Cultura : Shopping for art supplies in France

Once in a while, you have to treat yourself to something.  For some women, it’s shoes, for others it’s mani-pedi’s, for me that would be art supplies.  It is not like we don’t have good stores and art supply chains even, here in Belgium, but seeing I live so nearby the border… Sometimes just the idea of going to France puts me in a holiday spirit.  After what started out to be a horrible day emotionally, I ventured out to Cultura for some well needed retail therapy.

Villeneuve D’ascq is just about a half hour drive away from our home.  There you find a truckload of stores all gathered together with restaurants and a huge parking to form a ‘centre commercial’, in the French tradition.  You have the same deal in Belgium, and even in the Netherlands (mainly home supply stores I feel), but in Belgium everything is smaller scaled and they rarely contain an art supply store.  Granted, it is only half of the store that is dedicated to art and crafts, the rest is books and music and such. But still, it is big.

It is so tidy there.  I really like that.   Look at those pens!

Mhmm, so many colors of the BROAD kind of uniball.  Gotta love these.  Insert into basket.

I don’t need inks, repeat, I don’t need inks.  This French brand ‘Kesi Art’ has nice stencils too.  But I already have the ones I like.  So move on.

 

Mixed media in a Pebeo display.  Nicely done. Look at those canvasses.  I like the one with the cityscape.  But wait, what is that?  2+1? Got to check that out later.

Look at that color combo.  Really sparks of the canvas.  Great touch: you can scan the QR code to see the tutorial on the canvas.  I looked it up for you, you can find it here.

So in this ‘Graff en Live’ event they really had super deals on great supplies: posca markers, copics, paper, whole lot of Liquitex supplies.  And then I got a bit carried away 😉

 

This is what I bought:

Who could resist on 2+1???  I only bought one extra broad uniball. I figured I wouldn’t be using the other colors as much.  The tiny grey thing is an eraser for charcoal.  And then I saw the sales…  This suddenly fell into my shoppingbasket!

This is the Nathalie Kalbach ‘365 days of art’ Liquitex set.  You get six heavy body acrylic paints, a paint marker, a brush, some pouring medium, I think texure paste, canvasses and gloss medium.  Really looking forward to giving these a go!

The acrylics, I had to try to show you.

They are SO nice, really.  Good opacity, soft as cream.  LOVE! Look at those colors.  Big shout out to Swiz, the artist that made that canvas.  I wouldn’t have thought of combining those colors but look at that spark.

After all that shopping, I needed some special treat too.  Well, another thing France has that is not available in Belgium: KFC!

Some chicken, big salad.  All is good in the world.

I’ll sign of this photoheavy post with what is on my worktable right now:

Working on a Lifebook lesson.  Hope you like her so far.  I do.

Nice talking to ya!