What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?

plactagonic@sopuli.xyz to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 705 points –

Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.

Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.

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Traditional painting and illustration! While I now know that I never needed to spend more than $250 for professional-grade tools, I've spent about $18,000. As for sales in 3.5 years, they don't account for more than $800. For that I mostly blame Instagram where it's not possible to grow anymore organically and get an audience & potential customers. So I moved to the federated open source PixelFed now, if anyone's interested in my book-style illustration: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli

Also, as a word of advice for anyone who wants to also do illustration and don't want to do the same mistakes that I did. All you need is:

  • The Lukas 24 watercolor palette of student grade ($18). It's good enough and these days most paintings are scanned, so even if not all colors are lightfast, it's not a big deal. Few people only buy originals, most go for prints. If you're going to go selling originals, consider the Daniel Smith primaries set of 6 colors for $40.
  • A set of brushes of different sizes, including a flat brush and round brushes including a long thin one to do details, $15
  • Pencil, eraser, sharpener, $15
  • A set of gouache. Best bang for the buck for professional quality is DaVinci brand ($10 per large tube), or if you want to go cheap, the Himi Miya set for $25. If you go for the cheaper stuff, it's still advised to get a better quality white tube, so it's truly opaque (the cheap stuff aren't opaque enough). So go for Holbein or DaVinci white for $10-$15.
  • Soft core colored pencils, set of 48+. $15 (you will mostly need the muted colors to enhance the painting with harder edges)
  • Grey, sepia, black ink pens, and manga ink brush pens (for some types of paintings only), $40
  • 100% cotton paper for watercolor $25, or any watercolor paper for gouache $10 (gouache works on any, watercolor is more nuanced).
  • Brush watercolor markers, e.g. Tombows or Ecoline -- in case you want to do such type of illustration too, $30 for a few muted colors.
  • Masking fluid for watercolors, $10
  • White gel pen and white Posca pen (0.7mm) for white highlights, $15
  • Faber Castell white pencil soft pastel, $4
  • Caran d'ache Luminance white colored pencil, $4 (the cheaper colored pencils above again don't include a strong white)
  • Caran d'ache Neocolor II white crayon, $4
  • A ruler, to help you sketch.

I included various mediums above in white color because highlights are king in illustration, and each provides a different look and feel, depending on the painting. Happy painting!