This is not a cheap hobby if done properly. You can find student-quality paints that may look fancy at first but tend to fade over time, and I’ve yet to discover a truly inexpensive paint that brings anything other than flow — not structure — and I’m a fan of structure every ounce of the way. It’s tempting to pick up a five-dollar tube at the art store, then suddenly find yourself staring at tubes that cost anywhere from thirty to one hundred dollars each. I was searching for a magenta and they wanted me to pay seventy dollars for the tube. I’m not overly fussy about price — if I need a particular paint, I’ll buy it — but over the past few years I’ve easily spent tens of thousands on materials.
I love heavy texture; when I paint I don’t reach for a palette knife or a brush — the paint comes straight from the tube onto the canvas — and that is a very expensive way to cover a whole surface. The art store staff know me now and I get a small discount, which helps. I also stick to one canvas size, as I have for as long as I can remember: 36” x 36” (92 cm x 92 cm). At the discount shop I can pick up one of these canvases for about thirty dollars. Officeworks sells canvases for forty dollars. When I buy similar canvases from the local art store, they charge me one hundred and two dollars — and it’s the same story across the shop. The markup is outrageous. Yet people continue to buy from them, myself included, because they effectively have a monopoly on art supplies along the Mornington Peninsula.
I swear, if someone opened a competing store and didn’t mark their paints up to absurd prices, they would do extremely well. I’d even work for them for free! Lately, instead of forking out a small fortune, I rediscovered over a hundred tubes of paint and a stack of unfinished canvases in my ‘studio’. That find has saved me a lot of money for now, but the supplies will inevitably dwindle, and before long I’ll be back tempted to the dark side of overpriced art supplies.