Image: Michael Alford plein air painting in Amorgos, Greece.
By Michael Alford
For me, plein air painting is a natural thing to do. It combines my passion for the great outdoors with my love of painting, and it’s fair to say I’ve been doing it most of my life.
The pastime I pursued as a boy led to a career as an artist and plein air painting remains one of the most important ways I engage with the world on an everyday basis. Plein air work gets me out and about, making discoveries and, above all, looking at life with a painter’s eye. It has a place at the heart of my painting practice, providing support for the work I do in the studio and offering inspiration for future projects.
Over the years, I’ve done thousands of plein air paintings in a wide variety of locations, everywhere from Iraq to Dorset. In the process, I’ve road-tested an array of painting setups and paint media in challenging and not-too-challenging conditions.
Read more about Michael Alford’s lightweight plein air painting setups
Here, I’m going to cover the main media I tend to use: brush pens and water soluble pencils, watercolours, alkyd and water soluble paints and traditional oil paints.
Sketching in Scotland, not far from Ulverston. The light at this time of day is transient and there’s no time for anything but the quickest sketch. I’m using my most minimal kit, a small box with brush pens and soluble graphite pencils, which I usually keep in my rucksack for moments like these.
Water soluble pencils and brush pens
In the past I would have used pens and pencils to do basic plein air sketching. Now I use products like the Derwent water soluble pencil and the Pentel brush pen. They have the advantage of being very compact and portable as well as straightforward to use. They are more of a painting medium than a drawing one so it’s much easier to get subtle tonal effects with them than it is with pen and pencil. You can capture more visual information more efficiently. Shadows, trees, figures, clouds: no hatching or shading required, just a touch of water to blend.
Pros: compact, easy to use, good for capturing nuanced tonal effects, painterly
Cons: limited scope, monochrome, not for more ambitious sketches
A sketch of the Ciudad Perdida in Columbia. Getting there involved a 2-day hike through mountainous jungle and my time at the site was limited. Using brush pens, soluble pencils and a small sketchbook, which I kept in the wilderness drybag you can see in this snapshot, I was able to do several quick sketches in just a few minutes.
Watercolour
A classic for travel and still one of the easiest and most flexible choices for artists. It’s a medium you can use for loose sketching or to create more finished work. There’s a wide array of colours available in both tubes and box sets—you can tailor the palette to suit your style. It’s fast drying (sometimes too fast in hot weather, although it can be slow-drying in the damp) and it lends itself to a painterly approach to the subject. If you have a set of watercolours, all you need is paper, a few brushes and some water and you can produce a lot of useful work. A set of watercolours always has a place in my travel painting kit.
Pros: easy to use, portable, fast-drying, adapts to many circumstances
Cons: difficult to achieve intense colour and strong tonal contrast, slow-drying in damp conditions
Watercolour plein air painting in Spain. The adaptible medium is suited for rugged, remote situations and also for times when the conditions are easy. Here I’m painting by the hotel pool in Antequera, Andalusia, on a blistering hot day that dried the paint as soon as I applied it.
Water soluble or water mixable oil paint
I first tried these on one of my war-artist trips to Afghanistan. Painting conditions were challenging there, and I wanted a medium that was like oil paint, but easier to use in that context. These did the job.
The simple fact of being able to clean brushes and dilute paint with plain water is a huge advantage that makes these products valuable in many situations. Their colours and quality are good, although not as good as traditional oil paints, especially in the reds and oranges. The consistency is different from traditional oil paints and can take some getting used to. They’re probably best used for quite thick painting with a palette knife or using heavy brush strokes.
The main drawback with these paints is their drying time. I’ve just returned from a two-week trip to Spain where I used them. The paintings I did at the beginning of the trip, having been left out in the sun to dry for days at a time in very hot conditions, are still tacky despite the fact I use the drying media provided by the manufacturer. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s an issue.
Pros: easy cleanup, no need to travel with flammable white spirit, decent colors
Cons: some colours not strong, slow-drying, can’t be mixed with other oil paints
Here are my jerry-rigged arrangements for drying two paintings done with water-soluble paints. The weather was very hot, yet the paint was slow to dry, even when the pictures were hung out like laundry. Still, the intense colours and easy cleanup with these paints makes them worthwhile.
Alkyd paint
Alkyd paint is a very good medium for plein air painting, and there are several commercial varieties. You need white spirit or the equivalent to thin the paint and clean your brushes, but their advantage over traditional oil paints or water soluble oil paints is that they’re very fast-drying. This means you can get a thin coat down in hot weather and it will dry enough in twenty minutes to paint on top. I like to paint fast, so that suits me.
Another advantage of alkyds is that they combine perfectly well with traditional oil paints, something that’s not true for water soluble oil paints. This is a good thing, because I find the quality of the non-mineral pigments can be lacking in alkyds. The ochres and umbers are fine, but when you come to the reds and yellows, they don’t have the same intensity as in traditional oil paints. I’ll often turn back to traditional paints when I need these colours, carrying around a little tube of cadmium red oil paint, for instance.
Pros: fast-drying, can be used in combination with other oil paints
Cons: non-mineral pigments can lack intensity, requires white spirit or similar
I painted this study of a secluded cove in the Cinque Terre in Italy using alkyd paints on oil painting paper. The conditions were not altogether easy: this part of Italy is hot and vertiginous. But the landscape, its colours and the way the mountains meet the Mediterranean, make it an excellent destination for plein air painting.
Traditional oil paint
I use traditional oil paint for plein air painting when I am most in control of my environment. I use it when there’s no need to check my painting materials onto a flight, so the weight of my kit is not an issue and I can bring all the flammable thinners I want. I use it when I have a car to throw all my gear into—and to retreat quickly to if the weather turns nasty. I use it when I’m not in a hurry, when no one’s waiting for me to finish painting. I use it when I know exactly where my painting spot will be and know I won’t have to travel around very much or walk very far to get there.
Traditional oil paints still handle best and offer the most beautiful and complete range of colours. They aren’t the most convenient plein air medium, but there is nothing like them for quality.
Pros: intense, true colours, excellent handling, thick and thin painting
Cons: requires thinners, slow drying, cumbersome to use outdoors
All the products I’ve mentioned in this article will be available at your local art supply store and online.