the bonus things I brought for school, my planner, and occasional use when I’m really feeling it, we can hopefully kind of jet through this stuff.

Pencils! Blackwing Volumes 811, 33⅓, 10 (times 2), and 4 as well as a standard Blackwing. They all have different hardnesses (the 4 and the standard have soft graphite, the 33⅓ balanced, the 811 firm, and the 10 extra firm) so I have a nice set of options for whatever I need. Also, a backup Col Erase!

Highlighters! And a brush pen as well, all from Zebra. Perfect for school as well as my planner, I also use these for adding accent colors to the drawings and doodles in my journal. I also plan on using that gray for Inktober! Top to bottom: Mild Brown, Mild Dark Gray, Mild Magenta, Mild Smoke Blue, Mild Lavender, Mild Citrus Green, and Red. If you’re looking for highlighters for the school year, these are a definite recommendation from me!

Gelly Rolls! Just like the Mildliners, these are just fun for adding color and — specifically in the Gelly Rolls’ case — sparkle to everything I do. Stardust Marine Star, Stardust Pink Star, Stardust Clear, and Metallic Gold. I had many, many more that got left at home, but such is the way of things. I had to cull the unworthy and these are far and away my most used. I goofed a little in leaving behind my white gel pen and that’s my biggest regret.

The only ballpoints that I have time of day for and you can find them at your local Target or Walmart! Pilot Acroballs, in purple, pink, and blue. These also make frequent appearances in my journal and planner because they glide so beautifully that they’re wonderful when I have a lot on my mind that I need to get out on the page ASAP. Also, I swear I’ve used these for years and they have yet to run out. Magic!!

My Karin Brushmarker Pro set. These watercolor brush pens are super fun and a tad bit difficult for me personally. I love how vibrant the colors are and I really can’t rave enough about how fun they are. Because they’re water-based, it is sometimes tricky to get a flat lay of color, but that’s not always the goal! And the black one will be joining me on my Inktober journey as well.

• 

• 

Last but not least, my set of Prismacolor colored pencils and my POSCA paint pens. If you’ve seen my art instagram, you know how often I bust out my Prismacolors for my more cartoony drawings. They’re a must-have for me. As for the POSCAs, I used to use these all the time, but kind of forgot about them over the last year. I really want to get back into them, so I brought them along with me in the hopes that I would find some inspiration from and for them abroad.

I know this post was a bit of a mouthful, but I’m very excited to be doing art abroad!

I’ll be posting about the unfun experience I’ve had with immigration procedures and the preparations for them sometime this week. For updates, my enrollment is this Friday and my first class is next Monday! The latest beginning for school of all time.

I’m very excited to see what grad school is like as everything I’ve read online is that it is incredibly different from undergrad.

You’ll hear from me soon friends!

Hey, even though I’m here, I’m still fundraising! Check out my GoFundMe if you’re interested in supporting my grad school adventure. Cheers!

Beyond the Griffonage

When I was in high school, my mom began a long, arduous journey.

When she was young and learning cursive in school, she was told that her penmanship was so bad that, going forward, she would only be permitted to write in print.

After, I believe in her words, nursing that grudge for most of her life, she decided that she would improve her handwriting and finally use cursive instead of print.

(A small anecdote that I think is particularly demonstrative of this slight she suffered is that her signature when I was a kid had but one cursive letter in it, to qualify it as a signature.)

It blew my mind when she started doing this, sitting at our dining table every day and practicing letters over and over, filling notebook after notebook with repeated letters, words, poems. Annabel Lee featured prominently in her practice books.

Though I at first thought her wild to pursue this, after graduating from college and moving into her home to work in her stationery store, my perspective has changed about as dramatically as it could.

Being a stationery store, we write all of our price tags by hand as well as announcements that we post above our guest book and signs near the vintage items. For the first several months of working here, I could not bring myself to write the signs, always asking her if she could do it because my handwriting — which would be featured alongside the signs that she had already written — looked like an elementary student’s by comparison.

An example of the unreal level of artistry my mother has achieved.

That combined with the handwritten letters I was writing to my many pen pals, who quite frankly deserved better than the scrawl I was used to writing in during college, drove me to follow her lead and to improve my own handwriting. Thank you for inspiring this, and much more, in me Ma.

Now.

I am nowhere near the excellency that my mother has achieved. She worked much more diligently than I did and for many more years. But I have to be honest, this is one of my favorite things I’ve improved in myself since graduating college.

It brings me a lot of joy to write down a note for a customer — whether it be our email address, sizing for a poster, or anything else — and hear their excitement at my penmanship. They tell me that I could handwrite typed letters to people or write invitations and though I feel like they’re just being kind when they say that, it makes the progress feel so much more tangible.

I also find that slowing down and taking care with how I write things helps me slow down and think more about what I’m writing too.

(This does bring to mind the documentary that Skyler and I recently watched, California Typewriter. It features a typewriter repair shop in Berkley which shares the same name as the documentary — and whose Yelp page you can find here. It also gets hot take interviews from the likes of Tom Hanks and John Mayer. They all seem to make a point about how typewriters change the way you type, compared to how you would on a computer. It makes me deeply interested in trying out a typewriter, which I’ve never had the chance to really do.)

All this to say take your time when you write things by hand! Practice writing your name in different ways and find something that you find both aesthetically appealing as well as fun to write! You don’t need to put hours and hours into practicing your handwriting to notice a difference, especially if you just take care while writing in the first place!

This is also a good opportunity for me to plug something I think is one of the best tools known to mankind and that is a journal. Daily journaling, aside from a myriad of benefits such as helping you explore your language and how you express yourself in it; tracking goals in your life; delving deeply into your emotional well-being and finding comfort in emotions you may have once struggled to experience; improving both long and short term memory; and boosting your linguistic and general creativity, offers you a daily chance to escape from the daily stress of 2019 and practice the art of writing.

A mention of my GoFundMe goes here, folks! If you enjoy my writing here or perhaps the art of my Artstagram, I would greatly appreciate if you could check out my fundraiser for my graduate education at the Autonomous University of Barcelona this upcoming autumn. If you can’t donate (though there are rewards if you do!), sharing it with your network of friends would be super radical and help this little Gemini fund her schooling.