Art Supplies for Travel

I love a good capsule wardrobe, the simplicity of it but also the creativity invested into building one. I’m about to leave the country for seventeen days and am trying to do so with limited luggage. As such, I put together a travel capsule wardrobe.

But more fun than that was putting together a travel art supply kit. Since I pared it down to a limited selection of mix and match supplies, I’m thinking of it as a capsule, too.

Here is what I’m taking:

• several Micron pens, black pens as well as brown and burgundy

• 2h pencil

• pencil sharpener

• glue stick (this genius idea is from Samantha Dion Baker’s travel supply list)

• Blackwing pencil

• A Fabriano spiral bound sketch pad

• a hand-book watercolor, landscape format sketchbook

I’m still trying to decide if I’ll take my travel watercolor set or a set of watercolor pens and a few brushes. It might be fun to hold off and purchase a watercolor set in Rome.

If you’d like to join me in a casual, low pressure year of sketching, gather your drawing supplies, store them in a visible and easy to access location, and start sketching!

To figure out what I needed to take on my trip, I spent some time this past week sketching from old travel photos. It was really relaxing and made me really look forward to doing a deep dive into my sketchbooks in the coming year.

Happy sketching!