This is not a painting holiday. The difference between a family holiday where you try and slip off to draw and paint when you can, and a dedicated painting trip has really gone home to me this time. My personal experience of painting in oils en plein air is that the process goes something like first hour: ok, this is going ok, second hour: yeesh, what’s happening here? third hour: alright, maybe I can salvage something from this disaster, and fourth hour: that wasn’t so bad after all. In other words, an hour here and there doesn’t suit me. I can do a pencil sketch, and I can add colour with water-soluble pencils, but anything more is going to need time.

Last time I was here was two years ago. That time I was enthused with my new lightweight easel and various bits of kit for plein air oil painting, so I dragged a fair amount of stuff over from Sweden. Specifically:

• Lightweight easel. Made of plastic and aluminium
• Home-made palette and palette holder. I got the idea for this from another blogger who I would give a credit to if I could remember who it was. Cred to you, whoever you are! Their idea was a screw-on tray for a drum set, mounted upside down on the easel. Then you take a thick bit of transparent plastic, cut to whatever size you want (mine is about 30 cm x 25 cm), paint the back with a mid-grey (i.e. 5 on the Munsell scale) and using really strong glue, glue about six super-strong little magnets (you can buy them on Amazon) to the palette. Hey presto, a detachable palette that you can stick onto the upside down metal tray.
• Home-made brush holder: take a cardboard tube such as that which Jamesons sell package their whiskey bottles in, stick a couple of holes in the top, on the sides, and make a wire hanger so that you can hang it on the easel. Useful for putting your brushes in when they don’t all fit in the undersized brush holder that is mounted on the easel. And even more useful for transporting home.
• Home-made picture box thing: this is for putting wet canvas, boards and oil papers into for taking them home. It’s made out of Styrofoam, taped together with a large amount of silver tape. Inside there are runners made out of tapered lengths of wood. I can store three small boards in the box.
• Tube paints. Obviously. But I cut my palette down hard. I think I took titanium white, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, cadmium pale yellow, naples yellow, yellow ochre, raw umber, viridian, alizarin red. Maybe I had a sap green, and a different red. Note, no black: I don’t use it, you can get black from several different combinations of the aforementioned colours, my favourite being ultra blue plus burnt sienna, but viridian and alizarin red works as well.
• Flats. Maybe I had a couple of rounds, but I was going to do landscapes and flats are more useful in landscapes. The edge of a flat is a round, yes? And one (1) palette knife for mixing.
• Liquin. No messing around, just bring a little bottle of the stuff. The best thing about it is your paintings will dry faster which makes getting everything home practicable.

And most other stuff you can get locally, such as household paper and brush cleaner (turps).

So much for last time. I couldn’t be bothered with all of that on this trip though, so I have gone for the sketching plus a bit of colour approach. My inventory is therefore:

• A sketch pad. I bought a heavyweight pad on the island (425 gsm) and some Bristol board.
• My pen case: about 25 cm x 20 cm and absolutely packed with stuff. Water-soluble graphite,  all sorts of grades from H to 9B, knife, putty rubbers, TomBow pens, and much more.
• Pen case for coloured pens. Also now packed having bought a lot of new pens on the island. I have a small selection of watercolour pencils (12-ish), and about 25 watersoluble pencils (Inktense from W&N) which I prefer to the watercolour pencils. Also four waterbrushes, rounds in size 1 to 3 and a flat. These are from W&N and are plastic brushes with their own water reserve. In the case I added a couple of wider flats for doing washes.
• A travelling kit for watercolours: about 30 pans in a folding storage tray. Pans are much more practical for en plein air than tubes.

Much less stuff!

I suppose I should put up pictures of my sketches…but no. One or two were ok, but the majority are destined for the bonfire. That doesn’t mean they weren’t worth doing though! Lessons learned: bite off smaller bits of landscape. I mean, it is really hard to do absolutely the whole damn coastline. Better to take a little bit that is interesting and spend what time you have on doing that bit as well as you can, before it’s time to get back to the kids.

Also, it isn’t just about the landscape. Well, unless you are really into landscapes. There are a lot of motifs out there to find that make cool exercises. The interesting end of a roof, or the door to an old cottage. I know I can do some things alright, but other subjects need work, and I have to accept the crap that is a by-product of trying to make art. But I don’t have to show it to anyone!

Take pictures (with a DSLR camera). You might be able to create a masterpiece once you get home, if you can combine the accuracy of some really good reference pictures with the experience of having tried to sketch the subject in reality. Try and improve your painting memory so that you can remember how the colours looked when you were actually there.

And finally, every time you practice you get a little bit better. It can be hard to accept that when you’ve just ruined a perfectly happy piece of pristine paper, but if you hadn’t done so then you wouldn’t know what you now know. To get the most out of a failure, you need to think about what you did wrong. It might not stop you from doing it again, but you do need to self-analyse failures just as much as successes in order to get better.

Slane lhiat!