Today, I am opening up two mystery art boxes for the first time and creating
two separate art pieces using only the supplies inside. I have never
purchased an art subscription box before, and I've been approached by a few
companies in the last few months to see if I wanted to try them.
But this is the first one that caught
my attention because the products actually looked really good. Introducing Upcrate.
I've got two months of the Upcrate boxes that have been given to me by the Upcrate
team to see what this whole art subscription box hype is about.
These boxes caught my attention because each box also comes with unique creative
prompts and everything you need to create a unique piece of art,
along with a chance to win art prizes and showcase your art in monthly challenges.
So let's open them up and see what's inside.
Oh, Shane, we missed a huge opportunity here. Look at this.
"Aye, share your unboxing for a
chance to win more loot " and as we open up,
"It's time for ARRRRRTTTTTT"!
Its pirate themed!
I should have worn like a pirate hat.
Have we got pirate music?
So the thing with Upcrate is you can
subscribe for their future monthly crates, or you can actually go back and buy some
of the old crates, so I have here the Upcrate 16 and the Upcrate 18,
we're going to start with the Upcrate 16, let's have a look inside.
OK, "have fun mate".
It's either Aussie, or it's pirate.
So let's pull this all out and have a look at what's inside.
So we have some Tri Color Aqua Markers from Spectrum Noir.
That's a huge marker.
OK, so we have
teal there, and then we have aqua
aqua aquamarine in the middle and then we have a lake blue at the end.
So that's actually three different colors in that marker.
So we have nine colors here.
And I'm guessing that looking at these,
the three colors are designed to blend well together.
Next up, we have a Pentel Automatic Pencil.
So really good for initial sketching because you don't have to sharpen it.
I was actually thinking recently I would,
I don't own an automatic pencil and I would like to get one,
Done!
Then we have a Faber-Castell Echo Pigment.
So this I think is a fineliner, yes, it is.
And we have drawing gum.
Oh, this is a masking marker.
Now this is something else,
I've actually recently bought a bunch of masking markers.
In fact, I'm curious, did I pull this one? Almost.
OK, so I bought a similar one recently that I haven't used yet.
I bought a Molotow Masking Liquid Pump Marker.
This is drawing gum, so the goal is the same.
But now I have two to compare, so that's cool.
Basically this you can draw some, I think, I've never used them.
You can draw something first and then you
can do your art on them and it masks out that area.
So then you can remove it and it leaves a white lines.
So I've been wanting to try them, which is why I bought this for future video.
But we're going to try one today.
I have no idea how to use one, but that is half the fun of art subscription boxes.
In fact, none of these items, as much as they're similar to stuff that I
own, I have not tried any of these specifically.
So this is very exciting.
We also have a watercolor pad, which is what will be doing the artwork on today.
And we have some other information from
Upcrate, so let's see what they've included to find out what our challenge is
and what they want us to do with these supplies.
So first, we have a cute little sticker because, we all love stickers.
Then we have a booklet here that tells us
all about these project and all about the supplies.
Now, on the back page, we have our battle instructions,
"all mates on deck". Now, this is from December 2020.
"So December's battle is as crystal clear as the seven seas or an empty bottle
of rum. Aye!. I what do you associate with the same crystal clear.
How are you going to make it come to life ends on the 31st of January." So we've
missed the battle, but that means we can check out at the end of this video what
some other people have created and uploaded.
And we can still have a go at creating
our own art, following this challenge and seeing what we can come up with.
And they have this beautiful example here
of someone who has created this beautiful crystal themed artwork,
which can be a nice little thing that might frame and keep.
Let's have a look at our second box.
Totally different supplies in this one, we have a giant red paint marker.
Oh, look at that! Giant chisel tip.
That's very cool.
And then we have Rembrandt Soft Pastels.
Can you believe, I've never used pastels?
If there's a learning curve to these,
then I'm going to be learning on camera in front of you guys.
But it's about time that I finally used
pastels because I've really been wanting to.
And we have a Extra Charcoal Black Pencil from Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth I think you say.
And we have a White Coal Pencil.
I've not heard of that.
There you go.
So again, all items that I do not own that I am very eager to try.
We have our example artwork, which is very curious.
So I wonder what this challenge is.
Oh, and we have some paper.
That's quite an interesting feel, I wonder if that's a pastel paper?
Ok, there's our answer, it's toned drawing pastel paper.
So I was on the right track.
OK, the battle. "Hello, hello, hello!
I think our theme is echo. Echoes are as beautiful as they are fun to play with.
Do you have any fond memories of encountering an echo in nature?
How does one visualize sound in art?
Show us, show the world your understanding of echo."
This one sounds a little bit more challenging, but I think we can do it.
So now that we know what we've got to work
with and we have our challenge, it's time to start thinking about what
ideas I might be able to come up with for these challenges.
So when I think of echo, I immediately think of caves.
And when I was a kid, going into all the different caves
and stuff that are now blocked off to the public.
And this picture from the Color Catalog immediately
jumped out to me as something I would like to try and recreate also because the lines
in these rocks kind of remind me of movement lines like sound waves.
So I think we can kind of work those two
ideas together, whether I'll take a realistic approach or
maybe a bit more of an abstract approach just with this base idea,
I'm not really sure yet.
I think I'll kind of just see what happens as we go.
But I'm going to start by just playing
with my supplies, getting used to the feel of them.
So I'm going to use one piece of paper here for that.
And then once I'm comfortable,
I'm going to brave it on the actual piece of paper and see how I go,
because I don't have any sort of sketching pencil or anything to draft on,
I'm only using the supplies in this box, so we just going to wing it.
So I'll start with a red paint marker because I don't think I'll be able to do
any paint marker once I start with the pastels.
I'm not sure how much of this we'll see
by the end, but I would like to keep this bit of red undertone underneath the rocks.
I do think I really want to focus on those reds and oranges as much as possible.
I think my biggest limitation here is going to be the color palette.
I'm going to have to adjust the colors a bit.
I'm not going to be able to go exactly
realistic with my colors, like the actual picture that I'm sort
of using as a reference here, because I don't have bold colors here to work with.
What I have instead is a muted natural color palette.
I would probably rather use a cotton bud or something else to blend here,
but I did say I was only going to use the supplies in my box.
So I'm stuck with my finger, which is not allowing me to do very much
fine detail, but it's still kind of working OK.
I'm pretty happy with how this is turning out so far.
I am finding this is getting quite messy, so I definitely want to make sure that I
don't do too much on the right side of my page right away because I'm guessing
I'm probably going to put my hand in this a lot.
And given that I'm planning on doing a lot of black on this right side,
I really do not want to drag that black through the rest of my artwork.
So I'm going to focus on the left and try to leave the other side until the end.
As you can see from the previous swatching I did, we've got some more grays and some
browns and some sort of pale oranges and tone colors.
So I think we can still make this work, but it will look quite different.
So this is going to be a little bit more abstract, a little bit more arty.
And I'm not sure yet if I want to bring in some of these greens and blues.
I think I'm just going to see how this goes.
And I think I'll start trying to do realistic rocks.
And if the realistic thing isn't working out, then I'll go for a different angle.
As I'm adding more detail here,
these are starting to look a bit like rock, so I think I will stick with these
few colors and I'm not going to use the blues, pinks and greens.
I think I like where this is going and these are quite fun to work with.
I think these pastels would actually make
for some really good backgrounds on coloring pages.
I know it's something a lot of people do,
so I'll definitely be giving that a try in a future video.
If it's something you like to see, let me know in the comments.
I think I underestimated how messy pastel
and charcoal is, but that's OK, I'll get used to that because it was kind of cool.
Oh, my desk needs a clean.. We're done.
This is my version of echo.
Does it look like a cave? I'm not really sure,
but you be the judge.
Tell me the comments,
what you think, if you think that I pulled off this challenge.
OK, let's jump in to our second challenge.
So for crystal clear, I was originally thinking crystals, so
maybe heading towards something like diamonds.
So I had a bit of a look online leaning towards maybe drawing a diamond,
but I couldn't really think of what I was going to use the gum for.
And then, I had a thought.
So we live in a pretty warm climate here.
And so it does not snow at our house at any point during the year.
So when I travelled to Switzerland one year,
I, for the first time ever, caught a snowflake in my hand.
And what amazed me was that this little
tiny sculpture that was perfectly made out of ice was crystal clear.
So our watercolor pad also comes with two
sheets of tracing paper and two sheets of a watercolor mixing pad.
So before we get started,
I'm going to test my supplies again and find out how these aqua markers work.
So I watched the quick video from Upcrate's
website and discovered that you actually can dip these in a glass of water
as you're using them, and then you can mix the colors with the pen itself.
You can also mix them with a brush.
But they didn't give me a brush.
So we're following our rules of only using the supplies here.
So no brush today.
I'm going to draw three snowflakes using the drawing gum.
Now, from what I can say, this drawing gum works a bit like a paint marker.
Now, I also want to use the Echo Pigment Liner and I need a background to actually
put these snowflakes on, so I'm going to create a bit of a,
I guess, crystal shaped diamond triangle, colorful background.
I don't know what we're going to call this.
We're just going to go with it.
OK, it's time to get started with our markers,
I think this is going to be fun.
So these makers seem fairly intuitive, they're actually fairly easy to mix
colors, and the color dilutes a lot depending on how much water you add.
As I'm doing this, I am finding when I add
water, it's hard to then get the dark color back.
So as with everything, you just want to experiment a bit
with this and you get the flow and figure out what kind of technique works for you.
I think for me, I probably would like to work with the darkest areas first,
then dilute it and then fade into my lighter areas because that will allow me to get
that really dark color before diluting my marker with the water.
I'm really liking the colors that they have given us here.
I think the only colors that I haven't
used to get are the two greens that are here.
I've used the blues, I've used the pinks, I've used the purples.
And the splash of yellow is actually a really good mix.
And I think I'm done with the coloring.
So it's time to pull off our drawing gum.
Now, this doesn't actually peel off, you rub it off.
So we're just going to rub this off here.
And look at that,
gee that has worked really well. So I do think this drawing gum and other
masking fluids could come in handy for coloring books.
I'm thinking that these could be great to help do the background without messing
up the main part or to maybe create some special effects.
So that's a video that you would be interested in or if you have any specific
questions or ideas about using masking things in your coloring pages,
let me know in the comments,
it's something I'm a bit curious about and I would definitely love to experiment.
So my two creations were too late for the Upcrate battle challenge,
but if you want to see what other people
came up with, they are all still on Instagram.
If you look up the hashtag, #upcratebattle.
Thank you again to Upcrate for sending me these boxes.
I was a little intimidated at the idea of this video because these are supplies
that I have never used and I didn't know if I would totally mess this up,
but I'm really happy with how this stuff turned out.
And it was so fun to take on a challenge
with new supplies that I'm actually now really keen to use in some other artwork.
I also have a coupon for you guys if you want to check Upcrate out for yourself.
So check the description for that and let me know in the comments if you have any
other art subscription boxes that you've tried or what your experience has been
in the past with getting subscription boxes like this.
Speaking of art supplies, look what just arrived.
So I guess, you know, we'll be doing next week.
Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss this one.