A studio
built on patience,
pigment, and paper.
ArtByIqra is a small art supply house run out of a sunlit studio. We don't stock everything, we stock what we'd reach for first.
How it began.
It started, as most studios do, with a problem. Iqra had been painting for nearly a decade — restoring small canvases, teaching workshops on the weekend — and could not, for the life of her, find a tube of cadmium red that behaved the way the old tins used to. Pigments were thinner. Brushes shed. Canvases warped within a season.
So she did what artists tend to do when the world stops cooperating: she built her own corner of it. A spare bedroom became a tasting room for pigments. A second-hand stretcher became the first piece of canvas she stretched, sold, and shipped to a neighbour. The neighbour told a friend. The friend told a teacher. And six months later there was, somehow, a small business.
ArtByIqra today is still that, mostly — a curated cupboard of materials we love, sold by the people who use them. Every paint, brush, and surface here has been tested in our own studio before it ever reaches yours. If it isn't good enough for Iqra's own work, it doesn't go on the shelf.
We grow slowly on purpose. We answer our own emails. And we believe that good materials, like good company, are worth waiting for.
Three quiet commitments.
Small batch, by hand.
Every paint is milled in batches of fewer than 200 tubes. Every canvas is stretched in our studio. Nothing in this shop was made on a factory line that we haven't walked through ourselves.
Tested before sold.
If we wouldn't reach for it on a Tuesday afternoon, we don't sell it. Every product on this site has been used in a real painting by Iqra or someone in the studio. The reviews you read are written by people we know.
Honest about what we don't know.
We're not chemists, and we're not a giant brand pretending to be hand-made. We'll tell you which pigments are lightfast, which canvases warp in humidity, and which brushes won't outlive their first year. You deserve that much.
I built this shop because I wanted somewhere to send my students that wouldn't disappoint them. Everything here is something I would have gifted my younger self, the version of me who couldn't afford to keep guessing.— Iqra, Founder
The studio is open by appointment.
If you're nearby and want to feel the canvases before you order, write to us. We'll put the kettle on.
Say hello →