How to Pack for Plein Air
by Anne Kupillas.
Many of you have asked us exactly what to bring when going ketching on location. For me, the goal is to pack light, and pack only what I need, depending on the location.
What to pack -- how much you take -- when you set out to paint en plein air, depends on the location.
I’ve found that if I’m going to drive to a location and work close to my car, I can bring quite a bit more, than when I plan to be walking around, scouting locations or generally not have a car nearby. In this case, I’ve found you need to be much more selective in what you take along.
In any case, a backpack or tote bag is the foundation for the plein air artist’s kit. Take only what will fit into it; avoid overloading yourself, as it will limit your mobility and you may miss out on better views and locations, and tire out more quickly. My goal is always to travel as lightly as possible, and bring only what I need. It’s a challenge, in a way! The key is to Start Light - and what I mean, is that your backpack itself ought to be lightweight, like these from Herschel. A great backpack, it has padded shoulder straps water bottle holder, and is weather-resistant. Oh, and it’s 100% recycled!
Most of the time when I paint on location, I use watercolors because they're portable and easy to use without creating a mess. Along with a graphite pencil, and a pen with waterproof ink, I've got all the materials I need to produce a wide range of colors and mark-making. All my supplies, except the sketchbook, sunblock and water bottle, fit into a small/medium sized zippered bag, which fits inside the tote or backpack. The zippered bag keeps the brushes intact, and keeps the smaller items from floating around in the tote bag. It makes it easy to grab what I need.
My Personal Plein Air Kit
The above photo shows my kit set out on my easel, as I actually use them.
· Small watercolor sketchbook, for thumbnail studies.
· Landscape clipboard. Lightweight and costs about $1 at Daiso.
· Bulldog clips. On a windy day, these come in very handy holding the pages down.
· Small travel metal watercolor palette tin, 12 half-pans. See my note below about what colors I use.
· 4 brushes: small mop brush, small pointed round brush, large flat wash brush, ½” pointed filbert/ova wash. (See below for links).
· a Water brush comes in handy when you have little to no surface space to set your cup and water. For example, standing up you can hold the waterbrush in one hand, and balance the palette and sketchbook in the other and on your arm.
· Sailor Fountain Pen, filled with waterproof black or sepia ink from Noodler’s.
· Mechanical pencil with eraser, and sometimes I bring a plain white eraser.
· Blackwing graphite pencil for darker mark-making
· Pencil Sharpener choose one with a receptacle for shavings
· Masking fluid pen such as Pebeo, for reserving whites (much less messy than a fine liner)
· Viewfinder make your own or Tom Lynch’s Secret Tool
· Reusable cotton cloth for blotting
· Collapsible Cup - I like Faber Castell’s Click and Go cup because it has brush rests
· Painter’s Tape for blocking out areas and creating a frame
· Reusable water bottle - fill it up at a water fountain, public restroom, or before you leave home if you know you’re going into the wilderness
· Clear zippered bag, ideal for holding your brushes, pencils and smaller items. You can get very inexpensive ones like this one at Michaels and Daiso.
· Tide pen for cleaning up quick stains on clothing
· Alcohol wipe packets for cleaning up palette and brushes (I take a few from the BBQ restaurant or my first aid kit)
· Sunblock
If I’m driving to a location, I will often add:
· Portable easel
· Portable stool
· Loose sheets of Arches paper (9x12 or larger)
If I have to limit my items to fit in my purse (this happens often when sightseeing with others, when using public transportation etc, when I plan to sketch in a café or other on-the-fly situations), I bring only the following:
· Small sketchbook
· Sailor fountain pen with ink
· Mechanical pencil with eraser
· Brushpen, filled with a diluted solution of 1/3 ink and 2/3 water
For those of you who are new to plein air, here’s a helpful checklist. As you experiment with your practice, you may choose to add/remove items from the list. For example a fountain pen isn’t necessary for plein air watercolor, but it’s useful in adding fine lines and creating a sketch or more illustration-type work.
Bare Bones Watercolour Plein Air Painting Checklist:
o Travel size watercolor paintbox
o Watercolor sketchbook
o 1-2 Brushes
o Mechanical pencil with eraser
o 2 binder clips
o Reusable cloth
o Reusable water bottle
o Water cup
o Zippered pencil case or clear toiletry bag to hold the smaller supplies.
o Backpack or tote to hold everything.
o Sunblock, a hat, or coverup - critical!
o A phone is handy for many reasons. Taking reference photos, for example, or a video to post on social media.
A Note about Watercolor Kits:
There are a lot of different kits available, from large to small. Large palettes, like you would use in the studio, aren’t ideal for painting on location. I found this out the hard way! Now, I like a travel kit (plastic or metal) which folds out, and has about 12 half-pan spaces in the center and mixing areas on the sides. I don’t need more than 12 colors when I paint outdoors! Some travel kits come with half pans, like the one shown below ( or a similar but chi-chi version you can buy here) . Others come empty and have sloped pans. You can choose your colors and squeenze them in from your tubes. I prefer to do this because tube paints generally have a better flow to them, due to the amount of glycerin in the tubes. Daniel Smith paints are the exception — their pans and tbes have the same amount of glycerin added.
It seems natural that you would squeeze your paint into the deeper end, in order to maximize the amount of paint you can put in each well. But actually, I squeeze the paint into the shallow end, and use the deep end to mix pure color with water.
Be sure to squeeze out the tube paint into the spaces and let dry. If you do this a day or two ahead of your plein air outing, you will have a clean, full palette with no mess.
Colors for Plein Air - my usual palette
These are the colors in my kit; I use mainly Daniel Smith:
· Titanium Buff
· Raw Umber
· Burnt Sienna
· Indigo
· Sap Green
· Yellow Ochre
· Hansa Yellow Light
· Cadmium Red Light
· Alizarin Crimson
· Cobalt Blue Turquoise
· French Ultramarine
· Prussian Blue
I find this mix of earth tones, sky colors, and warm/cool primaries afford me enough options both straight and mixed. However, sometimes I do change things up and swap colors – for example, for a clear ocean, it’s helpful to have a Phthalo Green, and in the mountains, I might like to bring a violet. In the desert, I might bring more Buff or swap a blue out for Quinacridone Gold, which is excellent for rock formations. Leave your black and white at home. Black can be mixed, and white highlights can be added back at home, in the studio, if you need them at all (I prefer to mask or reserve the white of the paper).
*One caveat I will say about experimenting with colors – if you change up yout palette, test the colors out BEFORE you go on location. There’s nothing worse than being out and not having colors that work for you, or work together.
Special Note: When You are Flying
By the way, if you are packing for airplane travel, it’s not easy to bring tubes. Tubes aren’t allowed on carry-on, ever. That means you will have to pack them, and you will need to carefully double bag your tube paints so they don’t make a mess in your luggage. I recommend instead using a pill bottle or daily pill organizer to bring extra colors (blue for me, and often green too), rather than packing tubes. You can, like your travel palette, squeeze out the tube paint into the organizer spaces and let dry, then pack it away. Or bring a few extra dry pans or half pans in your most used colors. And I absolutely recommend labeling your supplies with a sticker to help airline inspectors understand what you are transporting. This is a free sticker, courtesy of Plein Air Magazine: https://pleinairmagazine.com/travel-sticker
Stacks of Sketchbooks, all of them get used regularly.
More Notes about Materials, and Links to my favorites:
Sketchbooks.I prefer cold-press paper with a lot of texture. Speedball has a beautiful bumpy texture, and is nice and thick – it can take a lot of water. It’s listed as 140 lb/300 gsm but it feels thicker. The textures is similar on both the front and back of the pages. It also has a clear plastic pocket on the inside of the back cover, which you can use to hold business cards, all sorts of scraps and loose paper. You can get it for under $40.
Field Artist sketchbooks are beautiful leather bound creations, hand stitched and with a cross-hatched textured paper, and bonus fold-out panorama panel at the back. They range in size from 4” square to 6.5” -- these are truly pocket sized. Check out the Field Artist store to see all the choices.
Loose paper. I often will tuck a few pieces of 9x12” Arches into my kit, especially when I know I want to do a more “complete” painting, rather than just sketches.
Palette. I like this one - it’s very versatile and I prefer to fill with my own colors. But a plastic palette of about the same size will do as well! You can even make your own from an Altoids tin.
Brushes. I bring my favorites! It’s taken me some time to figure out which those are, but my very favorites are the Princeton Aqua Elite series for oval washes, rounds that come to a point, and Rembrant or Isabey mop brushes. I like these, too.
Pen and Ink. Lately, I’ve found the Sailor Compass to be easy to fill, comfortable in the hand, and very fluid to draw and write with. It comes in different colors too! I fill with Noodler’s Ink, from their Waterproof selection, but take care! Some of the colors, like Zhivago, aren’t as waterproof as they claim to be, as I’ve had bleeding after laying down watercolor wash over what I thought was a dry ink line.
Pencil and eraser. I’m easy - I like a simple disposable pencil like these . I’ve also been enjoying adding pencil or crayon over the watercolor, and for this technique I’ve been using Blackwing’s colored pencil set. It comes in a lovely box with 12 pencils, which are really all I need. I also always carry a Blackwing Dark Black pencil and sharpener. I like the soft, dark marks I can make with this brand. They used to be only sent from England, but now lots of American stores carry them, like Dick Blick.
Water receptacle. I love the collapsible rubber Faber-Castell Clic & Go Artist Water Cup, because it has scalloped edges that act as a paintbrush rest. You can find this cup at any art supply store.
Clipboard. I found a genius horizontal / landscape clipboard at Daiso which is perfect for my needs. I can tape a loose sheet of paper down to it, or use it as a lap table. You can also buy them at office supply stores.
Stool and Easel – A lot of plein air artists use a travel easel and travel stool or chair. I prefer to stand or sit where I can find a spot, because I want to carry as little as possible. But recently, I started keeping a travel easel and stool in my car, and I can use these when I’m parked nearby the location I will be sketching at, and don’t have to tote them around very far. The Meeden Artist Watercolor Field Easel is lightweight (2kg), and super easy to assemble. It’s only issue is that the plastic tray and working surfaces are too large for most standard backpacks, and I haven’t figured out yet how to jerry-rig them to the outside of my tote bag. Once I do, I will likely take them along all the time!
This Fundango Stool isn’t too too low, and it doubles as a place to put my tote bag off the ground, when I’m standing at the easel.
In summary
There are a lot of options when going to paint outdoors, or sketch in a café. Try them out! Try out my bare bones sample kit and don’t be afraid to alter it – it’s got to be comfortable and useable for you, and your practice. The key is find a balance between what you need to create your artwork, and the freedom to enjoy the outdoor adventure. Let me know how you make out!
Eat Paint Live
If you’re interested in drawing and sketching on location, with a group of great artists, then I hope you’ll check out the art retreats we’ve planned, with Charlie and I as leaders at www.eatpaintlive.com We host same-day workshops and art retreats with small groups (no more than 9) in stunning locations. I invite you to join us next week in Catalina - we have ONE spot left – it’s not too late! Hope to see you there!