How to Win Friends and Influence (Among the Crows)

What is it like to get in tune with the place you live and work?

Poptart, my weird orange cat, has been sitting with me and taking up her half of the chair for the entirety of writing this entry to the blog. As sleepy co-author, she still deserves some credit. Especially since we both like to watch the crows building their nests (likely for different reasons).

It’s been three weeks since I made a big move from Lynnwood down into Edmonds, and I’m starting to feel pretty well set up. We’re painting the walls(1) one by one as we get to them, my bedroom is close to being in its final form(2), and we’ve been making good use of the Coleman hot tub we put behind the house. We have plans for the backyard that I’ve been looking forward to(3), but even moreso I’d been anticipating getting to walk to work.

When I realized that a change of residence was in my near future, I started the well-practiced routine of asking my friends and partners for any leads on housing. Rental markets aren’t ever really that friendly, but my options were particularly limited. I didn’t want to live right in downtown Edmonds and be tied to the store at the hip(4), but I also wasn’t particularly interested in going even further afield with this move than I already was(5). Luck and a lot of lifting and scheduling and such landed me a place about a half hour walk from the store, and I couldn’t have been happier.

I used to walk everywhere when I was in school in Bellingham. Granted, my world was a little smaller back then, and I barely even used the car I’d gotten on the cheap(6) until after graduating. Walking was a time to sit with my quiet mind, hum my way through songs that’ve been trying to be heard, and see the world far more slowly(7) than I possibly could while focusing on driving with all the perils and speed it brings with it.

Views from my walk to work

I had been looking forward to this because, in the past, walking for extended periods almost daily was good for my mental health. A forced reset in stillness as I make my way slowly to my destination. What I didn’t count on as a matter of fact was the company I’d end up keeping.

I’d noticed the first couple of times I walked that several of the copses of trees along the route were alive with sound. There had been crows I knew that frequented the quiet road out front of my mom’s house(8). Had I found some of my very own?

There’s a surprisingly robust body of literature online surrounding the topic of befriending crows. In short, though, they like to latch on to the same things as me: patience and routine. They have a stronger taste for peanuts than I do, so I decided to trade a bag from Winco (unsalted) for friendship. In just three weeks, they’ve grown from initially trusting that the food wasn’t going to hurt them to congregating in the tree in my front yard when I leave for the day. I sometimes whistle for them(9), but it’s not my intention to treat them as pets or have them treat me as their only source of food. Still though, it’s lovely to see a crow go absolutely nuts for nuts and call out to its family. Soon three or more crows are all joining in its happy dance. For the next few hours at least, they have one fewer thing to worry about.

The crows are just one thing that I’ve gotten to be more in tune with as I’ve settled into my new spot so close to Edmonds. I’m getting to be more in tune with the store and able to jump in as needed when needed at shorter notice. I’ve worried a lot over where I want to be and live, but I think for now I’m happy.

A bonus picture of my outfit for Crow Fest 2022 in Bothell this past October. It’s not even a big deal, but me and my friends DID win best group costume this year.

(1) If every wall is an accent color, then they’re all equally special.

(2) The lump on the back of my head from assembling my bed frame has just about receded. The chunk of wood that was knocked loose by my head is gone for good.

(3) I’m going to gush just a little bit that my partner and I have plans to start growing a reasonable amount of our own food. We’re just about to start turning up ground to plant, we’ll hopefully be set up to keep quails here soon enough to hatch them soon, and next year they offered to build me boxes and frames to keep bees. Homemade encaustic paints anyone?

(4) I love the store a lot; I wouldn’t be taking over ownership if I didn’t. I do value having a bit of distance though while still being close enough to run in at short notice if needed.

(5) If I had taken my budget and had to live on my own, I’d probably be looking at a 30-45 minute commute to Edmonds at least. I do love a long drive. I listened to the entire Witcher series of books while driving from Lynnwood this past year, but at a certain point I just don’t want to be giving that many hours of my life to sitting in a car burning fuel.

(6) My fantastic red Ford Escape was the only other car I owned, and I drove it all the way into the ground before giving it up for the care I have now. Someday I hope to have a car that isn’t 20 years old, but nobody is ever going to get rich selling art supplies.

(7) I think often of a Robert Frost poem, A Passing Glimpse (1928) with lines that include:

I often see flowers from a passing car

That are gone before I can tell what they are.

and

Heaven gives it glimpses only to those

Not in position to look too close.


(8) Agnes, the crow, went by as many different names as there were people who fed her, but that’s how I knew her. She was easy to recognize with a broken wing that prevented her from ever even attempting flight. As far as I know, she hasn’t been seen in at least a few months, which doesn’t look good for her.

(9) The same combination of notes every time. Patience and routine.





A Tale of Two Skates:

Running a serious business in a Very serious way


It’s a well-established fact…

…that ARTspot is one of the coolest spots in downtown Edmonds(1). That’s said not as a business owner, but as someone who was eight years old when the Wishing Stone opened a store in Edmonds down by the waterfront and there was finally something interesting to see in the early 2000s. I grew up in Edmonds(2). Despite traveling around a bunch and considering myself a somewhat worldly person I was always perplexed in my earlier twenties that I somehow always ended up back in Edmonds. I think it’s because I actually really like it here? Edmonds is really special to me for many reasons. One of the big reasons is the kernel of wonderful weirdness that lives in the community of artists that have made Edmonds their home(3).

To anyone outside that community, the arts may seem like a foreign concept reserved for others. The terrible truth, though, is that someone you know, and probably even someone you love, is an artist(4). And artists are weird. The weirder the better. Weirdness helps you find comfort in taking the risk of creating something genuinely awful. If you’re already weird then what do you have to lose? It’s ARTspot’s mission to provide artists with the tools and expert advice to find success in what they’re doing, but I also view it as an integral part of what we do here to encourage taking comfort in weirdness.

Just a normal guy doing normal things in a normal way.

Salvador Dali Walking an Anteater through Paris (1969)

To pivot the subject slightly, in the winter of 2021 we had all been weathering the COVID-19 pandemic to the point where the new normal felt pretty normal. It also kinda felt like we were still trudging through a swamp that fewer and fewer people wanted to acknowledge. It had been a weird time, but not in a particularly good way, and I hadn’t really made art or felt any creative drive in months by then(5). I was working at the art store, which at least afforded me the joy of being around other creative people and sharing in their joy, but it wasn’t a great time for me(6). 

My background in the arts is in costume design, which is all about nudging and pushing viewers’ perceptions for one reason or another. I was stuck in a major rut, so I decided to nudge my own perception as a viewer of myself. 

Wouldn’t it be fun to get really good at roller skating? (7)

So I’ve been wearing roller skates around the store almost every day for a year and a bit!(8) I started very slowly and cautiously after closing while running inventory reports, and to date I’ve never collided with a person or fallen on a display. My black Impala(9) skates, even when they were unadorned at first, were a great icebreaker for anyone coming into ARTspot with a serious attitude or expecting a serious store staffed by serious people. We take creativity seriously, but a big part of that is embracing the weird and wonderful.

These are my skates as of today! February 6th, 2023

Subject to change at an artistic whim. I could have taken a better photo of them, but I didn’t want to take them off.

By now, I’ve used POSCA acrylic markers(10) to cover my skates with more and more bits. Quotes from David Bowie and Ai Wei Wei(11), a Sex Pistols logo, and a guillotine for no reason in particular(12). They all wear off because the canvas in this case is something that gets used hard and regularly, and the only thing I always replace just the same is the bright yellow and pink of the Pistols. Acrylics are pretty durable, but if you think I skate hard at ARTspot, you ought to come out to the Lynnwood Bowl and Skate sometime for an 18+ night(13).

(1) Not for lack of competition! It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Edmonds as Deadmonds, and I think that’s only partially because of my advancing age. Though I must say there’s still nobody down here that sells Pokemon cards, which is what I primarily thought was cool at age 5.

(2) And Lynnwood a little bit. And what I think was unincorporated Snohomish County when I was really little, but I’m pretty sure there’s a Park & Ride and a Fred Meyer there now. I know it’s just going to get more pronounced as I continue to age in the same location, but it blows my mind how much this area has changed. There were horses down the street from my first house in Edmonds. Horses! In Edmonds!

(3) It’s lowkey very cool that downtown Edmonds was marked as the first Creative District in Washington. I think that opened up some funding for further cultural development. With all this development, I’m really hopeful that people from all walks of life will find ways to visit Edmonds, contribute to the culture here, and then hopefully help to enrich wherever they call home.

(4) It’s a pillar of the ARTspot philosophy that everyone has a creative side and a right to be able to access it. It may not take the form of visual art, but we love it when it does!

(5) I think the last bit of fun I had making art for a long while was back in April of 2020 when the business I was working at at the time (not ARTspot) was compelled by the state to send its workers home on lockdown as nonessential. I ordered, assembled, and painted a custom 3-D printed miniature of Darth Vader for a tabletop game I played hoping that I’d be able to play with my friends soon and impress them all. We’ve still not been able to get back together for a real game night.

(6) And I’m the author here so my feelings matter.

(7) Like, really good. Like Gene Kelly in It’s Always Fair Weather levels of good. I think about this routine a lot and marvel at how flat the street is despite being pretty sure it has to be a 1950s MGM soundstage. If any readers have ever attempted to skate a set of quads down an Edmonds sidewalk, you’d have a new appreciation for well maintained pedestrian infrastructure.

(8) Taking off my skates at the end of the day has become the worst part of any day. To go from gliding and swooping around with little effort to manually plodding around is such a wid shift. I haven’t needed to rearrange anything at ARTspot to accommodate my skating, but I totally have started to view the layout of things as a series of arcs and straightaways I can maneuver through, each with their own speeds to be able to stop nimbly to avoid something or someone.

(9) I am, unfortunately, not sponsored or affiliated in any way with Impala skates, but they do have some very cute designs and pretty good prices considering how well they’re built. If you or anyone you know may work for Impala or a similar roller skate-making company, please consider making more of your styles in sizes larger than a US Women's 9. All my fellow Amazonian transfemme skater babes will thank you and sing your praises until our deaths.

(10) I initially wrote this entire post as an Ode to POSCA, which felt a bit too much like a smelly sales pitch. That’s not really the goal of these posts, but if y’all ever want to listen to someone wax poetic about POSCA like Lieutenant Commander Data talks about his cat, please come in and speak to either myself or Vincent.

(11) “The purpose of art is the fight for freedom,” is a powerful reminder that art and creativity is not just for looking pretty or for making people happy. While curating the Intersections show last spring, I made a point to ask for and include art that I knew may spark an uncomfortable feeling for some viewers despite being shown in a setting that is ultimately safe for them. Art can be so many different things! Whether you’re making it (and you should) or seeking it out to take in through your senses, accept that it doesn’t have to look good for it to be good. I’m a huge supporter of making bad art badly!

(12) I’m a bit of a dirty anarchist, which is shocking I’m sure, but it puts me in an awkward position of also being a business owner raised up into the petite bourgeoisie by merit of knowing a lot about art supplies and coming from a family with access to enough capital to have started a business. I have a guillotine painted on my skates and also sometimes wear a guillotine necklace gifted to me by a friend when I accepted an ownership role to remind me that nobody is inherently better than anyone else and that everything is built on the efforts of others. Maybe all business owners, big and small, should have a little guillotine somewhere to remind themselves to keep humble and honest about the work they do.

(13) If you, like me, exhibit what the young folks are calling Main Character Energy, then maybe the 18+ Night at the Lynnwood Bowl and Skate is the place for you! As a certified freak, I’ve never felt less weird than when I’m surrounded by a bunch of people in their 20s-60s who all choose to go roller skating on a Monday night.

Conflating Gender and Color

Pink is for faers, blue is for zirs

That’s a butchering of neopronouns, which this entry will neither expound upon nor explain further, but i hope it got your attention

A child, maybe two years old, sits for a photograph in 1884. They have shoulder-length hair, which has not yet been cut, a ruffly white dress, patent leather shoes, and are holding a very fun-looking hat. Let not your eyes deceive you because the photograph is one of the earliest of the 32nd US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt(1). Until a certain age, children would wear white because it was easy to bleach. Dresses were practical to accommodate diaper changes. It was common for everything to be adorned with ribbons. At the time, however, children simply weren’t dressed to differentiate boys and girls. Kids were, and still are, just kids.

A normal, cutiepie boy c.1884

By medical happenstance, I grew up in a world surrounded by shades of blue. My parents were more progressive than some, so I wasn’t forced to exclusively wear or display this single color(2). Regardless, it proved impossible to navigate a life of unhappily assigned male-ness without associating it with the long history of masculinity that came before me. But if young men even just one hundred years ago generally wore white dresses, how vast could that history really be?

Not very, it turns out. Pastel shades started to become popular for children in the early 1900s(3), but it wasn’t until the 1940s that manufacturers and advertisers decided on our modern concept of blue for boys and pink for girls and pushed for normalization. The baby boomers are the first generation who grew up dressed like their mothers and fathers in pinks and blues. Coincidentally, it’s harder to pass down clothing from an older sibling to a younger one if they have mismatched gender assignments; parents would simply have to buy more things for their kids to fit in. 

My last entry was a quick dive into the color blue, which spawned the idea for this follow-up, but there’s too much to say about pink to fit into the remaining half of this post. Suffice to say, pink has a history with humanity that stretches as far back as our relationship with red. It wasn’t used to describe the color we recognize now until the very late 1700s(4), but it’s been popularized by everything from swirling scenes of opera and cabaret(5) to aristocratic mistresses(6), concentration camp victims to human rights movements(7), and punk rock aesthetic(8) to pussy-hatted protesters. 

So much PINK! It still blows my mind that the Rocky Horror Picture Show was made in 1975. Was it low budget? Yes. Did actual people still spend actual money to make this ridiculous movie almost fifty years ago? Also yes!

With all that’s changed in our perception of the meaning of color and the various forces of influence behind it all, it begs the question: is it bad that blue is for boys and pink is for girls? This may come as a shock to some who know me, but my answer is no(9). 

People seem to want group identity and seek acceptance within their chosen groups. It seems natural to follow that groups become associated with symbols, colors, flags, songs, and more to differentiate themselves. If you look at the LGBTQ+ pride movements, you’ll see a truly remarkable variety of colors used to denote broad and specific identities(10) or even as code to signal others in the know. I think it’s wrong to try and remove people’s innate sense of healthy group identity; whatever that group has chosen to assume as their symbols is theirs. I do, however, believe the trouble comes up when groups are intended to cause harm and  take away from others or when group identity is forced, rather than treated as an opportunity for exploration(11). Our shared delusion that blue is for boys and pink is for girls is harmless, or even empowering, so long as the conflation between color and gender is optional for everyone regardless of age.

(1) I’ll come out and say it, he was a very adorable kid in his dress.

(2) In actuality, I played dress-up a lot as a kid. My sister and I had an extensive variety of weird costumes, having been blessed in the 90s with a seamstress grandma. Stuff like this is pretty wildly good for kids to express and experiment outside the realm of cultural norms!

(3) As per an American trade magazine in 1918: ““The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Earnshaw's Infants' Department

(4) The word comes to us from the Dianthus plant, which is commonly referred to as a “Pink.” There are references from as far back as the 1600s to objects being “pink-coloured,” but the English language had previously relied on a few other words. Namely, incarnation, or in reference to the body of Christ as a literal flesh tone. I doubt Europeans in the 1700s were particularly focused on increasing their wokeness, but personally I’m glad the language has moved away from describing this common color as associated with a somehow inexplicably white Jesus. Not everyone looks like that.

(5) Opera Pink is one of my favorite colors and was made very dear to me by someone who used to work at ARTspot with me back in, like, 2015 or something. He was (and I think still is) fabulous, and the colors he liked were equally vibrant. This particular pink (PR 122 for those cool babes in the know) is sometimes criticized for its lightfastness and is supplanted by Permanent Rose (PV19 ew gross), which weirdly has less of a violet bias in a few lines of paint and is less fabulous.

(6) I’m talking about Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress of King Louis the 15th in France c.1750. You can try, but you’ll never be as cool as she was.

(7) Apparently the footnotes are all going to be about history for this entry. I honestly don’t know how many people outside of the affected communities realize this, but the Holocaust extended its remarkably horrifying umbrella over communities of gay and trans people as well as so many others marked as undesirable or a threat to the social order. They applied a label of a pink triangle to identify gay and bisexual men as well as trans women, which was later (and still is) reclaimed by liberation groups in Germany and then beyond. One of my favorite things in the world of media is its inclusion in one of Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s costumes in the Rocky Horror Picture Show (performed LIVE this upcoming Saturday the 4th at the Downtown Seattle Regal Cinema by the Vicarious Theater Company, including yours truly!). I’m very not sorry to be a threat to a social order that would prefer to erase delightful people like myself.

(8) I didn’t quite put this together until I was decorating my roller skates with POSCA markers. I was drawing out the Sex Pistols logo, which has lots of pink, and started noticing it came up pretty often in a lot of punk design. All the weird leftover crustpunks I made friends with in Hackney back in 2016 insisted that the only two colors are red and black. They’re great colors, don’t get me wrong, but a bright, obnoxious pink is such a good tool in the arsenal of anarchy. It’s very hard to ignore!

(9) I have a lot more thoughts about this that wouldn’t easily fit into a 600 word chunk of writing. Obviously the world and the problems therein are much more complicated than a simple yes or no binary. My reasoning in the following paragraph is brief, but I hope it resonates with some looking to claim or reclaim their masculinity in a healthy way; I know it’s something I balance on an everyday basis. In the same sense, these sorts of social systems can be very harmful to some who are trapped in them. To anyone who finds themselves in that boat, I’m very sorry and I hope you’re able to navigate your way out through your own competence and the good intentions of those you surround yourself with. I love you, and it will get better.

(10) Yes, even blue and pink. They show up in the flags for transgender pride as well as those of Demiboys and Demigirls and Lesbians as signifiers of “boy-ness,” and “girl-ness.”

(11) I hope this brief qualification helps to reinforce my earlier point. Please always continue questioning your communities regardless of whether they’re chosen or if you’ve been thrust into them. I no longer really attend, but the church I was raised in was very big on questioning authority, including its own. I’m really very glad to have seen that value demonstrated when I was a kid. No institution or social grouping is so perfect as to justify making life a worse experience for others. Those of us who have benefited from these systems have an obligation to apply those benefits for universal equity to achieve equality.

Pencils Have No Right to be as Cool as They Are

What even is graphite?

Where did it come from? What do we do with it now that it’s here?


Pencils are ubiquitous in the arts for good reason

Where did they all come from??

I doubt I’ve ever met someone who has never held a bright yellow, No.2 pencil. Probably a Ticonderoga, named after a spot in New York where graphite was processed back in the day. The graphite came from Lead Mountain in Maine(1), but there’s no elemental lead to be found anywhere in a pencil(2). But the Ticonderoga pencils mostly come from Mexico(3) now, and it’s a lot of information and we haven’t even started talking about war yet. And what does any of this actually have to do with lead?



So let’s roll back to answer this lead question. Way back to when information was even more muddled and less reliable than today. There’s some accounts(4) that in Roman times, scribes would use a stylus made of lead to make various marks. However, historians of the time were less interested in the mundanities of everyday life and bureaucracy than they were in military and political epics. What I consider to be a somewhat more credible source comes from the 1500s in England. After a storm, some folks happened upon strange, dark material clinging to the roots of a fallen tree. The material was initially misidentified as lead(5), but in fact the tree had grown atop the largest, purest deposit of graphite ever found. England was first in the European pencil-making business completely by accident.



Pencils rock. You can do practically anything with them worth doing, and their utility as both writing and artistic instruments were quickly apparent. My classmates joked in middle school that NASA had spent millions to develop a pen that would work in zero gravity whereas the Kosmonauts simply used a pencil to record information(6). As graphite became more widely available, pencils outperformed the various metalpoint art techniques(7) that had been practiced for centuries in Europe.

Do not run around with sharpened pencils. A portrait of Nicolaus-Jacque (1755-1805)




So now we come to war, blockades, and a mostly-unsuccessful balloonist named Conté(8). In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Britain was less interested in trading their super pure and excellent graphite with their continental rival. You know how math teachers won’t accept work unless it’s in pencil because only a madman works in ink? It’s the same idea. The necessity to turn in their math homework and anti-British artillery calculations drove Nicolas-Jacques Conté to mix more widely available graphite powder with clay and water(9). This could be dried in a kiln, encased in wood for strength, and became the model for our modern concept of a pencil. A similar method was in use by Joseph Hardmuth and the Koh-I-Noor company, who patented the process and developed the grading system of H’s and B’s we still use today(10). Companies like Hardmuth, Conté, and Derwent all date back to around this period and are still in existence today!


I always tell people that almost every other kind of visual art is built atop drawing skills(11). Working with pencils may not be as sexy as jumping straight to painting or pastels, but I can guarantee it’s hard to find a good drawing pencil for more than four dollars(12). It’s nearly impossible to find paints, brushes, and an appropriate working surface for anything close to that. Coincidentally, any of the great painters I know are also brilliant with a pencil. In the field of art where technique and style are developed through repetition(13), it pays not to spend a fortune developing your fundamental skills. Besides, how could anyone say that a pencil is anything less than extraordinary?


(1)  Or maybe somewhere in Massachusetts? I wasn’t really expecting to have my research in the history of graphite pencil production to feel more like I was researching the enigmatic roots of a mythology. Maybe I’m the weird one for thinking pencil-history is cool enough to be worth it, and if you think that’s the case then maybe skip this blog.

(2) Thank goodness, honestly. I found some sources that lead may have been present in some pencils until as late as when consumer lead use was mostly banned in the US (1978). While I don’t support lead poisoning for babies, artists do genuinely miss lead white. If we can have it back, we promise to not put paintings in our mouths and not use it on walls and toys.

(3)  I don’t intend to bad-talk Mexican production. Dixon-Ticonderoga pencils are perfectly average, and really I’m mostly salty about Prismacolor’s drop in quality after outsourcing production to any factory with reduced tests of quality.

(4) Or no citable accounts insofar as I could find. People write about it but never conclusively.  I do love a good historical anecdote though, especially if it confirms what I already think I know.

(5) To be honest, my knowledge of chemistry is maybe about as strong as that of an educated peasant in the 16th century. If I found a strange, dark material in the dirt I might just assume it’s dirt. Not a historically impactful mineral deposit.

(6) I have no comment on what they might have done to mitigate the loose eraser dust floating around the spacious interior of a Soyuz space capsule. Maybe they used a kneaded eraser.

(7) Namely silverpoint drawings. If you think art supplies are expensive today, I can assure you that it’s cheaper than buying silver rods.

(8) To quote Al-Jabarti’s thoughts on Conte’s disappointing ballooning incident in Cairo in 1798: “Their claim that this apparatus is like a vessel in which people sit and travel to other countries in order to discover news and other falsifications did not appear to be true.” Still, the guy knew more about it than I do. Probably.

(9) British graphite was sawn from blocks, which created a lot of unusable powder as waste unusable until 1838 when Henry Bessemer invented a compression technique that is still used. Why compress when you can have a nice slurry of carbon and clay though?

(10) When I was little I thought the H stood for hard because it was harder and made a lighter line. The softer B rating was a mystery. Bsoft? In fact the H stands for Hardmuth and the B is for Budějovice in modern day Czech Republic, where the pencils were produced after 1847. The less common rating of F stands for Franz, Joseph’s grandson.

(11) In a traditional Atelier art education it can be years before students are allowed to touch paint. The artists insane enough to make it through a machine that forges skilled artists are impossibly good at drawing.

(12) It’s not impossible though. I’m looking at you, Blackwing Volumes. You can get a functionally similar pencil for about a dollar or so less, but I contend that the cool design is worth it. Side note: if anyone can find and sell me a Volume 155: Bauhaus pencil for less than $50, please let me know. I feel like I should really get into the Blackwing-scalping business.

(13) I’ll probably do another blog post about this and try really hard not to let it devolve into a rant, but the hard work that goes into becoming a skilled artist is often attributed to natural talent. I think this is a mythology supported by people who see the understandably tedious process of practicing as impossible. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the neurologically atypical folks I know who hyperfixated on drawing since childhood are coincidentally “super talented”.





What's a day like in the life of an art supply store?

Welcome to the Day in the Life of an Art Store Blog!


My name is Ziggy (or Zigmund Felicity Fraker if you prefer formality). my aim with this blog is to translate some of the gibberish art-talk and pull back the curtain on just what it’s like to help run a small art supply store in downtown Edmonds, Washington.

There’s never a bad time or place to make art in downtown Edmonds! (Photo by Tracy Felix)

I’m an Edmonds native, but I didn’t think I’d end up here for the long haul. Growing up on top of the bowl, putting in nine years at Maplewood K-8, and making my way through high school at Meadowdale did prepare me pretty well though. Now I’m figuring out what actual adulthood looks like for me, and I can’t imagine setting down roots anywhere else. Edmonds has changed so much since I was little, for the better, I think. Selling art supplies to the people in and around Edmonds is the next part of a big adventure.

Working in art supplies has been a singularly unique experience. I’ve dipped in and out of ARTspot for all ten years of its life. I spent some time with other lines of work and lived in LA for six weird months after graduating university, but I always kept coming back to the store as a safe and fun place to work. After ten years of answering questions and researching new materials to bring in I realized that I had accidentally become somewhat of an expert, I think at least. When Tracy indicated that she was interested in transferring ownership, it felt like I’d made the choice to accept years ago without quite realizing that either.

An unfortunate reality is that art supplies are a luxury to many, although they can be of great benefit to any and everyone. To paraphrase one of the core philosophies at ARTspot: everyone has a creative spirit, and sometimes they just need a little push to find and direct it. Art of any kind has the potential to express feeling, communicate a thought, and explore aspects of our identity while we make our way through life. It’s always been a goal for ARTspot to stock various levels of quality materials to help fit the needs and means of anyone who visits us. I don’t think anyone here is going to get rich selling art supplies considering that it’s our honest goal to sell you the right thing. Not the most expensive thing.

It’s been a dream to finagle our way into a larger space someday, but I do enjoy the challenge of maintaining a beautiful space to shop in while still maintaining a healthy variety. Whenever I or my family travel anywhere we always make a point to visit a small (or large) family-owned art supply store. All over the world, it’s amazing to me just how similar we all are to each other. You’ll see the same polychromos colored pencils, princeton heritage brushes, and copic markers here at ARTspot as you’d find at Sennelier’s in Paris or Uematsu in Tokyo. Art and the supplies that make it are truly a global phenomenon!

I think that’s enough waxing poetic about ARTspot, creativity, and everything else on my mind for now. I want to use this blog to explore some of the weird intricacies of why art supplies are the way they are, why putting your resources towards supporting small businesses in your community is (not even in a selfish way) of the highest importance, and just what it’s like when every day is a day in the life of an art supply store.