Art Supplies!

So today my art supplies finally arrived! These are the supplies that were ordered from the States by the former art teacher.  So obviously I was really excited and couldn't wait to open the boxes. This afternoon during prep I went through all the new stuff.

And what i thought would be a really exciting and fun experience turned out to be more of the birthday I had when I was little and all I got was an ugly sweater, back to school supplies and some kind of sports thing (it might have been a baseball glove). Anyways half of this stuff i unpacked is a waste of money and the other half I have no idea what to do with it.

So what is to follow this is a rant, because i somehow need vent my anger and frustration so I can move on from here and out how the hell I'm going to teach these kids how to be IB art students when they have horrible materials. And I mean no disrespect to the former art teacher, I'm sure this all made perfect sense to her, and she would have better equipped to teach these kids with this random assortment of stuff.

But honest who spends $100 on paint brush holders? 4 small paint brush holders! Paint Brush holders that where shipped to the Philippines from the States! Honestly, you're gonna waste my budget on that. Whats wrong with coffee can, hell I could have got someone to build me the same thing for a total of 5 dollars!

Another $100 spent on art posters.

I have 3 Boxes of clay and no kiln, and no its not the air dry kind.  Which means it will just mold and crumble.

I have 45 sets of puck paints. 45! And remember that the biggest class I have is 15 students. I have more sets of puck paints then I have students this semester! These sets have the 6 main colors, brown and black and there is no white.

I have boxes and boxes of these Styrofoam blocks, the kind of Styrofoam that you stick fake flowers into.  I can only assume that she got it to make sculptures with.  But I don't even know where to start with that, because as soon as you touch it little bits start to crumble off into you hand and I'm pretty sure if you try and paint it will disintegrate.

I have 6 stretched canvases, which is crazy because I have huge roles of canvas here, tones of stretchers and the maintenance men apparently stretch the canvas for us.

All I really wanted was some good paint, drawing paper, and some new drawing supplies, we're short charcoal and ink.

And I get it, I'm a paint snob, but why on earth would you order stuff all the way from the states if when all your going to get is tempera paint, which you can get here. And by the way adding gel medium and modeling paste to tempera does not make it acrylic. Which by the way the modeling paste showed up completely dried out!

Oh wait I forgot I one box of the worst, runniest acrylic paint I have ever seen in my life. Not to mention the fact that the colors suck. please note that when a paint is simply labeled "Brown" instead of giving what actual shade of brown it is, thats a bad sign. Not to mention that the amount of paint in there is no where close enough to last 4 high school classes a year.  If your going to ship paint from the States, get some good paint! Is it too much to ask to get some Burnt Sienna, or Yellow Ochre? Or maybe some Ultramarine Blue so the students could actually mix colors and they turn out right! Maybe some paint that could hold some texture?

Maybe instead of wasting money on posters and brush holders I could enough paper to get through a year, or a single class.

So frustrating.