Art advent calendars are like regular advent calendars, but each day in December, or every other day, you get an art supply. They’re often themed, maybe you buy a pen and ink calendar and get different nibs and ink colours throughout the month. Or they can give you small pieces of a single project that you will complete over the month.

I decided to make my own with stuff I already have because they can be quite expensive, and I already have loads of art supplies that I never / hardly ever use. Hopefully this will change that!

I gathered together all the different art materials that I don’t really use, or have never even opened (looking at you gouache…)

1. Lino printing (bought after a workshop five years ago and never used)
2. Gouache (bargain charity shop find. Never used)
3. Conte crayons (they seemed very ‘grown-up arty’. Don’t really know what to do with them)
4. Coloured mechanical pencils (came free with regular 2.0mm pencil lead)
5. Paint Sticks (I scribbled with them a bit when I first got them)
6. Posca acrylic markers (used for details on a wall mural and now they live in a box)
7. Soft Pastels (messy. don’t really know what I’m doing so gave up quickly)
8. Dip pen + ink (not sure why I even bought these)
9. Willow charcoal (another ‘proper’ artist’s material I guess…)
10. Pencils (of course I do use pencils. But not all these different ones. You can see the only one I actually use…)
11. Alcohol Markers (not pictured because I forgot I even had them)
12. Air dry clay (not pictured. Wild card. I need my Tupperware back)

Surprise is a big part of the fun of advent calendars so I wanted to be able to pick materials at random. I thought about writing each on a slip of paper and picking one out of a jar each time. But that didn’t feel like enough of a present / prize / special event. Also, It would be too easy to put the paper back and have another go if I wasn’t in the mood for that material.

So I dug out some fat quarters (a 50cm x 55cm piece of patterned cotton often used for quilting) that I got to use as wallpaper in my dollhouse (when I get around to it…) and wrapped each art material tied with odd bits of wool.

There are 12 pretty little parcels and I will want to spend more than just a day (maybe more than a week) with each so this will be an extended advent. I’ll probably start well before December and go into next year.

My vague plan with each is to first just have a play around, see how they feel with no goal or outcome. Then look up some YouTube tutorials and/or artists working with this material and try to follow along with as many as I feel like. Then finally to create something of my own.

If it’s too easy for me to remember / feel what each parcel contains, then I might get my daughter to pick for me, and she’s welcome to join in trying them out.

Another reason I think this is better than a bought art advent calendar is that there will be no disappointing surprises. I own all these art supplies because, at some point, I was really excited to try them.

If you want to try this yourself but you actually use all the art supplies you own, then an alternative way I considered doing it was as a three materials challenge calendar. In the three materials challenge you draw from life for 30 minutes using only three materials, e.g. a blue crayon, a green paint stick, and a pencil. It would be fun to select a bunch of three materials beforehand and package them up, then open one at random each day *after* choosing what to draw.

A few friends said they might make their own art advent calendar too and (maybe jokingly) said we should come up with a hashtag for it. How about #DIYArtAdvent ?