Art Friend Brand Guidelines: The Singapore Art and Craft Shop With Three Outlets

Three outlets across the city.

Art Friend is a Singapore retailer of art, craft and design supplies. A Singapore shopping-listings site, in an entry by Leia Tan updated in January 2026, says the business has been established since 1981. The same entry lists three outlets: one at Plaza Singapura on Orchard Road, one at Clementi Central in the west of the island, and one in Bras Basah Complex on Bain Street.

The three-outlet pattern has been stable for some years. In February 2021 the lifestyle site TheSmartLocal described art lovers raiding one of the brand’s three outlets in Bras Basah Complex, Clementi and Plaza Singapura, and in August 2025 Honeycombers listed Art Friend with multiple locations including the same three.

The outlet map was different a decade earlier. In March 2012 a Singapore scale-modelling blog copied the outlet list then shown on the company’s website: Bras Basah Complex, a shop in the Takashimaya Shopping Centre at Ngee Ann City on Orchard Road, one at Buona Vista MRT station and one on Middle Road, the branch the blogger visited. Art Friend has also traded in Malaysia: in June 2011 Time Out Kuala Lumpur listed an Art Friend store at The Gardens, Mid Valley City, describing it as “the Singaporean chain”.

The shop sells to a wide spread of customers. Honeycombers described it in 2025 as covering everything from student supplies to professional-grade materials, and the 2012 blog post was written for scale modellers looking for brushes, paints and cutting tools outside the hobby-shop trade.

Aisles of paint, paper, clay and beads.

Range is what the Singapore press writes about most. TheSmartLocal, in a long 2021 feature on what to buy at Art Friend, described “aisles upon aisles of craft material”. Its list named goods across drawing, painting, modelling, party and craft supplies, among them Copic markers, Daler-Rowney drawing pads, Sculpey oven-bake clay and Derwent pencil wraps, alongside origami paper, decorative tape and face paint.

The same feature spread its picks across many kinds of making. For painting it named stretched canvases, brush sets and a stay-wet palette; for model scenery, turf from Woodland Scenics; for drawing, the Pentel GraphGear mechanical pencil; for spray work, Nippon Pylox spray paint; and for costume make-up, Snazaroo face paint and special-effects wax. Wood letters and numbers, foam shapes, pearl beads and a large hot-glue gun covered the crafts side. Time Out Kuala Lumpur had made a similar point in 2011, writing that the store was known among fledgling painters for its well-rounded, vast selection of art supplies.

Honeycombers, in a guide to craft shops in Singapore first published in 2015 and updated in August 2025, listed paints, brushes, canvases and papers, together with specialist items such as polymer clay, beads and scrapbooking materials. It said Art Friend offers online shopping, that staff guide customers through the many creative options, and that the shop often has samples so that customers can try paints and brushes before buying.

Other sources stress different parts of the same stock. The 2026 listings entry singled out scrapbooking products such as stickers, and wood products such as wooden pieces and shapes. Time Out Kuala Lumpur, in 2011, pointed to the store’s beads, clays, Copic markers, felt and rubber stamps as the draw for hobbyists and casual shoppers. The 2012 modelling blog listed oil paints and thinners, chalk pastels, air-drying clay, cutting mats and cutting tools, glues and a small range of model scenery.

Art Friend also runs a membership scheme. TheSmartLocal reported in 2021 that Singapore residents could sign up for an Art Friend membership giving a discount on all their purchases, that the joining fee was waived above a set spend, and that local students paid a reduced fee to join.

Signs, stores and catalogues.

Art-supply retail chains sell materials made by other companies, so much of their identity lives in the shop itself: the sign over the door, the name on the carrier bag, the catalogue cover and the colours of a website. The chains in this guide come from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Canada and Singapore, and each presents that identity in its own way, often in a name its founders or owners chose decades ago.

Store formats vary widely. Some chains run large stores on the edge of town; German Wikipedia gives the average sales area of a Boesner branch as about 3,000 square metres. Others keep compact shops in city centres or near art schools, and several run both, alongside web shops that now carry most of their range.

Print still matters in this trade. Gerstaecker, which began in Eitorf in 1953, built its business on a mail-order catalogue that the company says took its present form in 1982, and Boesner publishes its own catalogue and customer magazines. Chains also name their own-label ranges and services, such as framing workshops, and many describe courses, demonstrations and workshops held in their stores; where this guide repeats such descriptions, they are given as the companies’ own words.

Corporate pages tell the rest of the story: who founded each chain, who owns it now and how it grew, through new stores, sister chains abroad or changes of owner. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, separates documented facts from what the company says about itself, and states plainly where a chain has changed hands or closed.

A shop the city’s guides keep listing.

Singapore’s shopping guides return to Art Friend again and again. Honeycombers put it first in its 2025 list of ten craft shops in Singapore, calling it the go-to shop for everything from student supplies to professional-grade materials. The 2026 listings entry also placed it at the top of its own list, saying it led in both product quality and variety. TheSmartLocal built a whole 2021 feature around twenty things to buy there.

The outlets are spread across the island: Plaza Singapura on Orchard Road, a third-floor unit in Bras Basah Complex, and Clementi Central in the west. Each keeps its own daily opening hours, which the 2021 and 2026 listings give outlet by outlet, and all three shops have kept the same addresses since at least 2021.

For a design guide, Art Friend shows how a specialist retailer can build a recognisable name through range, staff advice and a long-running city-centre address rather than a large network. Compare Michaels, the North American arts and crafts chain, and Daler-Rowney, the art-materials brand whose drawing pads Art Friend stocks. For this guide we use a studio teal with ochre, canvas and clay tones and a deep charcoal with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Art Friend’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.