It's not worth buying cheap supplies

I knew it for a long time, but of course when you look at the price of your shopping cart in your online order you sometimes decide to go with the less expensive stuff anyway, or you think that "just for this experiment it doesn't matter". Well, sometimes it does even though most inexpensive art supplies are actually quite decent.

For quite a while now I wanted to paint something on gessoed board instead of on canvas. So I got some inexpensive gessoed art board "ultra-smooth, primed and ready". Essentially masonite painted with gesso. No rocket science, right? Well, I started putting some "imprimitura" on two of these boards, essentially a toning layer. One of the boards took it nicely, it was very smooth and took the paint well. The other one, though, sucked the paint away like a sponge and it was almost impossible to get a semi-consistent layer of paint on that thing. They looked the same, they were labeled the same, the cost the same. For all practical purposes they were the same, but obviously from different manufacturing batches. And one batch was almost impossible to use.

I payed probably $5 for each board (small 11x14" ones) whereas a higher quality board would have cost maybe $10+. And I've wasted at least half an hour trying to make the paint layer look ok, but might end up throwing the board out. So I didn't save money, but just wasted time, money and paint.

That really IS the reason why I prime most of my painting surfaces myself. Then I know what's on the material, and if something doesn't work right then I know who to blame.