Lately I have been really absorbed with this concept of using up an art supplies until the very last drop. Maybe this doesn't sound that interesting to some people, but for me it was a pretty sudden change in my habits (and a very welcome one at that!).

Around the start of the COVID epidemic, I struggled a lot to draw at all or be creative. Honestly, the struggle may have started even before this point, but that time of my life is a blur at this point, and the details aren't that important. All I can say is that I was chasing after some sort of inspiration for creativity in whatever source I could get it, and the most common thing was buying new art supplies. I would watch a video of someone working with a new medium and even a modest sparkle of interest would drive me to buy whatever they were showing me. I was spending a lot of money on new crafts and materials, using them once or twice, and then falling into a pit of exhaustion. I couldn't find the long term passion I once had to keep drawing. My sketchbooks around this time have massive, months long gaps between pages, and sometimes the pages I could manage were nothing but scribbles. It's very sad to look back on honestly, because now I realize I was very mentally unwell and just searching helplessly to reclaim the joy I once found in art, scraping at the walls to escape a seemingly inescapable depression.

My change in mental state came about, I think, because of several factors all happening around the same time...

In early 2025, I became deeply obsessed with the My Hero Academia character Fat Gum. I made an entire original character to ship with him, who I have become equally obsessed with, and I find myself rotating the two near constantly in my mind. I realized that if I wanted to see content of my ship, I would have to make it myself, and with that thought I found a source of inspiration to at least put pen to paper, even if only a scribble.

Around this same time I had also begun to reduce if not outright delete my social media accounts. I stopped using TikTok. I got off Twitter. I tried Bluesky and then got kinda bored, which I'm eternally happy for, because I would much rather be bored than scroll endlessly through posts and videos that trap me into a waste of time. I am extremely prone to getting trapped by algorithms, and I am perhaps every social media platforms dream consumer - I log on to do one specific thing and spend hours mindlessly consuming content until I realize how much time I wasted. Then, learning nothing, I would come back in a couple hours and do it all again. I could write an entire blog post of its own on social media, but the short form here is that I began to block access to it entirely, locking or deleting my accounts, to stop me from seeking it out.

With this step away from social media came a refreshing new frame of mind that began to grow and build inside me. Even though I have never really been a professional artist or had to wrangle the algorithm as many do, I still felt the compulsions regarding that very algorithm hammered into me just by being on the platform. Whenever I drew I would find myself feeling upset that I hadn't improved as much as I 'should have', as though improvement were measurable in a way that could be tracked universally. I worried constantly if my ideas were original enough, if what I wrote would make sense to a reader, if what I drew was pleasing to others beyond myself. Somehow, despite barely ever posting any art at all, I found myself haunted by thoughts that I was under constant scrutiny, and subconsciously my drive to create was warped by the concepts of external validation and rejection. I could not enjoy art for its own personal pleasures. As you might already imagine, removing myself from social media and drawing exclusively art for a ship involving an original character only I knew anything about was a quick way to strip that mindset clean off me. Who cares if the Fat Gum I drew in this perverted comic looks a little off model? I was going to be the only little freak looking at it! And I loved it! Because it existed. And I found myself more inspired to improve my art once this pressure was off. No longer did I feel this frustration that I wasn't improving fast enough... instead I would just simply draw something, and as I drew I would think "Shoes are so confusing, I should draw just shows" and then I would. And now? I can draw shoes decently. Not well, but good enough for what I need! And good enough is actually really good when it comes to making things, because the real hurdle of making anything is doing it at all.

And thus leads me to the final catalyst that led me back into creativity...

THE TOME.

Yes. The tome. The behemoth. The bludgeoning instrument that is my beloved sketchbook gifted to me by a close friend. I just got up while writing this post to weigh it on my kitchen scale - 1664 grams (or 3.7lbs). This monster supposedly has 666 pages, although I have not committed to counting them myself. My friend had already owned and was halfway through their original one, and whenever I would come over to visit, I found myself in love with the sheer absurdity of its size and weight. They gifted me my own teal tome for Christmas, and it sat for some time before I dared to start drawing in it. At that time I found it hard to put anything to paper for fear of 'ruining' the page forever, or even the sketchbook the page was a part of. Watching videos of people's flip throughs of their own sketchbooks, I couldn't help but think of mine and worry I wasn't doing something right. That mine were not 'aesthetic' or pleasing. What if I drew a terrible sketch that made the whole spread ugly forever? What if I wasn't able to make completed pieces of art on every page? Well, with this tome, such thoughts just seemed to disappear. There was no way in hell I was going to be able to draw every page perfect in such a thing. In fact, it was just so absurd that scribbling on the pages and not giving a damn seeemed like the natural state of things. I cristened my own tome on March 9th, 2025 by drawing in the first two pages, intent to make a mess and stop these fears... and then promptly stopped drawing for about a month.

Yeah, unfortunaetly the tome was not a miracle cure, but with everything else I described above, I did find myself regularly gravitating back to it time and time again. To give you some perspective, by June 6, 2025 I had drawn on 13 sheets of this sketchbook, so around 26 pages total (I went back and counted). I look back on this number now with a lot of empathy for myself and realization of how depressed I really was, though at the time I was a lot less nice to myself about it. I felt like a failure. And yet, as I gradually started to heal, I still kept coming back, as I was compelled to chase my creativity back into my possession. By June 27, 2025, I had drawn on 28 more pages. Then 8 more pages by July 11. This regular habit of drawing wasn't super consistent, and I still had times where I took very long breaks, but I found myself regularly coming back, over and over, to this one sketchbook.

And throughout this process, I would often doodle using my Col-Erase pencils, which had been one of the numerous things I'd impulse purchased in hopes of jumpstarting my creativity. I like these pencils a lot (some colors far more than others - why the hell did I buy a yellow pencil?! It sucks!!). My most used of the set was the classic Carmine Red one, which had a very satisfying color (followed closely by the Purple). I had been drawing with these pencils on and off for some time, since at least late 2024, but...

One day, in early 2026, I noticed that my Carmine Red pencil was noticeably shorter than my other pencils.

Obviously a pencil being used is going to get shorter as its sharpened, but for some reason the tangible reality of its size was something I became a bit obsessed with. I was consumed with a desire to use this pencil until it was reduced to nothing. I had never actually used a pencil to completion before, and found this a bit upsetting. I owned so many pencils, an absurd number of them in fact, but when had I ever finished one? At this time I was still trying to build joy in what I was drawing, and there were plenty times where I struggled to find any joy at all staring at either the empter page or my finished sketches... but I could find joy in realizing I had to sharpen my pencil, thus making it ever so slightly shorter, moving it closer and closer to this goal I had set. My only rule I had was it could only be dulled via drawing itself, not through some sneaky way (in fact I started using a point guard just to be extra safe - I had a Blackwing one lying around for some reason and was thrilled at the chance to use it for something).

I found myself drawing relentlessly over the next several months, more than I had any months prior, building up an endurance for drawing I had long lost. There is a notable section of my sketchbook where you see me chasing the high of wittling this poor pencil down to a nub, where dozens of pages became spreads of red artwork.

And on April 29, 2026, after 44 pages, I achieved my goal. My wonderful Carmine Red pencil was defeated and put into retirement. I completed my final page with a little message thanking the pencil for inspiring me to create. Below is a photo of that page and even the pencil itself, which I've kept in a drawer of my desk for motivation, periodically taking it out to admire. The text is very small, so I've transcribed it below (please don't hurt your eyes trying to squint and read!)

Goodbye to my Prismacolor Col-Erase Carmine Red pencil! I have worn it down to a stub and this its (sic) last contirbution. I will use it until it is dull and cannot be sharpened :)

Goodbye! I had so much fund drawing with you and you helped me grow more happy and confident in my art!

Since finishing this one pencil, I have continued to chase the joy of using up an art supply and have found a lot of success in using it as motivation to keep drawing when drawing itself isn't very motivating. In fact, the very next pages of my sketchbook after the one above have various doodles using the other colors of the Col-Erase set I had on hand. An audition of sorts for which pencil would be worked on next (the winner was Purple, although Green and Brown were strong contenders). The Purple has whittled down over time, though I have notably stopped using pencils at all recently as I try to build more line confidence and have since moved to using Sakura Gelly Rolls (why these? Because I found them in a drawer and realized I never used them for anything, and wanted them gone!).

The desire remains the same. I have used up two of these pens now, and the satisfaction of finishing the tool is still thrilling. Writing this blog post though has certainly inspired me to go back and finish off this purple pencil, if only so that my Carmine Red has a friend to sit next to in my desk and doesn't get lonely during retirement.

(And for anyone who might be wondering how on earth you use a pencil this small... the answer is a pencil extender!)