100 Days of Travel Sketchbooks Project
Day 2 – Sketchbook Packing Stress
Every trip begins with a great deal of stress for me for one simple reason; I simply have too many good art material options to choose from.
This is, of course, a very nice position to be in as an artist. I have enough materials to last me a lifetime and I adore dabbling in lots of different drawing techniques. Variety is the spice of life after-all!
But all this choice means it takes me way too long to choose what materials to take on a trip.
I always have my firm favourites of my Muji gel pens, glue pen and tiny sharpeners as well as my Derwent and Pentel aqua brush pens which I use both with coloured watercolour and Inktense drawing pencils.
This core of goodies paired with a couple of regular pencils is all I usually take on holiday, but, as this was a longer trip, an adventure no less, that I wanted to document fully, I also squeezed in a travel watercolour kit, some white gouache in a tiny pot, brush cleaner, gloves, plastic for keeping tables clean, gesso with spreader for coating paper pages and some handmade watercolour paper concertina books. Phew!
Then I thought, oh! I better take some crayons to make rubbings, and some tissue paper, and some bags for collecting things, and a knife and scissors in case my travel sharpener breaks, and an extra pen as I always run out, and a Japanese brush pen + extra cartridge for expressive drawing….. and so it went on.
In the end, my sketch kit weighed in at around 700g which sounds ok until I added the notebook for useful information, the sketchbook and a small aeroplane ‘carry on’ friendly drawing kit, which weighed in about the same, making a total of 1350g, or just under 1.4kg.
Now bear in mind that we had a number of internal flights where the luggage limit was 15kg and I was starting to sweat at the thought of how much I’d crammed in there.
But did I use it all?
Let’s see. Over the next 98 days I am going to take you on a journey through my most recent Travel Sketchbook/ journal. Some posts will be about the trip itself and some will be about making the art while there, as well as what art I am developing from the information I gathered in my book.
So if you’d like to follow me on this crazy trip, click subscribe or follow.
Namaste 
x
#the100dayproject
