Plein air painting kits for watercolour and oil.

Summer holidays beckon and I’ve once again been checking out my plein air kits so that I can take the bare minimum with me. I was just going to take watercolour sketching stuff with me, but Donna my wife suggested that I paint in oils as well. So, as we are flying it all needs to be small, and as we will be wandering around on foot it needs to be light. And all of it, both for watercolour and oils, needs to fit into one small shoulder bag so that I can have the choice of media when I spot something I want to paint.

Can I do it?

Yes, I think I can, so let me show you what I’m taking.

This shoulder bag is just big enough to carry both oil and watercolour kits, and it has two handy pockets, one for each. (Don’t ask me where I got it from as it was going cheap on a market stall somewhere. Sorry.) There’s also room for a phone, wallet etc..

Oil painting kit

Here I have the whole kit. 1. A bag of cobra water mixable oil paints – just the bare necessities, but I could have limited it even more to just a red, blue, yellow and white. 2. My Pokitbox which holds 5″ x 7″ panels. 3. A tin containing brushes 4. Two oil painting dipper pots which will hold my water 5. Tissues for cleaning up (also I use wet wipes which do a magnificent job of removing all paint from anywhere!)

The water bottle is not strictly necessary as I can use the spritzer bottle from the watercolour kit below.

Here is the Pokitbox opened up to show the 3mm MDF gesso coated panels that I paint on. You can also see the back magnetic strip in the bottom of the box that holds the metal dipper pots. My brushes are a collection of rounds and flats, and I had to cut the handles down on some of them to fit into the tin.

And here is how it works in practice. Lightweight and quick to set up.

Watercolour sketching kit

Here’s what fits into the other pocket in the bag. I use an A5 Hahnemuhle Watercolour Book and strapped to this by an elastic band and the black band that comes with the sketchbook is a 3mm board which has a magnetic strip glued to it. The yellow pencil case holds everything else.

Here is what is in the pencil case. 1. a few Escoda travel brushes 2. A couple of fineliner pens, one in black, one in brown 3. a mechanical pencil (doesn’t need sharpening!) 4. an eraser 5. a tube of white gouache paint 6. A spritzer bottle that doubles as a water container 7. some spare elastic bands 8. my paint palette made from a small makeup box and filled with half pans. I glued a magnet to the bottom of this so that it sticks to the one on the board. 9. a roll of washi tape for masking the boarders.

Here it all is in action. The wooden board slips between the covers and the first and last pages of the sketchbook and is held firmly in place there when the elastic bands are put in place around the pages. A tissue clips under the metal dipper which is also the one I use for oil painting (saving space again!)

So there we are – set up and ready to go! I’ll show you some of my holiday sketches and paintings in the posts that follow! I hope you are able to get away this year for a break, even if only for a few days, and that my ideas here may help you to slim down your painting kit so that you can go anywhere and paint everything! Happy hols.

ps. you can see other ideas I have had for portable painting kits here and here.