Building a Pochade Box, Part 1

There it is. My homemade pochade box. It’s probably the ugliest box in existence (not to mention slightly wonky, as my woodworking skills are lacking,) but it’s a terrific solution for someone that can’t or won’t* shell out the big bucks for a professional pochade box. I’m still trying to figure out the total cost (on account of a few mistakes and jigsaw that needed to be purchased,) but I think for the materials the cost rests somewhere between $20 to $30.

*(I should note that I DO eventually plan to get one of those wonderfully handcrafted pochade boxes…it’s just not in my budget at the time, unfortunately.)

For the unfamiliar, a pochade box is a portable outdoor painting kit - developed as a convenient way to carry supplies out into the field to perform plein air painting (French for “in the plain air”.) There’s a wide variety of pochade boxes in use today that fulfill different needs of an artist. It’d take a whole post to go into this, but fortunately Charlie Parker of the blog “Lines and Colors” covered this topic before when he was purchasing a pochade box. For the curious, here’s a link to the exact article: Lines and Colors' post about Pochade Boxes.

I would also recommend that if you haven’t seen his blog yet, I heartily recommend it – it’s easily in the top ten of art blogs on the internet.

So what made me decide to build a pochade box and try my hand at field painting? Vacation.

I went up to the Smokey Mountains this past week, and after looking at some photos of the area, I decided that it’d be a perfect place to give field painting a try (as a forewarning, I should mention the results were a bit atrocious, pretty much because of my lack of skill in traditional painting AND landscape painting. But it was a great learning experience!)

My budget wouldn’t allow me to actually get a nice pochade box, but I was able to construct one. In the end I think it’s design is somewhere trapped between an Open M box and an All-In-One (though if it had to be categorized, it’d fall into the latter.) And I decided to go over the construction in the next few blog posts to hopefully help some other people that are curious about how to go about it.

So, onto the first step: Figuring out my goals!

I made a short list of things I wanted out of my box – these were going to help me figure out the design and dimensions of it:

-Light, but sturdy

-Cost affordable (it should not be more expensive than $50, even that would be pushing it.)

-Able to hold a 9 x 12 watercolor block in portrait or landscape orientation

-Able to hold most, if not all, of my painting supplies

-Mounts on a camera tripod without modifying the tripod itself.

On Tuesday, I’ll go over the plans and supplies.

World keeps on turning...with sketches!

As is often the case, life gets in the way, which can hold up something like blog posting. Fortunately it wasn't anything terrible, just the usual hustle and bustle of things.

Most of this stuff is digital this time around, and in color! There's a few things here and there that are observational paintings (a panel from Batman: Year One and a 10-minute still life study), and a few imaginary things.

Studies...Studies...Studies...

If you're wondering what's up with the mitten hands... It's based around an idea I heard in a Glenn Vilppu lecture once...to figure out the hand, you need to treat it like any other thing - Simple ---> Complex.

Don't go at it worrying about all the little forms (even as cylinders,) that'll just muck it up and stiffen the gesture. Instead, work up to it with practice.

-A mitten with a thumb,
-A mitten with a forefinger and thumb,
-A cartoon (3 fingered) hand,
-A fully human hand.

By doing it this way, you're realizing the major forms that the hand takes on, and as you move up in complexity, you retain that information.

Whoo...

This is what happens when your day job gets too busy...you end up neglecting your favorite things! Fortunately things are winding down a little, so I'll be able to post more often.

Expect to see some more color work out of me soon, as I'm taking my first oil painting class this Thursday! Somehow, I slipped my way through art school without ever taking a painting class...and it's been the one thing I've seriously regretted. Now that'll be changing, and I'll get to learn that fine craft for the first time! I'm quite excited.

In the meantime, here are some new sketchbook doodles from the past few weeks.

Blegh...

Work was busy this past week, which meant not a lot of personal stuff to do...ah well, at least there's still something! It's a random smattering this week of life drawings and concept stuff.

Art Dump

Another plethora of Sketchbook pages, as well as two little things I'm working on - an illustration involving a troop of angry gorillas, and a build-up of the ogre sketch from before.

More sketches and an illustration!

Haha, it seems all I ever do now is dump sketch pages then quickly leave in a hurry....

Well, this is more of the same, sorta. Here are more sketchpages and a BC page, but I also left a treat! Below is an illustration I'm working on recently. Ultimately, it'll be finished in watercolor and gouache, but at the moment it's a tight underdrawing. The next thing will be value and color studies, then I just transfer it to watercolor paper and go to town!

Big ol' Artdump.

Here's a smattering of random stuff from this week - sketchbook pages, and digital study stuff. I still don't quite get digital art...as in, I'm still having trouble disassembling the hows and whys of it to make terrific art with it. I feel like I'm slowly circling the problem, but I haven't nabbed it yet and smothered it with a solution...but I think I might be close. Or really far away. Hard to tell.

Sketches and Paints

A few watercolor sketches and a few sketchbook pages...