What is in my painting bag

A few weeks ago I still did have some painting lessons. These lessons were lovely and the place where we painted was so gorgeous. However, getting there with your stuff is quite the hassle. So I introduce a painting bag.

To make things easier for me, I would put everything I needed in a bag that I could just pick up every Friday and take with me. It was so easy and now I still keep my stuff in there because I have everything I need in one place.

I think the painting bag was one of the best plans I had in a long time.

And just because I love it so much and maybe because some of you would want to know what kind of stuff I would take to go painting, I thought I would do a “What is in my painting bag”.

Now in this bag, I wouldn’t put the paper since we painted on A3 and A2 format but I have a separate drawing tube for that. (Because when you go by bike you don’t want a map or you will be blown everywhere.)

My bag is a tote bag that says reading is for awesome people that I got from one of my favourite books stores all time. I really like this bag and it is very sturdy but not too chic for me to carry paint in.

General Stuff

Tape (I think it is scotch tape?) The kind that you can stick paper down with and get it off without damaging the paper.

Watercolour tape; This tape is great to stretch te paper with. You make it wet and then it is sticky!

Charcoal For sketching and a sketchbook for some initial sketches. Fun fact; even though the paper is very thin, you can paint on it. I tried.

 Get the most out of your sketchbooks here  or organise you inspiration in sketchbooks

My personal favourite is the tear off pallet which is just amazing. I used to have to wash my stuff a lot and that would stop me from painting (I hate cleaning that much). But with the tear of pallets I only need to worry about my brushes and just throw the rest away.

And yes, this would waste paint but I learned how the dose my blobs in school (where we definitely could not throw away to much paint but had to mix on paper) so often I am just left with stains and almost o paint. For oil painting I often just use the same, pallet until I start something for which I need different colours.

Acrylics

Acrylic paint from Liquitex basics and Amsterdam. I just used a basic list of colours but, to be honest, that green… Really not needed that.

I love the natural colours and I found out that I use a lot of white and I actually needed to buy a second one after just 10 lessons. (It’s not like my paintings look like pastel everywhere, it just happens.)

Hog hair brushes & Synthetic brushes. I really grew to love the synthetic brushes. They are so lovely and soft and mixing with them is so much easier.

I also have a Spalter which is basically a very big flat brush which is great for just making a background begin with. Also, for oil paints, just starting with a underpainting in acrylic is a great way to start with values and cover the entire paper.

Oils

ZEST IT; This is basically life. It is an oil solvent but it smells of citrus. It works amazing for both pencil and oil paint and it doesn’t give me a headache. Plus, it is quite natural so you don’t have unnecessary waste. It just evaporates!

Linnen oil (I hope I did translate this good)

Part of the course was an introduction to oils and I fell in love immediately. So I bought an entire set of oil paints from van Gogh which is professional quality. It is an amazing set with all the colours I could want for a beginner. It has a cool shade and a warm shade of all the primary colours plus; green, brown, black and white.

It also came with painting medium but that one contains turpentine and since that stuff smells vile, I’ll probably only use that when I
can paint outside again (when will it be summer already)

In the same set, there were also two paintbrushes which I used a lot. I try to keep my acrylic brushes and oil brushes separate so the chemicals don’t mix.

This set contains a rounder smaller brush (2) and a bigger flat brush (4).

The whole set was 30 euros which I think is an amazing price for everything that is in there. It would have been a lot more pricey to get that all separate. But the box was a little bit big so I moved it to a smaller plastic case.

I also bought some pallet caps including actual caps to keep my solvent and oil in while painting.

So, overall, I have everything I need for both oil paint and acrylics so I can choose whichever I want on location.

This painting bag is amazing for me. I used it a lot and I didn’t even unpack it yet (and probably won’t for a while) 

Just too clear this was not plain air painting, things like the easel where already there so I only needed to bring materials.

I really loved all these materials! I think they are amazing and are good quality. If you want to know what I take with me when I go sketching, you can read that here! 

I would love to hear what you would take when you go paint somewhere.