What It’s Like to Have 500 Art Supplies and Still Feel Like I’m Missing Something
Let’s get this out of the way. I have a lot of art supplies. Like, a lot a lot. We’re not talking a cute little box of paint tubes and a handful of brushes. I have drawers. I have bins. I have baskets. I have secret stashes tucked into places I’ve forgotten about. If the art world ever experiences a supply chain collapse, I could single-handedly run an emergency response center out of my studio.
And still, I stand there, surrounded by all of it, and feel like I don’t have what I need.
Because this isn’t just about paint or paper. This is about chasing a very specific feeling that can’t be bought at Blick’s or Michaels. This is about needing the right thing to unlock whatever chaos is swirling in my chest today, and not knowing what that is until I’ve torn the whole room apart to find it.
Why do I keep buying more stuff? Glad you asked.
Every supply I own was purchased for a reason. Some were bought in a burst of inspiration. Others out of desperation. And many, let’s be honest, during an ADHD field dopamine binge because a YouTube artist said: “This changed my life”, and my brain screamed, WELL THEN ADD TO CART.
I genuinely believe that someday I will need all 73 shades of that one watercolor brand I can never pronounce.
There is no predicting what kind of art I’ll want to make on a given day. Maybe I want to make something soft and quiet, like it’s whispering to my nervous system. Maybe I want to grab neon acrylics and scream into a canvas like it owes me money. I don’t know until I know. And so I prepare for all of it. Pastel Rage? I got you. Soft grief collage? Got that too. A sudden urge to cover everything in hot pink gesso and glitter glue? Done.
This is not indecisiveness. This is what happens when you give a neurodivergent brain a blank page and a box of triggers.
I’m not hoarding. I’m curating an emotional toolkit.
Here is the kicker: I use maybe 10% of what I own regularly. The rest sits silently judging me from baskets and shelves, each item whispering, Remember when you promised you’d try me? To which I reply: I’m emotionally not ready, Penelope. Stand down. (Yes, one of my paint brushes is called Penelope. No, I’m not accepting feedback.
The truth is, I love the idea of having options more than I love being forced to choose one. Choosing is hard. Especially when your brain operates like a browser with 87 tabs open and one of them is playing music, but you can’t find it.
Each material I buy speaks a different emotional dialect. Watercolors are for softness and sadness. Acrylics are for when I’m coming unglued. And inks? Inks are for when I need control but also want to ruin my clothes.
Having them near me means I have a way out of whatever spiral I might be in. Art is not the performance. It’s the escape hatch.
What am I actually looking for? Sometimes I stand in the middle of my art room, completely paralyzed. Not because I don’t know what to make. But because I am waiting for that spark, the one that says yes, this is it. That spark isn’t in the brush bin. It’s not in the pen basket. It’s not in the eleventh roll of washi tape I bought “just in case.”
That spark is in me. But my nervous system doesn’t always know how to access it directly, so it sends me scavenging instead. And that is okay.
So if you’re like me…and you’ve got enough supplies to open a small chaotic craft store out of your garage, don’t feel guilty. You’re not wasteful. You’re not a mess. You’re just an emotionally intelligent artist who prepares for multiverse-level emotional emergencies.
And let’s be honest, there are worse things than being someone who sees color as survival. At least, I didn’t start collecting ferrets
Yet.
