For a long time, when I traveled, my art kit was just my iPad. Small, contained, nothing to forget and nothing to explain to airport security. Just the iPad and I was ready to go.
Last year that changed. I started sketching and painting in an actual sketchbook, working with watercolors, gouache, and colored pencils, and once I started I couldn't go back to iPad-only. There's something about working on paper in a place that you get to hold onto in a way you just can't with a screen. The paint dries, the paint blooms, and it's yours in a different way. So now when I travel I want to be more analog, and my kit has gotten a lot more interesting because of it.
The Bag That Started It All
The whole thing begins with the right vessel. I found mine when I visited Erin Flett's studio in Maine. She's a fellow artist who creates beautiful designs that she screen-prints on her own fabric and turns into products. The piece I picked up there is exactly the right size: big enough to hold what I actually need, small enough that it doesn't take over my bag. When you find the right container for your supplies, you know it, because everything fits differently and everything stays where it belongs.
What's Actually in It
The core of the kit: my watercolor pencil set, gouache tubes, sketching pencils, a moldable eraser, and water brushes. The water brushes are worth talking about because they make painting on the road actually workable. The barrel is hollow and refillable, so you fill it with water before you leave and you have a self-contained brush ready to go. No water cup to tip over while traveling, no scrambling for a bottle in a café. You fill it up and you paint.
For the gouache, I don't bring the whole collection. I look at where I'm going and think about what I'll actually reach for. The Upper Peninsula means the deep blue-green of Lake Huron, the gray-green of cedar trees, the warm brown of old Chris-Craft wood, so that's the palette I'm building around. Choosing it before I go is honestly half the fun.
The Thing I Had to Unlearn
For the longest time I packed the smallest sketchbook I could find, because the logic made sense to me: less intimidating, less pressure to fill the page, smaller commitment. It doesn't actually work that way. Small pages just meant I held back more, and holding back isn't the point of painting on location. I've switched to a larger sketchbook on heavier paper, the kind that can hold a wash of watercolor without buckling and wrinkling, and now I fill the whole spread. Wonky lines, awkward compositions, all of it. The whole spread is the record of being there.
What I Always Come Home With
This might be my favorite part of painting on the road: I try to visit at least one local art supply store wherever I land, not to restock on basics, but just to look. Every shop is different, and every place carries things you can't find anywhere else, so I always bring something home. A packet of watercolor pastel squares from Portugal that look just like tailor's chalk. A small gouache set from a shop in Italy. A tube of bright, blue gouache from a store in California that was the exact color of the Pacific Ocean on the day I was there, which was the only reason I needed to buy it. Those tubes and squares and little kits are a record of where I've been and what I was making when I was there, and they're better than a postcard. More useful too, which is saying something.
If you paint and you travel, or if you've been thinking about starting, I hope this gives you somewhere to begin. If you find a great local art shop wherever you land, I want to hear about it.
