plein air paint kit

It took me many months of experimentation to settle on a field kit for painting outdoors and to take with me on vacation. Equipment choices are highly personal, and every painter has his or her unique outdoor working style and equipment requirements. I'll describe my choices to suggest the issues you may want to consider in making a kit of your own.

Design follows function: the first step is to identify your functional requirements. I wanted a kit that would pack snugly in a small size (backpacks are too big and jumble up like a purse), be light enough to carry in one hand, unpack and pack up quickly, hold all the supplies I need (including paper and even water), and be durable enough to withstand the rigors of air travel and outdoor hiking.

Paint Kit. The bag I chose is a coarse black canvas Panodia tote bag, flat and rectangular in the same dimensions as a laptop computer bag (roughly 14x12x4" when packed), available from Pearl Paint and other art retailers. The bag contains two compartments: a large main compartment that opens with a single zipper along the top (handle) side, and a second black plastic coated compartment along the side that opens as a flap zippered along three edges; stitched inside the flap are several narrow pockets for pencils or pens.

the complete field kit (unpacked)

In the main compartment I carry three or four 9"x12" watercolor blocks (the picture shows Arches rough, Winsor & Newton cold pressed, Winsor & Newton hot pressed), a paint mixing card, a color xerox of the artist's color wheel and artist's value wheel, a large viewfinder cut from a 9"x12" piece of foamcore board, and a simple white canvas brush roll, which absorbs any excess water in the brushes and bundles them firmly without pinching the tuft hairs (as with the bamboo roll carriers).

My field brush selection has shrunk over time, as field painting normally doesn't provide the time or inspiration for fussy brushstroke distinctions. Large contrasts are the key. I carry a range of 5 sable rounds (#4 to #12 in even sizes), 4 natural hair flats (1/4", 1/2", 3/4", 1"), a set of acrylic aquarelles (1/4", 1/2", 3/4") for aggressive brushwork, a rigger, a sable fan (for drybrush grass or earth textures), and an ox bristle brush (for loosening or lifting the pan pigments).

This may seem like more brushes than necessary (and for any single painting it is), but I find I have use for them all, depending on subject or style. I don't carry my best brushes in the field kit, as working with dry pan paints will wear out brushes pretty fast (the cakes act as tiny grindstones, especially the cobalt, viridian, and yellow iron oxide paints), and there is always a chance that the kit will be lost or stolen. (Unfortunately my bag, closed up, is indistinguishable from a laptop computer bag.)

Field Paint Box. After much trial and error, the paint box I settled on is the enameled metal (aluminum) folding dry pan palette cranked out somewhere by some unsung art materials sheet metal shop and sold by Rembrandt, Schmincke, Maimeri, Lukas, Blockx and Winsor & Newton (in the UK) as watercolor half or whole pan field sets.

The plein air tradition remains strong in Europe, so pan sets and metal folding palettes, which can be somewhat hard to find in the USA, are readily available through European retailers. The empty boxes are available for about $30 from Ken Bromley art supplies — look for Lightweight Metal Tin Watercolour Boxes in the Palettes section under Accessories at their online store; they also sell boxes that hold 6, 12 or 24 whole pans. Kremer Pigments in New York City sells empty metal boxes that hold 6, 12 or 24 whole pans, listed in Kremer Watercolour under Ready-Made Colours. The Rembrandt web site describes empty metal palettes in various sizes and you can email them to find out how to purchase one. Or you can buy a Schmincke, Lukas or Rembrandt watercolor sets (metal boxes prepackaged with half pan paints) and as you deplete them replace the half pans with whole pans.

Although the commercial boxes are designed to accommodate 6, 12, 18 or 24 whole pan paints (or double that number of half pan paints; the sets may be listed either way), I discovered that these paint boxes will snugly hold 8, 14, 21 or 28 Winsor & Newton whole pan paints, or the empty plastic pans sold by a few art retailers (including Kremer Pigments). (The pans from other manufacturers, including Schmincke and Rembrandt, are slightly too large.) Whole and half pans can easily be mixed in this kind of kit.

The box exterior is usually painted black, with three rows of spring metal clasps to grip whole or half pan paints. There are 4 large mixing wells on the inside of the opened lid, and a flat mixing panel hinged on the opposite side with 10 small mixing bays. The paint clasps are riveted to a metal tray that lifts out of the case, if necessary, to reveal more enameled mixing areas in the bottom of the box. You can't stomp on or drive over this kind of box, but I find that it is plenty tough enough for packing, light in weight, cleans up very well, firmly grips the pans (I hate loose pans), yet pans are easy to replace or change.

Avoid the plastic field kits, for example the miniaturized 12 color watercolor field box set from Winsor & Newton. This costs around $80 and, oops!, will warp or melt if left in the car during a hot summer day. (And I mean left in the glove compartment, not on the dashboard or seat.)

Several of my British readers have lustily recommended the super heavy brass handmade metal palettes by Craig Young. These are used exclusively and recommended by Charles Reid, and while they are pricey (up to US$420 for a 20 pan box), they appear to be sturdily made, based on traditional field box designs, enameled in exterior designer colors (racing green, dark blue, maroon and black) and interior white, and can be built to accommodate either left or right handed painters. You can contact Craig by email or by post at 23 Friars Garden, Ludlow, Shropshire UK SY8 1RX; at this writing he was running a several month backlog of orders. Winsor & Newton markets a similarly heavy enamel paint box, but I found that I didn't want or need the extra weight ... and the mechanism for holding the pans in place (a detached metal strip used as a wedge) is ineffectual and inconvenient — the strip partially covers the pan, making it harder to get the brush into the paint.

Paint Selection & Palette Design. Which brings us to paint selection. I either buy the Winsor & Newton whole pans from Ken Bromley or Jackson's Art Supplies (both in London), which seem to be the only online retailers who carry the complete whole pan range, or I make the pans myself by squeezing tube paints into empty plastic whole pans available from most art retailers, or as the W&N whole pans get depleted. This is more cost effective, and lets me use any brands of paints I want.

I also want to give special mention to the whole pan watercolors formulated by Kremer Pigments, which includes 47 traditional and modern pigments and 17 pearlescent colors formulated in a very pure gum and glycerin vehicle, without fillers or brighteners.

I have tried painting in the field with small (6 oz.) paint tubes and an Eldajon palette, which I also used to carry in my field bag, but I found the paints were messier to clean up and, if left on the palette between painting trips, dried to a hard plug that was no different from the dry pans. The tube paints are prompt to get started, though, which is a plus in unfavorable (hot, cold, crowded, precarious, uncomfortable) painting locations, make it easier to get a dense, rich color mixture, and are less wearing on brushes. You may find it makes sense to pack tubes of the few paint colors you use most often or as dense mixtures, and squeeze these out onto a palette mixing area.

Field painting is an encounter with the unexpected, so I use a broad, "colorist" palette design, shown in the palette scheme below.

my 21 paint field palette scheme

I indulge in a large (21 pan) selection of colors because this allows me a wider range of paint handling attributes (texture, transparency, staining). I also discovered that working with a more limited number of paints tends to consume time in paint mixing and water in brush rinsing in situations where both are precious resources.