UpCrate Art Subscription Box Review: A Monthly Surprise for Creative Hands

Introduction

UpCrate is a Germany-based art subscription box company that has built a reputation as one of the most popular names in the art subscription world. It is also one of the more affordable options at roughly $24 to $25 USD per month, which immediately raises an obvious question: how much art can a company realistically fit into a box at that price?

To find out, we opened three consecutive boxes: the January box, the March box, and the April box. The results were mixed, occasionally frustrating, and at least once genuinely delightful. If you are considering subscribing, here is what the experience actually looks like.

What Came in the Box

The January crate included a six-piece Art Space color marker set with both a detail end and a chisel end, a white Marco pencil, a set of six basic UpCrate color pencils, an Art Space 0.6 black liner, a small abstract print by artist Soul Curry Art, and a pad of Art Space mixed media paper. Art Space appears to be an exclusive UpCrate house brand, and this was our first encounter with it.

The box also came with a magazine covering the supplies inside, artwork from a previous box, background on the featured artist, and a how-to video guide. According to the company’s own description, each crate is filled based on the value of the supplies, and the company states that the value of your new art supplies should be worth more than the subscription price, minus shipping.

Putting the Markers and Pencils to Work

The Art Space markers surprised us. They performed well on the included mixed media paper, which held up nicely with only light ghosting on the back and no bleed-through to the next page. The paper in particular was very good for the price tier.

The trade-off is the nib type. There are no brush markers here, only detail and chisel tips. Anyone who prefers brush nibs for blending will likely find these limiting, though artists who favor fine detail work may get along better with them. The included colored pencils added little over the markers, and the white Marco pencil was the weakest item in the box, crumbling and breaking repeatedly during use. The 0.6 fine liner was a genuine highlight, precise without being invisibly thin, though we would trade it for a white gel pen any day given how the rest of the kit pairs together.

Overall, the January box felt like a very basic assortment. It works fine for simple cartoon-style drawing, but for anyone who likes to blend and layer, the supplies never quite added up to more than the sum of their parts.

The March Box: A Different Kind of Crate

The March box took a sharp turn in direction. It contained Sakura Jelly Roll Moonlight gel pens in a range of genuinely pretty colors, Sakura Micron pens including a 03 size, a compass, a protractor, and paper. The included artist spotlight featured Kerry Ellison, who uses jelly roll pens as her medium of choice, and the box was clearly built around recreating her geometric circle-based art style.

We appreciated that UpCrate included a tutorial here: a roughly seven-and-a-half-minute video of the artist showing how she made the featured piece. That level of guidance is a real strength of the format.

The catch is that this style of art is not widely popular, so many subscribers will open the box and wonder what to do with a compass and a protractor. Combined with a protractor that arrived damaged in several pieces, this box felt like poor value for the cost. The gel pen colors themselves were lovely, though, and anyone drawn to geometric pen art would get more out of it than we did.

The April Box: The Watercolor Crayon Surprise

The April crate was the strongest of the three and the reason we would still consider giving UpCrate another chance. It included two Art Space soft brush sign pens in four-season colors, a set of water-soluble watercolor art crayons, a sticker, and a large Art Space watercolor paper pad at 300 GSM, which is very thick and good quality.

The watercolor crayons were the standout. We went in expecting to dislike them and left genuinely converted. They are soft, fun to use, and activated beautifully with water, producing loose illustrative flowers and a slightly evil-looking green bee that we remain fond of. As someone who rarely reaches for watercolors, we would honestly use these over regular watercolors, and they seem well suited to travel and outdoor sketching where you want color without the mess.

This box also proved that the house Art Space brand is not just filler. The paper pad and brush pens were both solid, and the short tutorial videos, while less comprehensive than the March one, still helped.

Subscription Changes Worth Knowing

UpCrate has moved away from monthly shipping. After regrouping and refining, the company announced a bimonthly subscription model starting in May 2025, with enhanced boxes shipping in May, July, September, November, and so on. The new price is €28, with shipping included within Germany. The company describes these boxes as bigger and better, packed with more supplies.

This mirrors a broader trend in the art subscription space. Several competitors have moved to quarterly schedules, and at least one well-known monthly box has shut down entirely. If you prefer a steady monthly rhythm of new supplies, UpCrate no longer offers that, but the every-two-months format promises more substantial crates.

Should You Subscribe

UpCrate makes sense for a specific kind of subscriber: someone who enjoys surprise, is open to trying unfamiliar supplies and techniques, and is not expecting a box full of premium name-brand products every time. The low price is the honest trade-off. You will not always get the Liquitex-level hauls that some of their past boxes apparently included, and individual boxes can feel thin on value, as the March crate did.

What UpCrate does well is variety. Rather than repeating the same products every month like many art boxes do, it introduces genuinely different materials, and in our case that led to discovering watercolor crayons we now genuinely enjoy. The included magazines, artist spotlights, and tutorials also add context that a plain bag of supplies would lack.

If you want name-brand reliability and high value per box, look elsewhere. If you want an affordable, creative nudge that occasionally hands you a new favorite tool, UpCrate is worth a try, particularly with the new larger bimonthly format.

Conclusion

Across three boxes, UpCrate delivered one weak crate, one mismatched crate with a damaged item, and one genuinely great crate that introduced us to a supply we now love. That variability is the essence of subscription boxes, and at this price point the gamble feels reasonable. The move to bigger bimonthly boxes is the detail we would watch before subscribing, and for artists who enjoy surprise and experimentation, UpCrate remains one of the more interesting options still standing.