raw materials

We finally found a supplier of pre-made frames with a quality we were happy with, and it turns out they were practically in our back yard. Framatic is a Southern California company that makes pre-made frames including several lines of “seamless” frames. We’ve started out with a small selection of frames in black and white from their Modern line, as well as some larger Superlight poster frames. These are an affordable alternative to the custom framing services that we offer, and work well with the pre-cut mats from Logan that we stock.

For the month of February, get a free pre-cut mat with the purchase of any pre-made frame. We’ll be working to build out our selection of pre-made frames and mats in the months to come.

We have had a few of the Ivory Black Oilbars from Winsor & Newton in stock for a while now, as well as a set of Slim Oilbars, but we’ve recently added more colors of the original size of Oilbars.

Here’s what they have to say about them:

Artists’ Oilbar is an artists’ quality oil colour in stick form, enabling you to paint and draw freely and directly onto your surface. It is a unique medium because it provides the artist with the buttery consistency and richness of oil colour together with the freedom and directness of pastels or charcoal.

Oilbar is fundamentally different from oil pastels or oil crayons due to its unique formulation. Each of the 35 colours in the range are produced by combining artists’ quality pigments with linseed oil, into which are blended specially selected waxes. To provide further flexibility, Oilbar sticks are available in three different sizes.

Winsor & Newtown Oilbars are 20% off every day. If we don’t already have a color that you’re looking for, let us know! We’ll be working to expand our selection to include the whole line.

The Pilot Parallel Pen is a breakthrough in calligraphy pen design. The pen features a nib that consists of two parallel plates, allowing the writer to produce lines sharper than existing calligraphy pens. Ink cartridges can be switched in the pen to create gradated color lines and mixed colors. Available in four different nib sizes, each set comes with a Parallel pen, one black and one red ink cartridge, a converter to clean the pen and a nib cleaner. Refills in many colors are also available. Get your own Parallel Pen for 20% off for a limited time.

Made by a local FIDM graduate, these art marker and pencil holders are perfect for carrying around the Prismacolor markers and pencils that you stocked up on during our 40% off sale. The marker holder holds 49 markers and is $19.99, and the pencil holder holds 38 pencils and is $15.99.

This will be the first in an ongoing series of posts that will be of interest to almost nobody, but will let me blow off steam about Checkout, the point-of-sale software we use.

When a new purchase order is opened (what is used to track inventory orders and receipt), it presents this friendly list of suppliers. You’ll have to take my word for the fact that navigating this list is, for our setup, brutally slow. (Consider the overall slowness of Checkout my biggest gripe, but I can’t really show it to you via a screenshot.)

But take a look at those “Needed Products” values. Look useless? It absolutely is. You can set up what you want your minimum stock for each product to be, and that and your inventory drives the numbers in this list. But if you have an extra product of one SKU, that will balance out a product under the minimum of another SKU. The more products you source from a supplier, the more useless this number becomes.

Seem like a small gripe? It is. I’ll try to come up with something better next time. (Want a big gripe? You can’t import or export the data in purchase orders. I’m in the middle of entering a purchase order of about 250 SKUs right now. Something I have to do every week. And just working with purchase orders makes the rest of Checkout go slower. Nothing fuels rage like having to spend an hour hand-entering data that would take a second to import.)