Travel Painting: Art Tools I Take on Vacation

Although most of our family vacations are packed with sight-seeing activities, I always bring my travel watercolor kit with me in case I have a quiet moment to paint. Last month I had the joyful and relaxing experience of painting the view from my cottage rental in the Scottish Highlands. By the time I was painting this scene, I had carried my tools all over the UK (from London to the Peak District to Northumberland and over the Scottish border) and hadn’t opened them once! Honestly though, I wasn’t disappointed by this at all. I like to think of it as a reassurance of how much fun we were having as a family and that I didn’t have time to pick up my brush until our trip was almost over. One quiet afternoon, while my husband was with our older son on a big hike nearby and my younger son was resting on the couch, I decided to spend a little time getting lost in the meditative motion of imperfect watercolor journaling.

This piece took just 10 minutes. I started with light pencil lines to get the shapes down, then moved on to inking some rough lines, and finally added lots of color. When my time is limited, I don’t worry about accuracy of line or color. I just go with the flow and end up with a piece that evokes the feeling of a place, rather than a precise documentation.

Here are the tools I had with me: a small zipper pouch to fit all of my tools; 1 waterproof ink pen, 1 water brush, 1 eraser, 1 sharpened pencil, and (most importantly) paint! This paint palette is sold with empty pans and I filled them up with my preferred colors. I wrote about my preferred paints and method for filling paint pans in a previous post.