April 2017 Paletteful Packs (Young Artist Box)
For the month of April, I decided to review the Young Artist box from Paletteful Packs. I wanted to showcase what they have for young beginning artists. This month featured a comic drawing kit and supplies for comic making. If you are interested in trying these supplies for yourself, I have included my Amazon links down below.
This is what you see when you open the box. Wow, look at that neat stuff!
The first item that I received was a 6 piece set of Sakura Pigma Sensei drawing pens. The Pigma Sensei drawing set consists of four pens, one mechanical pencil, and an eraser. The pen sizes are 0.3 mm, 0.4 mm, 0.6 mm, and 1.0 mm. The mechanical pencil takes 0.7 mm lead. I received this set in one of my previous Paletteful Packs for the Premium Box. This shows me that Paletteful Packs is not afraid to use high quality supplies in their box for young artists! This set runs from $11.93 to $15.73 and can be found at dickblick.com and Amazon.
The next items were a Prismacolor Col-Erase Blue pencil and kneaded rubber eraser. These tools are used for drawing the rough drafts in a cartoon. Cartoon artists use this blue color because it is is easily covered up. You can get 12 pencils for $5.59 at Amazon and a pack of 3 erasers for $4.85.
Next I received a 5.5 X 8.5 inch Strathmore Drawing pad. There's 40 sheets of paper in this drawing pad. Amazon carries this for $4.95.
The last item was a kit to make comic books. The kit consists of a 28 page blank book where you can draw your comics, some tracing paper, stencils for making comic panels or word balloons, a pencil, and instructions on how to draw Manga cartoons.
This kit is available at Amazon for $8.61.
Doodlin' Time!
As you can see the Prismacolor Col-Erase pencil doesn't show up very well. This is what the cartoonists want because the initial rough sketch can then be erased or colored over very easily. The pencil from the cartoon kit sharpened to a very nice point and makes nice dark lines. The Sakura Pigma Sensei pens make nice thin lines that don't smear and the mechanical pencil makes very thin lines too. The Sumo Grip eraser works very well and erases very thoroughly. The Prismacolor Kneaded eraser also works well.
'Flower Alien'
by Ellie Taylor
Here is my little cartoon. I am not really a cartoon artist although I love to draw cartoons for practice. This is in the style of one of my favorite cartoonists, Mark Kistler. The stencils work nicely for drawing the cartoon panels and there are two sizes to choose from. The speech bubble stencils are a nice guide, although I didn't really use them much. I did the rough sketch in blue pencil and as you can see, it doesn't really show up and can be erased very easily once the final inking is done. I used the Sakura Pigma Sensei pens for inking and they are very nice and don't smear. I used the little booklet that was in the cartoon kit and it has very nice thick paper. This was a really fun box and I think kids who like to draw cartoons will really enjoy it. This box has a very good range of supplies to introduce cartooning to anyone (even adults) who is interested in cartooning and wants to give it a try.
If you are interested in checking out Paletteful Packs, their website is http://www.palettefulpacks.com/ They have two tiers of boxes : the Premier Pack for $34.95 and the Young Artist Pack for $29.95. Shipping is free for the United States. International buyers pay for shipping.