Tips for Putting Together a Compact Field Sketching Kit
As the weather gets warmer and patios re-open in Ontario, we’re all itching to get outside and spend some time enjoying the great outdoors. One of our favourite summertime activities is outdoor sketching. Whether it’s noting down the plants we encounter on a hike or simply enjoying the vibrant city life through urban sketching while sitting down at a cafe, there are endless opportunities around us for creativity and relaxing ourselves with some drawing or painting. Whether you’re new to outdoor sketching or simply want to look for new creative tools to add to your supplies kit, we’re here to share with you some of our favourites and essentials for a simple and reliable plein-air sketching kit.
The Bare Basics — Pencils, Erasers, and Sketchbooks
A good pencil is a no-brainer to include in your essential sketching supplies. There’s no need to fiddle with caps or wait for ink to dry before moving on to the next page. If you like to add a watercolour wash to your sketches, the latter is even more important when pressed for time. Of course, a pencil is also a great tool for planning out your composition before committing to the scene.
We’ve carried Faber Castell’s excellent collection of 9000 graphite pencils for many years, and these are still our most recommended pencils for artists. They come in a wide range of lead grades, from 6H to 8B, so you have a flexible selection of texture and line darknesses to choose from. Remember, as a rule of thumb, H pencils are hard pencils and B pencils are soft pencils. What you will want to use most often will depend on your sketching style.
Some people will prefer the precision of a mechanical pencil. Mechanical pencils eliminate the need to carry an extra pencil sharpener (although the Perfect Pencil is a fabulous pencil-plus-sharpener all-in-one tool), and with the wide range of lead grades available from Faber Castell’s collection of graphite refills offer much of the same flexibility and choice as a traditional wooden pencil. If you're looking to add a compact mechanical pencil to your sketching kit, we recommend taking a look at the Kaweco Sport series. They’re made of plastic (or aluminum, if you’re looking at the AL-Sport collection), so they remain fantastically lightweight. Its wider body also offers a bit more comfort in the hand, especially for those who tend to have a tighter grip.
A kneaded eraser is a fantastic addition for travel sketching outside of a studio. While we do carry a fine range of traditional erasers, including ones with protective sleeves which are great for throwing in your backpack without worrying about getting them dirty, a kneadable eraser is one of the best erasers for detailed line work. It offers added versatility because it allows you to mould different forms that you might need, like a fine tip for lifting sharp highlights or a round ball to create soft edges in your drawings. They can also be rolled across your page to lighten your underlay drawings if you wish to add watercolour paints on top.
Finally, no basic sketching kit is complete without a sketchbook! We do carry a wonderful collection of sketchbooks from various manufacturers, but with outdoor sketching, it’s best to keep things compact and lightweight. The Authenticbook collection from SM-LT Art is perfect for this. This collection features thin, A5 sketch albums, typically filled with 24–48 pages. They come in a range of paper options, from the smooth, classic, white bristol paper to the lightly textured Ingres paper. Depending on the paper type you choose, you can even expand to other media types such as charcoal, pastel, markers, or even watercolour.
Another one of our top recommendations is the Stillman & Birn Beta series. These are relatively new to our store but are beloved by artists from around the world for their high quality paper. Softcover versions with rounded corners are available, combining portability with durability. One of the best things about this particular series is the heavy duty 270 gsm, cold-press paper used in the sketchbooks. They’re not quite as textured as a traditional cold-press watercolour paper, so your pens and markers will still glide comfortably across the page. However, they are still textured enough to handle some work with mediums like charcoal pencils and soft pastels, and they are certainly thick enough to handle a good amount of watercolour. They really are an excellent option for those who plan to progress to other sketching media.
Upgrading to Ink Sketching
Once you become comfortable with pencil sketching, you’ll most likely want to move on to pen and ink — either with fountain pens or with fineliner markers. For the latter, we love using Faber Castell’s Ecco Pigment Fineliners. They come in widths ranging from 0.05mm (for extra fine detail work or shading in small areas) to 0.8mm (for bold, expressive outlines and silhouettes). Best of all, the ink is lightfast, permanent, and acid-free, which makes the pens perfect for archival purposes. We usually recommend starting with a 0.5mm pen and then adding a 0.1mm and a 0.8mm for a full range of line options.
If you’re looking for a fountain pen for outdoor sketching, we couldn't give a better recommendation than the bestselling TWSBI Eco fountain pen. The clear ink barrel means you can always check to make sure you have enough ink for the day before heading out. Its lightweight construction makes it a pen you won’t even think about twice about including in your bags. Of course, the smooth writing and drawing experience offered by their stainless steel nibs cannot be emphasized enough. With a bunch of colours available, the Eco is a good option for every style.
If you’re using a fountain pen for sketching, you’re also probably going to want to use waterproof ink in case you want to add any watercolour washes to your drawings. There are a range of options available, but by and large, Platinum’s Carbon Black ink is the most requested waterproof ink at our store, as it’s one of the few fountain pen inks on the market that will truly resist any smudging when water is applied to the page.
We do have to give you the obligatory warning, though, to avoid leaving any waterproof ink unused in your pen for extended periods of time! If you think you'll go more than 2–3 weeks without using your pen, it’s best to simply empty out the ink and give it a good flush with tap water to avoid any potential clogs. Of course, it goes without saying that one should only ever use fountain pen ink in fountain pens. Avoid India ink, or drawing ink, at all costs, as those are not water-soluble inks and contain binders that will most certainly ruin your precious pens!
Another fountain pen option that’s excellent for a sketching kit is the Pilot Kakuno, particularly if you plan to use a waterproof ink. The friction-fit, snap-on cap means no need to fiddle around with unscrewing the pen. It’s also postable, meaning that the cap fits nicely onto the back of the pen when you’re drawing, so there’s less chance of you losing the cap. Best of all, it’s one of the few pens designed for easy, complete disassembly, which means you can fully clean out each part of your pen — nib, feed, converter and all — and not have to worry about ink build-up over time.
Adding Colour and Exploring Watercolours
It’s hard to resist the joy of adding colours to your work. Watercolour is a quick and easy way to note down the colours of an object or a scene, either using watercolour pencils or watercolour paints. There are lots of options for water-soluble coloured pencils, but our favourites by far are the Supracolor series from Caran d’Ache and the Albrecht Durer series from Faber Castell. Choosing one or the other is really a matter of personal preference, as they’re both very high quality, artist-grade watercolour pencils. The Supracolors are known for their softer texture, allowing for easier application and layering, while the Albrecht Durers are known for their superior water solubility and blendability, as well as their vibrancy. Either way, we recommend keeping it simple for a sketching kit with a 12- to 24-pc set. Remember, these pencils do blend rather easily, so you can get a huge array of additional colours even when starting with a small set.
Likewise, with watercolour paints, we prefer to keep it simple with a compact 12-colour set like the ones from White Nights. These are not yet available from our shop, but will be coming very soon, so definitely keep an eye out for their release.
Edit (2021-07-17): The Nevskaya Palitra Watercolour Sets are now available for purchase from our shop!
Of course, watercolour painting would be impossible without a good brush. We recently introduced a small range of Escoda’s travel brushes, available either with premium sable hair in their Reserva series or high quality synthetic taklon for the Perla series. They are beloved by professional artists and are an absolute pleasure to use. These pocket travel brushes are quite handy and come with a metal cap that functions both as a protective cover for your delicate brush tips and a handle extender to transform the pint-sized brush into a full-length one for comfortable painting. If you’re painting primarily on A5 (or 6x8") paper pads, a single #6 or #8 brush is usually enough to cover your canvas. However, for smaller details, you may want to add a #4 brush, or for large areas like the sky, you may want to add a #12 brush. Add a collapsible water vessel like the Faber Castell Clic&Go Cup, and you have a fantastic basics kit for all the watercolour sketching you’ll want to do.
If you want to be even more simple, you can opt for a water brush, which combines the brush and water vessel into one convenient tool! The Tombow Water Brushes are the latest to join our collection of creative supplies at Phidon, and they are one of the main brushes we recommend for a minimalist artist. Just squeeze the barrel gently to release water into the tip of the brush and use it with the paints in the palette or your drawing page.
As for paper, the Stillman and Birn Beta sketchbooks we mentioned earlier are great for watercolours. But if you want something that is dedicated to the job, the Travelogue Watercolour Journals from Hand Book Paper Co. are another popular option. They are even available with a 300 gsm paper option, so you can easily do heavy washes with lots of water on your brilliant landscapes for the hiker and mysterious city scenes for the urban sketcher. No matter your perfect place for sketching, the linen-bound hardcovers also help to give you a more rigid surface to work on while you’re painting. These journals are particularly fantastic for travel and vacation, as you will have a stunning, ready-made scrapbook or visual album by the time you head home.
We’ll be going over artist and watercolour supplies for creative exploration in more detail in a future blog post, but for now, we hope these suggestions will help you get started. Remember, there is no better tool for the job than the ones you have right in your hand already. The more you use them, the more you’ll learn how to bring out all of their best qualities in order to carry out your work. Last but not least, our team is always just a DM or email away, so feel free to reach out to us if you require any assistance!
How will you be using your creativity in July? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to tag us in any photos of your sketches that you post to social media!