In the Era of One-Click AI Image Generation,

Are Young People Picking Up Paintbrushes Again?

Doodling, painting, journaling, DIY...

Art supplies are officially shedding their "niche" label.

According to Google Trends data, over the past three years, search interest in "Watercolor for beginners" and "Travel art kit" has grown by 40%. According to Tmall data, in 2025, transaction volume for journals on the platform grew by over 30% year-on-year, with the number of related merchants increasing by over 70%. As of now, the "hand-drawn" topic on Xiaohongshu has reached 20.27 billion views.

Journal painting, everyday doodling, travel sketching... Young people's various hand-drawing hobbies are turning creation into a part of daily life. Image source: Internet.

In a consumption environment where standardized goods are increasingly abundant, personal expression and hands-on creation offer consumers another choice. For the art supplies industry, this not only expands consumption scenarios but also brings new considerations for channel layout, product development, and customer management.

Channels Have Changed: Art Supplies Are No Longer Sold Only to "People Who Can Draw."

From the perspective of traditional drawing supplies, the changes in the art supplies market are almost "counterintuitive."

For a long time, art supplies were a niche track, with core customers concentrated among artists, art students, and children's art institutions, and sales channels dominated by specialty art supply stores. Today, art supply brands are actively exploring new channels to reach a broader range of ordinary consumers.

Guangbo: Guangbo's 2026 semi-annual report shows that the company adheres to multi-channel collaborative expansion to achieve precise category breakthroughs: Fizz art supply series products successfully entered Sam's Club, topping the Sam's stationery category sales list in June-July 2026; licensed products such as Sanrio entered leading bulk snack chain systems including Haoxianglai. At the same time, it deepened cooperation with quality terminals such as trendy toy collectible stores like KKV and Tomato Pocket, and boutique lifestyle stores. Brand stores have opened in Shanghai Joy City, Ningbo No. 2 Department Store, Ningbo Xiushui Street, etc., with regular pop-up events in core commercial districts for new product seeding and fan operations.

Image source: Guangbo Cultural Creative

Marie's Art Materials: The century-old brand "Marie's Art Materials," while retaining traditional professional gouache and oil paint product lines, continues to launch 12-color artist-grade oil paint sets, snap-lock storage liquid acrylic marker portable sets, and introduces 3D coating sets suitable for models, figurine customization, and other needs; its independently developed AI assistant Agent "Ma Xiaoli" provides online Q&A friendly to zero-basis beginners; pop-up stores have landed in Crystal Rainbow Bridge, strengthening its "everyday creative good items" positioning and bringing the century-old brand into young people's daily creation.

Image source: Marie's Art Materials

2027 Ningbo International Stationery Fair Booth No.: H11-T05

Kangda Art: As a leading brand in China's art supplies industry, a national high-tech enterprise, and a Zhejiang Province invisible champion, Kangda deeply cultivates professional art supply manufacturing and export while continuously extending to mass consumer scenarios: forming a multi-brand layout around different groups: professional art brand CONDA, academic brand Ousidan, and children's art education brand KIDDY COLOR, covering children, students, art enthusiasts, and professional artists. Product forms extend from single tools to set-based, scenario-based, and lightweight formats; communication methods are simultaneously rejuvenated, with short videos, social media, and artist collaborations giving art tools more space for expression, turning painting from a "professional skill" into a shareable lifestyle.

Image source: Kangda Art

2027 Ningbo International Stationery Fair Booth No.: H11-T28

Winsor & Newton: International leading art materials brand Winsor & Newton also adopts a dual-line layout: on one hand, iterating artist-grade watercolor and acrylic series to deepen the professional creator market; on the other hand, launching the global "Art Mail" watercolor postcard creation activity, encouraging ordinary consumers to participate in creation calls with hand-painted postcards.

Image source: Winsor & Newton

Brands are attempting to break through traditional professional supply sales channels, bringing products into more retail and content consumption contexts. What they are targeting are users who originally "wouldn't be likely to buy watercolor tools"—travelers, journal enthusiasts, content creators, or even people simply looking for a quality gift.

In this sense, products are not just solving the problem of "whether you paint well or not," but rather a more fundamental business problem: how to make creation simple enough that more people are willing to start. And once "starting" becomes easy, subsequent sharing, social transmission, and repurchase can only then happen. For enterprises, how to adjust product combinations and communication methods according to the consumption characteristics of different channels is an important issue in expanding the mass market.

The More Mass-Market, the More Professional: Two Paths Accelerating Simultaneously.

Mass interest consumption does not mean weakening the professional art supplies market. On the contrary, professional creation and daily interest consumption are putting forward different demands for art supply products.

One end explores professional depth. Professional creators and art academy groups have rising requirements for material performance: high-purity pigments, excellent lightfastness and preservation, special texture media, high-quality paper and brushes are all core competitive points in the professional market.

For professional creators, art supply products still need to be optimized around color expression, material compatibility, usage stability, and artwork preservation needs. Focusing on product R&D and quality improvement remains an important foundation for building long-term competitiveness.

The other end penetrates into mass life. Brands launch lightweight, low-threshold sets suitable for adult doodling, journaling, art therapy, creative gifts, and other uses. Product design pays more attention to portability and ease of use, lowering the psychological cost for ordinary people to try creation.

Category stratification meets demand: professional painting pigments, leisure painting pigments, and children's painting pigments run in parallel, meticulously covering different groups from beginner to advanced; marker pens, acrylic pens, fineliner pens, and sketchbooks combine to tap into journaling and portable sketching scenarios; marker and watercolor pen sets for students and interest groups continue to enrich; acrylic markers and ultra-light clay and other materials further lower the threshold for beginners to get started. Major brands' mass-line products are seizing the light creation trend and opening up entirely new incremental markets.

In Conclusion.

Each rise of a creation trend broadens product application scenarios and drives market demand and consumption trends to evolve continuously.

For brands, closely following the emotional tone of the younger generation makes product direction naturally clear. When products effectively reach users' emotional touchpoints, resonance is no longer just a slogan but the real soil in which brands can take root. And when they possess sufficient quality and resonance, industrial extension has a more solid foundation.

March 25-27, 2027, the 2027 Ningbo International Stationery Fair will be held at the Ningbo International Convention and Exhibition Center. The fair will gather many domestic and international first-line brands, covering multiple subdivided categories of art supplies. The next issue will reveal in advance the art supplies exhibiting brands of the 2027 Ningbo International Stationery Fair. Stay tuned!

2027 Ningbo International Stationery Fair

Will open at the Ningbo International Convention and Exhibition Center

Looking forward to meeting you on site, expanding horizons together, and enjoying the excitement together!

Pre-registration channel is fully open → Free registration before the fair

Registration from 0:00 on March 25, 2027 requires a fee of 50 RMB per person