231 Compact Sketching Kit

I’ve been busy with stuff other than sketching this week. Exciting things like planning for my trip overseas, to welcome my first grandchild. I would like to do some sketching along the way, to fill in the transit hours –  19 hours flying time plus 2 hours at Doha airport. I don’t want to be lumbered down with taking stuff I may not use I decided to make myself a new kit, with just the bare essentials.

I wanted my kit to be compact, minimal and light, something I could slip in my handbag and use to sketch on the plane and hopefully a few sketches in the area. I don’t expect to have much free time for sketching while I’m there but I want to have stuff on hand if the opportunity arises.

 Yesterday I spent time designing and sewing a kit to hold my pencils, pens, palette, waterbrush, journal with room for a couple of extra items in the top flap. This is made from an imitation leather, to fit a 21 x 14 cm Stillman and Birn Alpha journal. I tossed around taking my lighter hand stitched 21 x 21 cm journal but decided the S&B has so many more pages I can scribble away to my heart’s content without worrying about running out of space. It will also fit the square one if I decided to take that instead as I do prefer the larger format. I painted the sketch below in the S & B journal, trialling the kit using the same tools.

My watercolour pencils have been modified – cut in half and glued together so that I can have 12 colours in 6 slots.

Much as I like my existing travel palette with 21 colours I decided I could make do with just 3 – Yellow Light, Permanent Rose and Pthalo Blue. I decided to add a few others for convenience and I couldn’t do without Ultramarine Blue. I made an insert I made to fit in a tiny credit card holder, with a thin piece of sheet plastic or Perspex and fashioned the wells with hot glue. I can slip it in and out if I want to change the colours in the palette. I know you can buy these online but postage to Australia is a killer. Hey, it’s not fancy but it cheap, and it works 😄

I squeezed the colours from tubes. Some colours (winsor and Newton) I added a tiny drop of honey with a toothpick, then stirred thoroughly. This settles the paint into the well. The honey stops the colour from drying too hard and makes them much easier to rewet. Other colours MGraham already have honey added. 
Using a small clip the palette can be attached to the book leaving hands making it much easier to sketch/paint in restricted places.

The only other painting I was able to do this week was a pleinair sketch, well sort of. It was such a cold and blustery day for our group Meetup that we sat inside a local cafe and sketched the outside view.