Acquisitions!

I only had one textbook to buy this semester, so I invested some of my money in things I'd been wanting to try for a while.

The brown box is a Mt. Vision flesh tones set of 25 pastels. They're the biggest pastels I've ever seen, I didn't expect to get this amount for the price, so I'm really pleased with them even though I haven't even tried them yet.
I got the Panpastel sets mostly for painting cats and to try my hand at landscapes, and the Pastelmat seems to be highly praised everywhere, so I'm excited to experience it.

I bought the Da Vinci Venetian red tube a while back but never really used it because the tinting power was too strong to lighten with the big tube of student grade white I had. I used this as an excuse to branch out and get a selection of Gamblin paints as well as a big white tube and try out artist grade oils. I  used to enjoy oil painting when I was first learning art, but I haven't tried it in several years. The Gamblin paints came with a set of 4 small paints as a bonus, so it'll be interesting to try out some extra colors. I didn't actually realize it until I set them out and looked at them, but I believe I have a pretty nice palette selection here.

I intend to write a few reviews for these products after I've played with them. I've invested enough cash into them that I have no excuse not to use them (I have a tendency to buy stuff and tuck it away for months) and hopefully they'll pay for themselves in short order.