What not buying new art supplies for three months has taught me.

If you know me, you know that I am a sketchbook and overall stationary hoarder. I LOVE MY ART SUPPLIES. Paper, pencils, paints, but also stickers, prints, notebooks… The list is endless and OH MY are those things expensive. 

I am a little bit ashamed to say that last year, I went through a phase of mindless spending, during which I purchased a LOT of art supplies. Way too much for one person. All my money would go towards these frivolous expenses… I mean, not exclusively, but I did buy a lot of art supplies (and art. And other stuff too…). 

So at the beginning of 2025, the holy year of my thirtieth birthday, I decided that it was high time I matured and started managing my money - which I had been metaphorically throwing out the windows for the past years. 

I had absolutely no savings whatsoever.  And I was starting to build my own business that I might want to invest some money in. 

So yeah, I decided to do a low-buy year. 

The rules? I wasn’t allowed to buy any new : 

• art supplies

• stationary

• books

• clothes

• courses (I have a whole thing of buying online courses and not taking them…)

If you want to know how the low-buy is going, I have a first quarter review video on my Youtube, and I also talk about it in depth in my monthly Patreon podcast (become a free member to gain access to it). 

What I want to talk to you about, is what doing this has actually done to me, how it has impacted me, and why I think we should all give a try to doing a low-buy. 

First, let me acknowledge my financial privilege. Europeans or not, we have been living through intensely hard financial times recently. This recession has us working hard, and while everything costs so much more, our salaries do not seem to be following the inflation quite enough…  And here I am, bragging about doing a low-buy after one and a half years of spending mindlessly. I know I am one of the privileged ones not having had to worry too much about that. 

Last year was the first year I really had a salary. I found a day-job, with nice advantages and a reasonable salary and after years of working very crappy jobs with ridiculously low pays, it was a whole new world for me to have spending money. I have never really been educated about money (which also comes from the privilege of having enough of it). 

So when I first discovered the joy and comfort of still having money left to spend after paying rent, I started consuming. And after a few rough years, I felt like treating myself. The thing is, I was starting to believe that the more I consumed, the happier I would be. 

But did buying a shit-ton of stuff make me happier? My fears and doubts of not being a good artist still existed. I was still unsure about my path. And there was this stress, this underlying frustration of feeling like I never had enough, like I’m always missing something. Like if maybe I had this or this art supply that an artist I love is using, maybe I will feel like them? But I didn’t. And yet, my identity was starting to dangerously merge with the stuff I owned. With how much I consumed. 

Also, being an internet person - building a career online - made me more vulnerable to thinking that I needed to be and look perfect in order to find success and, therefore, happiness. And perfection seemed weirdly linked to consumption. 

At first, doing a low-buy and not buying new art supplies was super easy. Especially because I had been hoarding them for the past year, so I had way too much actually, or more than enough supplies to last me for the rest of my life. 

So I was riding the high wave of self-sufficiency, trying to use all those fun art supplies I had been hoarding. I was (and I have been) drawing daily. I even cut my social media consumption for a while, by deleting apps from my phone and working on my business through my iPad. 

Slowly, but surely, I started noticing the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that people are always trying to sell me stuff. This is the world we live in. And even I do, I use social media to try and find illustration clients, to present them with my work and make them want to work with me. But I never used to give much thought to how much I am surrounded with ads - when I scroll Pinterest, I not only find inspiration but I am also BOMBARDED with them. Same on Instagram. It is very hard to resist the urge to buy.

But by compartmentalizing, by cutting my screen time and therefore drawing more, I was starting to wake up. Had I been completely hypnotized by my apps, so much so that I had become blind to the fact that I was only being used by brands to make me believe that my self-worth was linked to something other than my soul, how I love, and the alignment of my actions?? Did I really believe in the fake happiness that they were selling me? 

Waking up was a bit hard on my ego, I’m not going to lie to you. 

But having a goal - a clear financial goal -, and having a tool to track it, has been helpful to me. It gave me motivation, when I forgot and was suddenly again swayed by some advertisement, to resist and think on it. Sleep on it.

And obviously, not buying new art supplies has given me the golden opportunity to use the ones I already have. 

When I finish a colored pencil that I have thoroughly used during a daily self-portrait, my instinct is now to try another one, to see what I could replace it with from my own supplies. Because I could very well buy another one of the same colored pencil, but isn’t it more fun to switch it up a bit? Very fun. And how cool would it be if I had a collection of very tiny, completely used colored pencils?? VERY COOL.

Basically, not spending time yearning for what I don’t have has allowed me to focus more on the process and to appreciate what I do have. By romanticising my own stuff and my own life instead of dreaming of having another one’s, I find myself trusting myself more, drawing more, and feeling that much more confident

The secret is in the doing, it would seem. To end this blogpost, I give you this wonderful quote from The Artist’s Way, that I am currently re-reading :

“Focused on process, our creative life retains a sense of adventure. Focused on product, the same creative life can feel foolish or barren.”

This quote from Julia Cameron invites us to forget results and focus on the process, and this is the main tool I preach to anyone who will accept to listen to my unsolicited advice : instead of focusing on how things look, learn to fall in love with how you feel while doing the things. 

That’s it for today, pip pip, my loves.