Making Art While on a Family Vacation

Do you dream of a relaxing art vacation full of hours of outdoor sketching, and returning home with a book or stack full of little paintings? I do, too... but the challenge that you might identify with is that I'm usually traveling with non-artists and there's little opportunity for the kind of lingering sketching and painting requires.

Here's how I managed to turn a recent vacation into an artistically inspiring experience. I had a summer fling with a new medium and returned with reference photos and some small works of art, too!

Here are some bookmarks I made while on vacation. Is this the height of fine art? No. Did it inspire me and enhance my vacation experience? Absolutely!

Setting Priorities & Being Realistic

Right off the bat, I knew it was important to outline the priorities of the vacation to myself. If it is unrealistic to think that you'll have 3 hours per day to wander away by yourself while on vacation, then yearning for it just creates unnecessary frustration and doesn't help you see more beauty around you. So, I fully embraced that this vacation would not allow me much actual painting time, and instead shifted my focus to gathering inspiration.

Infusing Art Into Experiences

I could've sat for hours on that beach, watching the waves crash in again and again and the light shift into evening.

We undervalue what it means to look at the world with an artistic eye.

We value ourselves as artists by production: how many pieces we create and how much time we spend making them. If we don't have enough time with brushes on canvas or enough finished pieces, we question whether we're really artists after all.

With this focus, we miss out on the magic of art, which is seeing something special in the mundane world. Anyone can see the beauty in a spectacular sunset, but it's an artist who sees a spectrum of color in a dreary day or stunning design in a pile of dishes. And without this vision, our art might not be all that interesting.

So that was the first thing I decided to focus on: Regardless of what we were doing as a group on vacation, I had my artist eyes open. I indulged myself a couple extra moments here and there to meditate on what I was seeing. Spending the time to really look at a scene and say to myself, "the colors make everything look like it's drenched in butter," helped me hold onto the experience a little longer, until I was able to get out my watercolor set on the way home and paint during the car ride.

Taking Photo References, Videos, and Notes

While I do believe it would be even better to stop and paint en plain aire, that wasn't possible on this trip. So I did the next best thing and took tons of reference photos! All the while I paid close attention to the fact that what I was seeing through the camera lens was really *nothing* like what I was seeing through my own eyes. This later freed be up to change compositions a lot instead of trying to find perfect reference photos to copy.

Something which is really helpful is taking a video while verbally describing what you are really seeing, so that once you do have the opportunity to paint you have some clues as to how to better show shapes and colors as they were. I've done this also by typing notes on my phone, however the video with description only takes a few seconds and is both easier and more descriptive.

Portable Materials

For this trip, I brought along a small watercolor palette, a water brush, a mechanical pencil, a pen, a marker, and a pad of bookmark watercolor paper. I placed all of this in a zip-up pencil case which was smaller than an iPad but a few inches thick. When opened, it created a convenient surface for sketching in my lap with my phone off to the side for reference.

Working in watercolor, though it had been my nemesis for some years, with a waterbrush meant that I could paint anywhere and pack up at a second's notice, no clean-up required. Working on a tiny bookmark-sized bit of watercolor paper meant that I didn't have to take the sketches too seriously or spend much time on them. Using the pen in conjunction with the watercolor gave it more the feel of a doodle or a tiny illustration and I didn't stress too much about accuracy or getting detail with the brush, I just drew it on with the pen after the fact!

Of course, I would have preferred to come back with some small oil paintings, but since that wasn't going to happen, I chose to remove as many barriers as possible and change my expectations. I knew I wasn't very good at watercolor, but something happened with the repetition of the little bookmarks...

I started to enjoy the process, and I started painting more with the watercolor rather than drawing with it.

Bringing the Inspiration Home

I enjoyed doodling with watercolor so much on my vacation, that I've started to do more involved paintings from reference photos I've taken, even moving up to postcard-sized papers. Above you can see a Spanish winery on the top, Spanish sunflowers on the bookmark, and the view from Sintra in Portugal at the bottom of the photo.

Realizing that the color scheme of each sketch was pretty similar, I started this sunset view using a Holbein palette I had at home. A friend let me text out her Qor half-pan set, and that will now be next on my list!

Last week I hosted a Monochromatic Thumbnail Painting Workshop with the Realist Art Club and used vacation reference photos and watercolors to design some tiny compositions. I'm enjoying this all so much that these might become larger oil paintings, or I may even begin to work a little bigger in watercolor, too! Next month when we tackle Color Thumbnail Painting in the Realist Art Club, I'll undoubtedly be coming back to my set of vacation photos for inspiration.

If you're getting ready to travel with non-artists, or you're just struggling to get art into your daily life, I hope you've found this post helpful! While not every trip can be all about art and creating, it can still be productive and inspirational, and allow you to soak in your experiences deeper by using your artist's eye and awareness.