Making a watercolor travel kit

Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity - Arnold Bennett

Recently I've been pricing up watercolor travel kits and to be honest the ones I've seen here in New Zealand haven't been very cheap. The Winsor and Newton Cotman Sketchers Pocket Box is one set I've been looking at and the price is around the $56 NZ mark. Not very cheap if you are just starting out and have children that would like a set each too. This prompted me to start looking at cheaper alternatives.

I've seen a lot of different kits on the internet made from peppermint tins and using half pans mounted on small magnets to keep them from moving around inside. I priced up this option and buying half pans with paint already in them in the Cotman's range was going to be more expensive than just buying the travel kit. As I already have watercolors in tubes I thought that maybe buying empty half pan cases and filling them with my tube paint might work out cheaper. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find empty half pan cases yet so I decided I needed to put a bit more thought into it. 

What I really needed was a container with a lid and different compartments in it. I had a couple of different ideas. An ice cube tray, but I decided that it was too big, a pill type box with separate days, but I thought the plastic hinges wouldn't last, and finally an eyeshadow box, which is small and thin and has a proper hinge on it. Eureka!

So off to the $2 shop I went, looking for a cheap eyeshadow set that I could convert and they didn't disappoint me. The photo above is of one of the three sets I purchased, I spent $6 in total. The eyeshadows were in little metal containers fitted into the compartments with a tiny bit of glue on the bottom. I prised them out easily with a small screwdriver, you could also use a knife blade. The glue came out easily in a chunk just using my finger nail. Below is the case minus all the eyeshadows.

After I'd emptied the case and scraped off all the glue I gave the case a good wash out in dish washing detergent using a rough woven scouring type cloth pad, just to make sure that any remaining glue or eyeshadow was removed properly. Then I dried it all and added the paints from my tubes. See picture below.

I now need to leave the paints for a couple of days to dry out completely and I'll have a compact watercolor set I can fit in my pocket if I want to. Below is a picture of the container I keep my tubes in contrasted against the compact size of my new travel kit. I can use a much small bag now :)

The only other thing I will do to this kit when the paint is all dry is to paint the inside of the lid white to mix on.

 I'll still probably need to carry something else small to mix on and a water bottle. When I go for long walks especially in the summer time, I always carry a drink bottle with me anyway. While at the $2 shop I also picked up a small telescoping brush tube to keep my brushes in. I'd also like to try out the water brushes with the water tank built in at some stage, these could make my kit even smaller. 

I can't wait for the paint to dry so I can get out and test drive my new kit!

I hope this gives you ideas for your own travel kits. Have a great week! :)

A Piggy Tale

"Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves" - William Lowndes

Wow what a week!

A sick child at home with a tummy bug and then an allergic reaction caused by the same illness and also Hubby home with a swollen infected leg. As you can imagine life has been a little busy and distracting so I've only managed one journal entry this week. 

It's that time of the year again when the IRD send you strange nonsensical letters about your taxes just to scare you before they tell you they made a mistake and they owe you money, fingers crossed anyway :D 

It's also council rates time grrr, so not really my favorite month.

Anyway I spotted our terracotta piggy bank high up on a shelf in the kitchen and thought "mmm I wonder if there's anything in there?". 

Short answer "No".

This got me to thinking about how many other empty piggy banks could be languishing in the back of people's cupboards and shelves around the world in this time of global financial unrest. Could the cute little piggy bank soon become nothing more than an empty ornament as governments gradually drop small value coins as prices go up or as we eftpos everything and therefore never handle money? Could our children end up with nothing to jingle in their little piggies?

What a horrible thought....

While working on this with some new black pens I discovered that they weren't as permanent as I thought they were. I suppose I should learn to test these sorts of things out before I start a drawing? Anyway this opened up a whole different way of shading as I just added water with a brush to see what they would do. Then I just finished with some burnt sienna watercolor paint and a brown colored pencil.

I also discovered something weird, when I started trying to draw this pig with pencil I just couldn't get it right. I erased bits here and there, redrew the pig twice and in the end chucked the pencil and picked up a pen. It came out pretty much how I wanted it straight away. No erasing, no second chances. It's like my brain said "Right, this is it, no chance to fix anything so get it right!" And it worked! The scooter from the next post was drawn straight off with a pen too. I think I might just lose the pencil for a while and see how things go ;)