I’ve started Liz Steel‘s Sketching Now Travel Sketching course this week, and so I’ll be posting about my progress throughout the course.

I travel a few times a year and while I already sketch during my travels, I want to improve my speed and gain enough confidence to sketch in less than ideal conditions. I rarely sketch standing up, and I don’t feel comfortable sketching while I’m waiting in line, for instance, and these are useful skills to have if you plan to sketch while on a trip that isn’t dedicated to sketching.

As usual with Liz Steel’s excellent courses, the first part is an introduction which includes an overview of the course, setting personal goals for the course, materials list/discussion and a review of where you are starting from.

I have decided to take a different approach to the materials requirements for this course. I have a pretty compact and set travel sketching set of materials, but I’m allowing myself to expand on it and change it a bit to experiment with some new techniques.

The first big change is the sketchbook I’m using. It’s a Hahnemühle A5 Watercolour Book, which includes 200gsm fine grain paper. I’ve never used it before, but as I regularly use the Stillman and Birn Alpha that Liz is using for the course and I’m not a huge fan of it, I decided to give this paper a spin instead. If it works it would be ideal for travel sketching, as it’s thin and lightweight, the paper takes watercolour washes much better than the Alpha, and I appreciate the elastic closure and hard covers. They are very convenient additions that should help me sketch while standing, and keep the sketches safe while I carry the notebook in my bag.

I’ve also changed my watercolour palette somewhat (it’s the bottom palette, not the top one). As I’m still not certain about it, I’m not fully documenting it at the moment. This course isn’t geared heavily towards watercolour, but I tend to like to sketch as quickly as possible on location when travelling, take a few reference photos and complete the sketch with watercolours later that evening.

For the first time I’m adding watercolour pencils to my travel sketching kit. As Liz recommended I have a triad (yellow, red, blue), a green, a brown, a grey, a dark, and while she recommended having two lights, I have three. Why? Because having quickly available greens is very useful, the pink is useful for skin tones, and the ochre is too generally useful to be left out. All of these pencils are Faber-Castell Albrecht Durer.

Dry media is also more than double what I normally carry on me. Here the point is to experiment, and it’s very likely that I will say goodbye to several of these tools during the course. I normally use only Staedler Pigment Liners in 0.3, 0.5 and sometimes 0.8 when I sketch, but here I’ll be adding a Tomboq Fudenosuke brush pen to the mix, two fountain pens (a Lamy Safari and a Sailor Fude both with De Atramentis Document Black), three pencils (Faber Catelll 9000 2B, Rotring 600 0.7 and for the first time ever, Faber Castell 4B graphite aquarelle), an eraser and a pencil sharpener. I’ll also be using a medium waterbrush instead of my usual fine one.

All of these tools will be carried in a Nock Co case, with the exception of the watercolour tin and rag, and a brush case.

I don’t think that I’ll be using these too much during this course, but these are my travel ready brushes. I keep them in a Ti2 design tube with glue tac at the bottom to prevent the brushes from moving. The brushes are Windsor Newton Series 7 numbers 4 and 7 and Rosemary & Co dagger brush 772.

That’s the whole kit, and now it just remains to try it out and see what works and what doesn’t.