As I've been accumulating more and more art supplies, I was starting to realize that things had gotten a bit disorganized and it was becoming more of a hassle to find the things I was looking for, so I started thinking about how I wanted to organize my drawing tools. In this blog post, I'll go over what my goals were in organizing my supplies, what I've settled on, and why it works for me. I'll also go into a bit of detail about the specific tools I use in case anyone's curious, but I'd like to remind anyone who's looking for advice about what to use for your own artmaking that I am very much an amateur at this, so you probably shouldn't listen to anything I say. Also, this is what I've found works for me, and you might find other things work better for you. That said, let's get to it.
I had two main goals in organizing my art tools: 1) Everything should be easy to find and readily accessible when I need it, and 2) As much as possible, things should be portable so I can just grab them and go when I want to draw in another room or away from home. Related to #2, as much as possible, I wanted things to be compact enough that I could fit them in my laptop bag.
With those two goals in mind, I purchased a set of Global Canvas pencil cases and an Alvin 8" nylon utility bag. The cases come in multiple colors so it's easy to tell at a glance which one I'm grabbing, and they're compact enough that I can fit three of them plus the utility bag into my laptop case, which fulfills both of my requirements.
Black Case (Drawing & Sketching)
The black pencil case contains my graphite, charcoal, and ink drawing and sketching supplies.
My graphite pencils of choice are Prismacolor Turquoise or Derwent Graphic 6H, 2H, HB, and 2B for precision drawing, along with Prismacolor or General's HB, 4B, and 8B woodless graphite pencils for shading large areas. The two pencils that get the most use are the 2H (for light sketching) and 2B (for dark lines). Everything else is used more situationally.
I've taken a liking to sketching in layers with colored pencils, and for that, I use Prismacolor Col-Erase pencils. I have a Staedtler non-photo blue pencil in there right now that I'm using because it erases pretty well, but I'll probably end up replacing it with a light blue Col-Erase, because they erase a bit better, and the non-photo blue is just a little too light.
For charcoal drawing, I use General's 6B extra soft and 2B medium softness black, and Derwent light gray and white charcoal pencils. I've found General's and Derwent soft black and white charcoal to be pretty much identical and use them interchangeably, but Derwent doesn't have anything like General's medium hardness and General's doesn't have anything like Derwent's light gray pencils.
Also included in this kit are a blending stump, a tortillion, and a pencil tip-shaping sandpaper pad.
The pens I use for inking are Pigma Micron pens of various tip sizes between 0.2mm and 0.5mm, as well as a brush pen.
Blue and Red Cases (Colored Pencils)
My colored pencils are divided between two cases. The blue case contains Prismacolor Premier and Derwent Coloursoft (soft tip) pencils, and the red case is for Prismacolor Verithin (hard tip) pencils. Also included in each case is a Prismacolor colorless blending pencil. The Verithin pencils are better suited to light sketching and drawing thin, precise lines, while the softer Premier/Coloursoft pencils lay down deeper, richer colors and are better suited to blending and color filling.
Utility Bag
The nylon utility bag is for storing everything else that doesn't fit in the pencil cases.
I use three types of erasers (a vinyl eraser, a kneaded eraser, and an artgum eraser) which all serve different purposes. The kneaded eraser is the most versatile, as it can be sculpted into any shape I need it to be for precise erasing, and it doesn't leave any residue so there's no worry about leaving a mess of eraser debris everywhere. The vinyl eraser is for heavier-duty erasing of dark pencil marks that the kneaded eraser won't pick up, and the artgum eraser is a last-resort option for obliterating large swaths of a drawing by transmuting pencil marks into giant piles of eraser crumbs.
My pencil sharpener is an Alvin Brass Bullet, which I bought specifically because it's the only pencil sharpener I've ever seen that has replacement blades available for it. The only downside is that it doesn't have a reservoir, so it has to be used over a trash can or a bag so I don't leave pencil shavings all over the floor.
I keep a 6" non-slip straight edge (it has a rubber back so it doesn't slide on the paper while I'm using it) in the bag for drawing straight lines on the go. I also have a 12" that I keep at my desk at home.
Finally, I have some extra blending stumps and tortillions of various sizes.
Paper / Sketchpads
All of this wouldn't be very useful if I didn't have something to draw on.
Most of my sketching and practice drawing is done on Canson Universal Sketch and Strathmore 400 Series sketch/drawing pads. My most commonly used sketchbook is a 5.5" by 8.5" Canson pad, because it fits perfectly in one of the internal pockets in my laptop bag (meeting requirement #2), but I also have other pads in a variety of colors and sizes up to 9" x 12" (anything bigger won't fit on my limited desk space).
For Serious Business Artmaking, I bought some Stonehenge cotton vellum. It's not cheap, but I figure if I'm drawing something that I'm going to want to display on a wall, or if I'm creating something for someone else as a gift or commission, I might as well do it on the highest quality drawing surface possible. This stuff can also be used with wet media like watercolors, if I ever decide to get into that.
Digital Art, Hardware & Software
I'll make this quick because this blog post is getting enormous, but for sake of completeness, here's what I use for creating digital art:
My drawing tablet is a Wacom Intuos 4 Medium. Maybe someday I'll be able to afford a Cintiq, but today is not that day.
I create most of my digital art in Photoshop CC with the Lazy Nezumi Pro plugin for line smoothing (I usually leave Lazy Nezumi disabled while painting, but it's handy for line art). Most of my digital painting up until now has been done with a basic round brush, but I've been playing around with brushes in the Megapack from kylebrush.com, and I'll probably be experimenting with doing more paintings with those soon.
Lastly, use DesignDoll to create pose references when drawing people/characters.
And That's That
If you made it all the way through that, I commend you, and thank you for reading! Now, let me turn the question around on you: If you're an artist, what mediums do you like to work in, what tools do you use, and how do you organize them? If you like, you can leave a note in the comments below (all comments on my blog are moderated).