As students in a college setting, and dealing with a global pandemic, I am sure it is easy to say that most of us are feeling the pressures of school as well as our own personal lives with the health of our own selves on top of friends and family. As beautiful as the weather has been here, it hasn’t been easy to go out and enjoy life the same as before! I myself have always been an artistic person and have always used different mediums of art to heal the soul and to pass the time peacefully. I want to share my top five choices of artistic expression with you all, and on top of that, I am going to share just how cost-effective these things can be at stores like Walmart!
Drawing
This one is super straightforward, but that is a beautiful thing because it is extremely cost-effective for us college students, but at the same time you can do so much with a sketchpad and a pen or pencil. At stores like Walmart or Target, this choice of art is going to run you about $10 or less! A simple small sketchpad and your choice of a pencil are going to do the trick just fine. I myself use the kinds of mechanical pencils that most of us typically use in class for note-taking. You don’t need to buy any certain fancy pencils or graphites in order to make good art! Tip: if you need to get your shading really smooth in a pencil drawing…use a Q-tip to blend it, it has saved my life.
Painting
This one requires a few extra tools, but at the end of the day, this one will save your wallet just like drawing will! Painting is such a beautiful way to express yourself, and depending on what types of paints you want, they can vary so much. I typically use acrylic paint from Walmart, they run about $12 for a set of 14 paints, although they do have different sets to choose from, some with less and some with more. Canvases are another tool you’ll need for acrylic or oil painting, and if you look for the sets of canvases that come in bulk, you can get a great deal and you’ll have multiple paint sessions ahead of you! Paintbrushes are about $5-$10 dollars depending on which ones you want, but the cheaper ones are just as good and useful! As for watercolor painting, I tend to look on amazon for watercolor sets. For about $25 you can get a watercolor set that has paper, paints, and brushes which is basically everything you need to start your watercolor practice!
Embroidery
This is one of my favorites that I don’t see a lot of people talking about super often. We are probably all on Tik Tok a lot of the time, myself included, and this is where I first started to learn about embroidery. It is such an inexpensive art form and is actually very cost-effective. Not only that, but it is a very forgiving art form, there is no erasing or having to start all over because you’re using a needle and thread. If you mess up you just need to remove what you messed up and continue going! Once you fix a potential mistake, there is almost no way to tell that a little mess up happened. That’s one of my favorite things about embroidery and I really want to share this with you because I feel that more people can find enjoyment in this art form! On Amazon, I bought myself a $16 embroidery set that actually came with much more than I needed for simple embroidery designs. I have every single tool that is needed for embroidery, plus so many colors of thread to choose from. This was a quarantine buy and I do not regret this purchase one little bit. Highly recommended!
Creative Writing
This one right off the bat I am going to say is going to cost you absolutely no money to procure. Not that there is much explanation needed as for why, but it’s just because you only need your pencil and notebook, or just a computer and your hands. This one is so near and dear to me as an art form, because there are so many people with different imaginations out there who can just imagine the most beautiful and unique different worlds and universes and can put a story together in them. If you love to tell stories and love to imagine different worlds or lives, this one is probably your best bet, and you might end up making a full-fledged novel from it, who knows! Quite literally your possibilities are endless with creative writing because there are no limitations to what you can put down onto a piece of paper. Go for it!
Make Music
This one is my absolute heart, and I want to encourage those of you who are music lovers to make music! It doesn’t have to be music that you release, you don’t have to show anybody, and you most certainly don’t have to make it sound perfect and stage-ready. I love to encourage people to make music because music is the window to the soul! You can make covers of your favorite songs, you can produce your own music to write lyrics to, or you can find already produced music that you can make an original song to. This art form gets the brain pumping and working so well because not very many people make music on a daily basis. It is new for a lot of people, including myself, which is why it is such a stimulating and invigorating experience. You can find a super cheap microphone on amazon, maybe around $15, and if you find that you enjoy making music and want to continue, then you can invest in a different microphone down the road. Any free music software (GarageBand for example) will allow you to use these mics with them. It might be far fetched that some people take this option as their go-to over painting or drawing, but I promise you it is worth a shot for those of you who are interested in this route!
Obviously, there are so many different art forms in the world and some of which are far more complex or interesting than those that I listed here. These are just my top 5 ways I like to express myself artistically, and they are my top five recommendations when someone is trying to find an art form to pursue. This semester has been a very rough one, and with cold and snowy weather coming our way I know it is going to be taking a toll on a lot of people as well. These ways of expression are very invigorating to the mind and are actually quite refreshing, not to mention rewarding when you get to finish a project you’ve been working on! I hope if you finished this article you found at least one or two art forms you are interested in trying during these upcoming cold months. Happy creating!