Lately my en plein air bag has gotten heavy with additional mixed media materials. I keep adding to my materials that I might want to use, despite the fact that when I get out there I use just a few. This problem is compounded by the fact that I picked up the Soola pouch. It encourages maximalism over minimal supplies.
The decision paralysis over basically my entire studio out there with me wasn’t helpful at my goal of quickly (30 minutes-ish) capturing the feelings of a spot.
So in these videos I limited my supplies down to:
- Water soluble graphite crayons
- Water soluble charcoal pencils in fun colors
- Some sort of water soluble colored pencil
- My own walnut ink and acrylic ink
- Some Inktense
- Water brushes
I didn’t use everything, I started out with water soluble pencils and the graphite crayons and added in as I wanted color or something that matched the feelings.
I also chose to work 9×12 inches with a taped border.
After this I switched things up and decided I REALLY need to lighten my load out- it has to now fit in my Vernon Trunk Bag for my bike. I switched everything out to my cardboard pochade box, which works REALLY well. Shockingly well. I’m going to make a whole video about building one.
The thing about working with just a few materials and focusing only on values- dark and lights means that I can not worry about mixing colors and matching them or not. When I was using the Seami kits I used a pale pink and purple color for the beach and honestly it’s perfect. I’ve got to remember that pink is a good color for the beach.
Using minimal materials also means that the images feel more low stakes, at least to me. I don’t get stressed out at the idea that I might want to sell these images (though I’ll totally sell them if any one is interested.)
Anyway, here are the videos:
I think the simple and few materials really helped to loosen me up. I’m going to keep this in mind as I struggle with adding more and more to my bag.