Oil paint stays wet for hours, blends effortlessly, and produces a richness and luminosity that five centuries of masterworks testify to. Acrylic dries in minutes, layers quickly, cleans up with water, and is far simpler to set up. Neither is better — they are different, and the right choice depends entirely on how you paint and what you want from the medium. This guide gives you an honest comparison of both, covers their genuine limitations, and helps you decide — including whether, as many painters do, working with both makes the most sense. Wallace Seymour oils from £9.95, Sennelier Abstract acrylics at £3.95, all at Craft and Canvas.

Picking up a pencil is easy. Drawing with confidence and control takes technique — and most beginners are never taught the five fundamentals that make the biggest difference. In this guide we cover hatching and cross-hatching for structured tonal work, tonal gradation for smooth transitions from light to dark, blending for seamless soft passages, subtractive drawing using the eraser as a drawing tool, and contour line quality for edges with presence and life. Each technique is explained clearly with practical guidance on how to practise it. Faber-Castell 9000 pencils stocked individually at Craft and Canvas.

Most graphite pencils follow the same format — graphite core inside a cedar casing. The Caran d'Ache Grafstone does not. It is a stick of almost pure graphite, encased only in a thin plastic sleeve, and it produces marks that a conventional pencil simply cannot match in richness and depth. Available in HB, 3B, and 6B, it can be sharpened for precision, used blunt for broader work, tilted for tonal shading, or snapped to create irregular edges for textural marks. This post looks at what makes it different, how the three grades work, and where it fits in a drawing practice alongside conventional pencils. On sale at £5.60 at Craft and Canvas.