Michael Alford’s Lightweight Plein Air Kits for the Road

 Image: Michael Alford painting plein air on the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico, using his most minimal and portable painting setup.

By Michael Alford

I’ve done plein air painting for most of my life, starting when I was a schoolboy on holiday with my family. Its original use for me was as a way of record-keeping while travelling and I still use it that way today, even in instances where I am in fact gathering material toward studio paintings.

Over time, I’ve developed several different setups for plein air painting while on the road. All my setups are lightweight and portable, but to different degrees, depending on the kind of travelling I’m doing.

Choosing the Kit to Suit the Trip

To choose the right setup, I have to distinguish between trips, whether I’m just stepping out of my house to paint in London or embarking on a ten-day, self-supporting overland hike on a long-distance trail, which is something I like to do. I don’t like to feel encumbered when I travel. I always try to take the lightest, most minimal kit I can get away with, while still having the option of painting the way I want to paint.

I’m sometimes asked if I always keep painting materials with me, so that I can paint at any time. Sadly, I don’t. I try, but sometimes I decide not to bring my kit and usually regret it later. If you don’t have the kit, you can’t do the painting, so it’s essential for me to have a setup I am actually willing to carry, the more lightweight and compact the better.

What follows is a description of the four travel setups I tend to use, from the lightest and simplest to the more elaborate: box-sized, bag-sized, the mini pochade box and the collapsible easel.

Option 1: Pocket-sized

For my most minimal, ultralight setup, I carry around a small watercolour sketchbook (Moleskine and Hand Book do good versions), a couple of Derwent water-soluble graphite pencils, an eraser, a sharpener, a plastic brush with a water reservoir, which you can buy at Hobbycraft (£3 for 4), a couple of Pentel brush pens in sepia and grey, and a block of sepia watercolour, made by ArtGraf.

This setup doesn’t even require a bag. Everything fits in a little box that tucks into my pocket. I pull it out when a scene or figure strikes me, or when I find myself with a minute to spare. It’s great for waiting rooms and airports, still moments in cafes, on benches, in parks. It’s also perfect for quick sketches on the trail or in camp, on trips. The little paintings I create with it are minimal, monochrome, but enough to remind me of the subject and what attracted me about it.

Option 2: Fits in a Bag

My next setup is what I think of as my opportunistic kit. I use this setup for minor excursions, such as a walk in the countryside or around town. I also use it on longer trips when I’m hiking in remote places and have to carry my kit over distance. Though I’m not going out specifically to paint, I hope that something along the way will catch my eye, and so I go prepared.

The beauty of this arrangement is that it fits into a single bag—I tend to use a wilderness drybag because they have handles and are waterproof. The kit itself is pretty standard, consisting of a 12-pan box of watercolours, a watercolour sketchbook, maximum 10″ x 8″ inches, some pencils, and a handful of travel brushes. I’m not fussy about water containers and usually cut down a spare drinks bottle or scavenge a plastic cup from somewhere.

Option 3: The Mini Pochade Box

For many years, I just couldn’t find a setup I liked for more serious plein air painting, the sort where I am going out specifically to paint and need to walk long distances carrying my kit, or travel over several days, or deal with challenging terrain and outdoor conditions.

I cobbled-together a kit consisting of a portable Jakar easel, a board, a plastic plate for a pallet and a box from Muji that held a limited number of tubes of paint, either traditional oil paints, alkyd paints or water-soluble oil paints—I’ve used them all.

Read Article: Paint Media for Plein Air Painting: Compared

I deployed this homemade arrangement in some challenging painting situations, such as during my war artist commissions in Afghanistan. It wasn’t elegant, but it was functional and I could carry it myself in a small-ish backpack, which was an essential consideration.

Recently, I’ve been using a small New Wave u.go  8.4” x 11.25” magnetic pochade box for this kind of painting trip. It’s designed for doing small oil sketches and has a built-in magnetic easel. You can hold it in your hands or mount it on a very slender photographic tripod. I tend to bring pre-primed canvas oil painting paper to use with this arrangement because it’s lightweight and packs down small, which means I can bring more of it and do more painting.

From top: Plein air painting with the U.Go Mini Pochade Box at a traditional boatyard in Oman. It’s perfect for doing more elaborate paintings in situations where you don’t want to bring a heavier portable easel. Here I’m holding it in my hand, but it can also be mounted on a very light tripod. I am using water soluble or water mixable oil paints, which I carry around in a waterproof drybag. The finished sketch. The painting I later developed from the sketch.

Option 4: The Portable Easel

I have a full-sized traditional pochade box, or collapsible easel, which has room in it for brushes, paints, pallet, everything. It is theoretically portable, and I’ve used it on painting outings that involve walking across a field or beach to a pre-determined painting spot. It’s not portable in situations where I have to walk five miles over rugged ground in search of a place to paint. So I tend to use it only when I have a car to pack it in to and know exactly where I’m heading.

I know there are plenty of artists who like to use this tried-and-true arrangement when they travel. As for me, I find it too heavy and cumbersome. It’s easy to find excuses not to take it with me and instead choose one of the lighter and more compact options. So far, I’ve only used my pochade box in the UK, during short trips to the country, or in London.

From top: On my way to paint the stunning Sanna Bay on the Ardnamurchan Penninsula with my portable easel. I drove to this beauty spot, parked in the car park and walked a few steps to the beach. The wind was tolerable, the weather was uncharacteristically Mediterranean, and the whole experience of painting that day was excellent. The resulting sketch of Sanna Bay. The painting I later developed from it.

Minimalist Tendencies

Looking over my various painting arrangements, I can see how my deep minimalist tendencies and love of ultralight travelling have shaped my choices. I know such austerity is not for everyone and I sometimes wish I were different.

I study with envy the pictures of Joaquin Sorolla painting plein air on the beach in Valencia in the 19th century. In those days, a famous artist like him could command a team of servants, carts and mules to haul his entire studio, all the equipment, huge stretched canvasses, plus windbreaks and sunshades, out onto the sand to paint in the middle of the scene.

One of Sorolla’s incredible plein air setups for painting on El Cabanyal, Valencia’s main beachfront. The paintings he created this way are some of his most remarkable—in the image you see him working on the magnificent canvas, El Baño del Caballo, held in the Sorolla Museum in Madrid. But the idea of setting up this elaborate rig is daunting. Sorolla and his family had a beach house not far off but, even so, the organisation required is beyond most of us.

It must have been thrilling to paint so directly, at that scale, in nature. To have everything to hand and be able to capture those fantastic fleeting light effects, as Sorolla does so inimitably.

Yet I know that in reality I could never stand the hassle and faff of such complicated arrangements. Every artist has to do things their own way. My preferred travel setups will always be minimal ones, and I will probably go on looking for lighter and more efficient setups until the day I am no longer able to lift a brush.