 Hi there, it's Sandy Onok and it's time to show you finally my plein air painting setup that I've been asked about so many times. I'm one of those who operates on the theory you carry as little as possible. I have a very small backpack with basic supplies. I have an easel case that came with my easel and I have something to carry my paper in and that's it. I have seen people drag wagons of supplies with them and I know oil painters need to have more supplies so no knock on you for that but I've seen watercolors do that too and you just don't need that much. I have my easel in the bag that it came in and this is a Blick brand easel. It's not the most lightweight one and if you like to help hike to mountain tops this is maybe not the one for you. It's not heavy but it's larger than you might need and if I were to decide I was going to do major hikes and backpacking and stuff I would probably find a lighter weight one but I like this one a lot. It has a lot of adjustability in all the different parts that you put together with it so you can use different angles for your painting. You can use different sized papers that sort of thing. I'm adding on my gorilla painter umbrella to it that I just bought recently to take away the excuse not to paint in the rain or if it's too sunny and hot and I'm you know a whiner so that takes away my excuse but you can certainly paint without an umbrella. The easel comes with this tray for supplies and it has two little spinny things here in the middle and I rest my palette on those and then it has a little spinny thing to hold brushes. I do only take two of my brushes. These are my good stable brushes. I don't use travel brushes for something like this. I want my full weight of my good brushes and my palette I attach using the piece of velcro that's on the tray so that if my palette slips off then it's held on there through the thumb ring with that little piece of velcro. I bring my brush washer with me that has three sections so I can have clean water dirty water and less dirty water and then I have a little bottle for spraying water and a pencil and an eraser. I am going to tape my board down or my paper down to my board and this is a graphics incredible board and I use these in the studio as well as doing plan air. It's very very lightweight but very very sturdy and I cut mine down so that they fit this quarter sheet of paper. This is a quarter sheet of a full sheet so it's about 11 by 15 ish and then I have the incredible board cut down to an appropriate size for that. I usually have a couple taped boards at home that I bring with me rather than taping them out here but since I was showing you everything I figured I'd do that I don't use blue or green tape so it doesn't distract my eye color wise and then I always have a cotton rag of some sort. This particular time I'm going to do sketches and I don't always do that and I always regret it when I don't. Sketches help me to figure out my layout and I work on coming up with a couple options for what that layout might be in this particular case. I wanted to do a tall skinny painting thinking oh yeah I'll do that because my battery is running low on my camera because I did all the filming of the supplies and I thought you know if I did something smaller maybe that would help in making sure I get finished before I run out of battery juice. I'm using my two-toed three pencil and this is a mechanical pencil that has three different leads in it so I can get light medium and dark colors and a value study is all about light medium and dark and working out where your dark areas are going to be versus your light areas before you start painting and it just helps to give you some context before you begin so you know where your darkest areas are going to be and the sketch on the left has the top of the painting starting in the middle of the trees across the way and then the water takes up most of the real estate and then there's a little duck. The second sketch I thought what happens if I pull back a little bit and you can see the tops of the trees and the darkest point in the painting moves more toward the center and you know building up the trees that way because they're lighter at the top and in the one on the left I only see the darker trees and this kind of a thing can help you to think through what would make a good painting and what fascinates you the most. In a composition class that I taught I told people you know do five ten sketches if you need to and then find out what you keep drawing over and over again because clearly you're most interested in that and even though I'm only doing two sketches here I was most interested in the movement on the water and the trees are kind of a supporting character to that but it's the water that I was most interested in and as I was doing this I decided I was going to do two paintings at once and race the clock to see if I could beat my camera battery and I did put a piece of tape down the center of my paper so that I could do two paintings at once and I'm speeding this up you can tell by the motion of the ducks in the back how fast it's going but one of the things you can do when you're out painting especially if you're not used to painting large anyway and for some people it's just scary to do that divide your board into a few areas so that you can have a couple paintings to work on it once that way while the left side is drying I can be working on the right side and vice versa and it gives me a chance to put down the first wash on one while I'm waiting for the other to dry so you can see already I've got just some really basic flood of color started on here a lot of painters will start with much darker washes than I do I just haven't figured out how to get to that point yet I tend to build up in a lot of layers instead of filling my my paint as much with as much pigment as many artists will do and that's just something and I'm in the the process of learning is that I just don't tend to get dark quickly enough but I'm getting there and using bigger brushes really helps so the brushes that I am using here this one is a DaVinci Maestro and it's a good sable brush very expensive so I know my craft audience do not stress out about needing this kind of a brush you can do the same kind of thing my normal brushes I use for crafting are the silver brand brushes they are just fine for for this kind of painting or any other kind these are just really super delicious brushes and I really enjoy painting with them a lot it just feels very very different to paint with a super good brush so I'm adding a bunch of color onto these and letting the paint do its thing I'm letting gravity do its thing by having this at a steep angle and letting colors just drop into each other I tend to paint directly from colors out of the tube or out of the pan shall we say and I let them mix on the paper there are other artists who really just can't stand that it makes them nuts and they want to mix a color first you can certainly do that I find this is a little quicker for me to do this rather than trying to mix up the perfect color just adding colors until whatever is on the paper is what I want it to look like so my paper is really saturated so I'm going to let you watch the ducks for a few minutes I hope you enjoyed that little break while my paper was drying so we can get back to the painting once the paper is dry and I start painting then I'm in a little more control of where my hard edges are so I'm going to add some darker layers with thicker paint to be able to add more detail and I will add some some looser brush strokes as well just kind of in combination with some of those more defined areas and that allows me to get that difference between hard edges and soft edges in my painting one of the things that painting outside does for me is make me work quickly and that's important because otherwise I get too busy working on the fussy details and not just using bigger bolder strokes and letting the paint do its thing it also helps me to focus on what I'm seeing out there I was watching the water the whole time I was painting and just would look at how the wind was moving across it and how it changes the color as the ripples move across and every time the ducks went by and then there would be multiple ripples going different directions and how they criss-crossed each other it's just fascinating to be able to watch that in real life I would never get that from a photograph working in the studio I took a lot of pictures while I was out though and when I am out doing plein air painting I always take pictures of what I already painted as well as some other views of it so that when I'm back in the studio then I have something to reflect on I've seen this in real life and I know what it looks like and I'm able to recreate some of that in a more relaxed studio setting without having to to be out there in the wilds trying to paint quickly like this but I can put a little more time and thought into some of those sort of things so adding a few more final touch details in the last layer with some of the the woods that were on the other side there was all these little trees little fallen trees and stuff across the way and then it's finally time to remove the tape for the big reveal always the favorite moment of any painting so there we have it my scene in front of me that I was painting from and I have two small studies that I can then develop into something when I'm back in the studio later on and have some really good reference to work from and I hope this was helpful for you if you've ever thought about doing some plein air painting I highly encourage it you don't need all these supplies you don't need a fancy easel you can lean aboard against something out in the wild just get out there and paint I'll see you guys in another video soon bye bye