Plein Air

Plain Air

About once a month, my artist friends and I go out to draw in the nearby park. 

Initially, I took a huge amount of tools with me. The tools would fall, get dirty, get lost, and interfere with my drawing. With each outing, I took fewer and fewer things until I developed a list of absolute essentials:

• A waterproof A4 clipboard with clips to keep paper from flying away 

• Thin adhesive tape to prevent paper from warping 

• A4-A5 size paper sheets. It's very difficult to handle larger formats outdoors, especially if you haven't gained much experience 

• Pencil and eraser 

• 3 brushes: 

  • 2cm flat brush 

  • Soft round brush with a fine tip. Preferably one that can fold 

  • Thin firm brush for details 

• Paper or tissues for blotting 

• Water container. I use a hair mask box with a lid. Its big advantage is that I can fill it with water and close the lid at home. Often that's all you need. 

• Small paint box. I have a 12-pan box from "White Nights". The paints have long since been changed. 

• And something to sit on, like a cushion for the bench.

Many artists use an easel for outdoor painting, but I prefer not to. While easels offer a traditional setup, I find they're quite heavy and bulky to carry around. This becomes especially impractical when you're walking through a park or hiking to find the perfect spot. Instead, I've found that a lightweight clipboard or drawing board provides all the support needed while being much more portable.

But why do we need these inconveniences when we could draw the same thing at home from a photograph in much more comfortable conditions? To answer this, we need to understand what we want to achieve.

Undoubtedly, our goal as an artist is to create a very good painting, but this is unlikely to happen during plein air, so I suggest dropping all ambitions about this in advance.

Let's treat plein air as a recreational outdoor walk. Our entertainment will be our artistic adventures: trying to capture interesting play of light and shadow, drawing greenery in a new way, or finding new shades of clouds.

Observe yourself, set small but specific goals, and try to work on them. Pay attention to details of nature that you usually handle automatically.

If you notice something that causes you difficulty, go home and study other artists' materials. This will become a task for your next plein air session.

That's basically it.

Of course, definitely take a water bottle, sandwich, and sunscreen if you live in a hot country like I do. Having a couple of artist friends won't hurt either - it will make your plein air pleasant in every way.

Summary

The goal of plein air is not to create a masterpiece, but to learn to identify the essential elements, build composition, and be able to notice and quickly capture changes in nature.

*Photos are from the internet.