I ran an office-supply shop in Quincy for the better part of forty years before I sold it to my nephew, and one thing I learned about catalogs is this: the good ones cost the company real money to print and ship, so when one is genuinely free to the customer, you take it. Blick Art Materials still mails one out for nothing, postage included. Frankly, that surprises me a little in 2026, but I checked twice.
My oldest granddaughter is the artist in the family. She's eleven, draws from breakfast to bedtime, and goes through colored pencils the way I go through reading glasses. Last year I started ordering her supplies through Blick instead of the big-box place, and the math came out in our favor more often than not. So here's the plain rundown on how to get the catalog, what's in it, and what it actually costs to buy from them.
How to request the catalog
Three ways, all of them free:
- Online form. Go to dickblick.com, scroll to the bottom, and click Catalogs under Customer Service. The direct address is dickblick.com/customer-service/catalogs. Fill in name, address, email. Takes about ninety seconds.
- Phone. Call 1-800-828-4548. A real person answers. Tell them which catalog you want.
- Walk-in. Blick has roughly 65 stores in the US. If one is near you, pick a copy off the counter and skip the wait.
Allow two to four weeks for the mail copy to land. They print a few different editions:
- The Materials for Art Education catalog (the one teachers and grandparents like me get the most use out of). The 2026 edition is the current one as I write this.
- The Studio Edition catalog, aimed at working artists, with the heavier-duty paint, brushes, and panels.
- An international request page if you've got family abroad who paint.
If you want a PDF instead of paper, both editions sit on the website as a downloadable file. Saves them postage and saves you waiting.
Who Blick is, in plain English
Founded in 1911 by Dick Blick himself in Galesburg, Illinois. Still family-owned, third generation. Robert Buchsbaum has been the CEO since 1996, which by modern standards is a long stretch. They picked up The Art Store in 2004 (eleven locations) and the Utrecht brand in 2013 (forty-five more), which is how they got from regional outfit to national footprint. The Utrecht brand had its 75th anniversary under Blick last year.
Newsweek named them one of America's Most Trusted brands in arts and crafts five years running through 2024, and in 2025 they came in #1 for customer service in the same category. I take those rankings with a grain of salt, but for what they're worth, Blick wins more of them than the next outfit.
What you'll find in the catalog
Blick lists somewhere north of 90,000 items. That's a serious operation. The catalog isn't all of it - the website carries the long tail - but the print book hits the categories most people actually need:
- Paint and mediums - acrylic, oil, watercolor, gouache, spray, fabric, kids' tempera, the whole rack. Cadmium-free options now in the major colors, which matters if you've got younger artists in the house.
- Canvas, paper, and surfaces - stretched canvas, panels, watercolor pads, sketch pads, printmaking paper. Their house-brand stretched canvas is the one I send the granddaughter, and it runs roughly half what the name brands charge.
- Brushes - watercolor, acrylic, oil, by shape, by hair type. Hundreds of them.
- Drawing and illustration - pencils, charcoal, pastels, markers, pens, erasers. The Blick Studio colored-pencil sets are the workhorse purchase here.
- Easels and studio furniture - tabletop easels start around twenty bucks, full studio easels run into the hundreds.
- Framing and matboard - frames, mat cutters, hanging hardware.
- Ceramics, sculpture, and printmaking - clay, glazes, kilns, lino blocks, baren tools. Not the impulse-buy section, but if you're set up for it the prices are competitive.
The price math, which is what I actually care about
Blick's house brand - sometimes badged as Blick Studio, sometimes Blick Premier - is where the savings live. They're the same kind of in-house line that any big retailer runs, and like the others, they undercut the name brands by 30 to 50 percent on roughly equivalent quality. For a kid who's still learning, or a hobbyist who paints on weekends, you don't need the professional-grade Winsor & Newton. You need paint that doesn't dry out in the tube.
They also discount the name brands. The catalog and website both list paints, brushes, and pads at savings up to 60 percent off list price. Blick's list-price discount is the real one, not a fake retail-then-marked-down thing.
Shipping - read this part
This is where the original 2021 article on this site got out of date, so let me set it straight. Blick's free-shipping threshold is now $79 in the contiguous 48 states (it used to be $35, which was nicer, but here we are). Below that, standard FedEx Ground or USPS runs $9.95. Gift cards don't count toward the $79. Free shipping doesn't apply to anything that ships by truck - that means the bigger easels, large kilns, full sheets of mat board.
My rule of thumb: if you're under sixty bucks and don't need it this week, wait and combine with another order to clear the $79. Ten dollars of shipping on a twenty-dollar order of pencils is, frankly, robbery to yourself.
Standard delivery runs four to six business days. Expedited is available for a surcharge if you've got a deadline.
If you sign up for the email list
I generally don't recommend giving out your email, but Blick does the right thing here: $5 off your first order of $45 or more, and they don't pelt you with daily nonsense. One or two emails a week, mostly with actual sale prices on actual products. There's also a $10 e-gift card that comes back to you on orders of $100 or more, run as a separate promotion from time to time.
For teachers and grandparents who help out classrooms
If you're connected to a school - and at our age a lot of us are, whether through grandkids or volunteer hours - Blick's education side is worth a look. They run a separate education catalog, lesson plans free for download, and discounts for verified teachers. Schools and PTAs can buy at quoted volume prices. I've watched my granddaughter's elementary school spend more than they had to at a national big-box chain because nobody told them about the Blick teacher account. Tell them.
One last thing
A free, well-printed mail-order catalog in 2026 is a bit of a holdout, and I appreciate it. Catalogs the size and quality of Blick's are not cheap to put together - I know what four-color printing costs, and I know what the postal rates have done in the last decade. The fact that they keep mailing them tells you the catalog still drives orders, which tells you a lot of artists, teachers, and frankly, customers like you and me, still flip pages before we click. Request the 2026 edition, dog-ear the brushes section, and order off the price you actually see in print.
