I love it and it’s so fun and also it’s really infuriatingly hard and I’m on year 7 of seriously trying to make it a part of my life, so, y’know, I have some thoughts!
Regarding getting started, there’s some real rabbit holes you can fall down, including ones such as “what sketchbook is best” and “instructions on building your own easel” and “which tripods are the lightest” and “real artists don’t use waterbrushes” and so on and so forth and they are ALL traps and I suspect I’ve fallen into each of them at least once. But much like all art, getting started isn’t so much about having the best gear as much as having gear you’ll actually use. Especially gear you’ll actually use a) enthusiastically; b) outdoors; c) to make inevitably frustrating and initially often bad art.
So for me initially, that was a small travel kit of student grade cotman watercolour half pans, a Handbook travelogue sketchbook with its ‘mixed media’ friendly paper, a wadded up takeout napkin or two, and one or more refillable waterbrushes:
Between those and James Gurney’s youtube channel I had everything I needed to get started, and getting started meant making some really rough stuff for a while!
So the core of my advice on getting started is: find supplies you like that you’re not TOO precious about, and watch a bunch of other folks paint plein air and talk about the challenges and frustrations and process of it all, and then go outside and make a mess! And ta-dah, you’ve started! You’re a plein air painter now! You can never live this down!
And hot tip: timelapses of people painting (as opposed to footage that is filmed in realtime, and just heavily edited for youtube or wherever) can absolutely mess up your assessment of how fast things are supposed to go, so do make sure to watch some realtime footage too!
Pretty sure that’s just scratching the tip of the iceberg though so I’ll probably be back with more thoughts later on!
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