Pittsenbarger Watercolors : Plein Air travel Paint kit

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Plein Air travel Paint kit - low budget edition

For sometime now I have been wanting to expand my on location sketching to full on plein air painting. Currently I do most my sketching on site and later add the watercolor washes at home. In preparation for a trip to New York and Toronto with hopes to do some good urban sketching I decided to put together a plein air travel painting kit. I didn't want to spend too much money on a travel paint kit so after doing a little research I decided to make a palette out of an Altoids container with water bottle caps for the paint wells.

My kit includes:

- Altoids pallet with M. Graham watercolors colors- burnt sienna, ultra marine blue, cerulean blue, raw sienna, alizarin crimson, payne's grey and hookers green.

- Nature Sketch 5"x7" sketchbook (this is an inexpensive sketchbook that does great with watercolor washes)

- Stillman and Birns 8 1/2" x 11" alpha sketchbook

- Escoda Perla Z travel brush

- Pentel Aqua Brush

- Small plastic water container (from my backpacking stuff)

- Sepia Micron .005 pen

- staedtler lumocolor pen

I tested out the kit on a nice day at Cathedral Park along the Willamette river in North Portland

here are some of the sketches, it worked really well except the aqua brush is a little small for my style and its very difficult to get the right amount of water. It will take getting used to.