Plein Air sketching follow up

What Actually Worked (and What Didn't)

Over the past month, I’ve had a trips down to the Mornington Peninsula, Venu Bay, and I'm partway through the Plein AirPril challenge, whereby I’m supposed to do an outdoor painting every day in April. It has been a great chance to properly road-test my three DIY portable setups I'd been tinkering with.

The clear winner: the sketchbook holder

I haven’t used my tripod easel at all, but I’ve used the sketchbook holder constantly. It securely holds both my A5 sketchbooks, one with a hardcover sewn-spine, the other a wire-coil visual diary style. You slide the book covers behind the holder, fold the pages forward, through the slot and spread the pages to where you want and clip them with large bulldog paper clips on either side, and you're done. Even in the wind, it stays put. It's light enough to hold one-handed while standing, or it just rests across my knees when I'm sitting.

The whole setup takes almost no time: a pencil, a pen, a water brush, and my homemade CD dot card palettes. Done. It pays to be agile when the fickle Melbourne weather decides to throw storms, rain, wind gusts, but is mostly grey and overcast with occasional surprise sunshine at me all in the same afternoon.

The watercolour sketchboard: promising but …

I only pulled this one out a couple of times. It works, but it's heavier, slower to set up, and critically, the prototype was made of matte board. Getting drenched a few times took a real toll on it. The bulldog clip slots are a clever idea, and worth keeping in any future version

Lessons learned the hard way

Bag organisation matters more than you think. Rummaging around for that specific brush or pen mid-session is genuinely annoying. I've since started bundling brushes and pens in cord concealer spiral tubing and keeping them in small ziplock bags. Bonus is less disruption searching,

Using Velcro was trickier than it looks. Its holding capacity between its hock and loop surfaces is powerful. So powerful when I taped it to plastic palettes, the sticky backing kept pulling off surfaces as I removed the palettes. It was also lifting the paper surface off the matte board, strong double-sided tape and hot glue didn't work well either; PVC glue was slightly better. Still experimenting, looking for a heavy-duty version of this tape.

Keep your water brushes topped up. I nearly ran out of water mid-sketch one day. Lesson learned: empty, clean, and refill water brushes before heading out.

The spray bottle is actually pretty mandatory as well because it lets you keep whatever form of watercolour palette you’re using moist and the paint easier to pick up, especially with a water brush.

What's next

I'm planning to rebuild the sketchbook holder in plywood, with slots at the side to hold the sketchbook pages and a slightly bigger top flap for my larger palettes. For larger work or when using larger watercolour pads or blocks, I'll stick with my existing drawing board (the one with the tripod mount) with a camera tripod for a proper travel easel setup.

Overall?  Happy with how it went. Sometimes the simplest, lightest setup really is the best one.

Dealing with Unexpected Expenses in Retirement

As you get deeper into retirement, you start to dread things breaking down and needing replacement. They're often big, expensive items, and we've had several recently unrelated plumbing and electrical issues, with multiple big-ticket items needing repair and/or replacement. Annoyingly, these are things that have to be replaced but don't get covered by standard insurance. You just have to grin and bear it. It is time to consider a careful division of limited retirement funds, what's most important to maintain and what could be tolerated or put off.

Unfortunately, the surprises just kept going on and on with different new problems.

Anyone know how to open the
well-designed Lacie housing?

My current computer problems have become a low priority behind everything else? One extra problem arose when our washing machine flooded laundary and tripped the power. One of my attached drives in the studio failed to restart. I had been gradually building up a family photo library on it from my larger photographic collection. Unfortunately, it wasn't yet backed up. The same hard drive also now housed all my Wednesday Wanderers photos and had become the working area for my website updates, also not backed up.

Is this yet another disaster? Some of the working files are still around on my two working computers. I'm hopeful I can take the unresponsive Lacie drive apart and maybe recover what's on the disk if I can just open the well-designed housing.

The moral of the story? If things get tough, make sure you backup everything and don't just have a single copy of important computer files. Older and wiser, isn't that what they say...

Figuring Out What to Keep and What to Change

Laptop

The good news is that the basics are already sorted. Email, browsing, office work, wifi, bluetooth, and lots of small applications all have solid Linux equivalents, so day-to-day computing isn't a problem. The more interesting challenge is figuring out what to do with the more specialised creative software.

The office computer, the one that died its unfortunate death-by-upgrade, had been the focus for most of the heavy graphics work. It was well set up for it. Dual screens, a BenQ eye-care monitor (low contrast by design but genuinely helpful reducing glare for my eye problem), and enough USB ports to keep all my external photo backpack drives plugged in at once. Replacing that setup takes a bit of planning.

Here's where the graphics and photo software currently stands:

Program	Temp Destination	Linux Alternative	Cost
ON1 Photo RAW	Laptop	Darktable	Free
Luminar Neo	Laptop	Darktable	Free
Corel Draw	Studio	Inkscape	Free
Corel Painter	Studio	Krita	Free
Corel VideoStudio Pro	Studio	Kdenlive	Free
Corel AfterShot Pro	Laptop	RawTherapee	Free?
Paint.NET	Both	Pinta or GIMP	Free
XnView MP	Both	XnView MP	Free (user supported)

The encouraging news is that ON1, Corel, and XnView all offer Linux versions of their software, which opens up some options. The outstanding question is how to transfer licences from the dead office machine without having to buy everything again, particularly if switching to Linux versions. That's a puzzle still to be worked through.

Studio

The way I work has always been a bit like following a thread wherever it leads. An idea turns up when it feels like it, on whichever computer is in reach, so sketches, notes, half-finished drafts, and collected images end up scattered naturally across all three machines (office, laptop, and studio). The office computer was nominally where it all came together, but that's never really been the point. The point is being free to pick up and run with something the moment it sparks, without being tied to one desk, one device, or worse, someone else's server.

That last bit matters quite a lot, actually. The whole appeal of building and managing things locally is that the work stays mine, on my machine, without a monthly subscription, quietly making itself essential to getting anything done. There's something genuinely satisfying about owning your tools outright.

Which brings up the trickiest part of the whole picture. My website has been built using Incomedia's Website X5, which fits that local, hands-on approach perfectly. I can build and preview everything on my machine, tweak the code directly where needed, then upload it live via an old-fashioned FTP (FileZilla) when it's ready. Simple, direct, and nobody else involved. The snag is that Website X5 is Windows-only, with no Linux equivalent on the horizon.

Program	Destination	Linux Alternative
Website X5	Studio	No direct equivalent
FileZilla	Both	FileZilla (Linux version available)

Most things have been recovered and pieced back together, but a few Website X5 gaps makes this a natural moment to stop and ask whether it's time to find a different approach that keeps that same local, independent spirit intact.

Progressing Along Nicely

Office

My Linux Mint desktop replacement is settling in beautifully in the office, and honestly it's way quicker than the Windows 10 machine it replaced. I'm taking it step by step, loading and testing things as I need them rather than throwing everything at it at once.

The old Windows 10 Desktop PC had been with me since my consulting days, so it was pushing close to 10 years old. Over that time it had accumulated just about every piece of software I'd ever owned, and it had gotten painfully slow switching between programs. On top of that, I was dealing with complications from a corneal graft at the time, which made screen glare a real problem. I could only manage about 20 minutes of detailed computer work before it became unbearable. Safe to say I don't miss that setup at all.

For the hardware I went with my old Toshiba laptop, affectionately known as ICE because it's white. It's probably around 15 years old and had a rough patch with what looked like an internal disc corruption. Fingers crossed that's sorted now because it's cruising along nicely. It's also the only laptop I have with an Ethernet port, which means I can connect directly to the NBN router rather than relying on wifi. It's not exactly exciting hardware but it's a comfortable old friend and a reliable workhorse.

The main task now is figuring out what works well in Linux and what I might need to find alternatives for. I started with Firefox and webmail, but quickly switched to Thunderbird Mail for email and found it much more to my liking. I was also keen to reduce my dependence on Google where possible, but still wanted to keep using Gmail, Calendar and Drive. The answer turned out to be Ungoogled Chromium, a stripped back browser that follows the same basics as Chrome but without all the Google tracking. It works really nicely with Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs and Drive, so that box is ticked.

The last piece of the puzzle, for now, was finding a replacement for Microsoft Office. Fortunately LibreOffice was already installed and it's been great. It looks and feels very similar to Word and Excel, and it plays nicely with Google Docs and Sheets too. I haven't stress tested the compatibility yet but for my everyday needs it's doing the job perfectly.

A long way further along than I expected, and so far so good. Best of all, it's all completely free!

Pleasant Surprise at the 9by5 Exhibition

Yesterday I headed along to the City of Greater Dandenong Council's 9by5 exhibition opening at the Drum Theatre and was genuinely impressed. The foyer was packed with both a large crowd, and also with 225 works on show spanning a huge range of styles and media, from a few beginners right through to very experienced artists. Each artist could enter up to two pieces, and having everything the same size (9" by 5") made for a really cohesive exhibition. The organisers did a wonderful job fitting it all in.

My work ended up down the back (as usual), but I was pleased to find a red sticker already on one of my watercolours!

It was great chatting with some of the other artists. Everyone was enthusiastic and grateful for the opportunity to show their work. A point that kept coming up in conversation was how wonderful it is for people to be able to see and buy affordable original art, and I couldn't agree more.

The exhibition runs until 1st. May If you're on the south-east side of Melbourne, it's well worth calling in. and if you can't make it in person, the most works are also available to buy online.

Experimenting with Plein Air Easels and Sketchboards

I'm not entirely sure what to call these things: plein air easels, sketchboards, drawing boards? 

Whatever the right term is, I'm on the hunt for a minimal, easy-to-deploy setup for sketching and painting outdoors. The important restriction is that everything has to fit in my red art bag alongside all my other tools. So I've got three prototypes to test on my next trip.

Option one is a simple drawing board I cut down to fit the bag. I've added a quarter-inch T-nut so it can mount on a tripod, which gives it a bit more stability to the bag. It's just a flat sheet of plywood, 33 by 24.5 cm (about 13" x 9¾"). Nothing fancy, but solid.

Option two I'm calling a sketchbook holder. It's a prototype cut from matte board, 34 by 16.5 cm (roughly 13½" x 6½"). The clever bit is a slot cut into it where your sketchbook spine slots in. The back cover sits behind the board while the pages open out in front, held firmly in place with a couple of bulldog clips. The exposed board at the top gives you space for your sketching and painting media. There are plenty of DIY versions of this out there and I've been particularly inspired by Sarah Burn's design experiments. Commercial versions like those in the Etcher series are also worth a look. For my prototype, I'm using Velcro, though a lot of people prefer magnets.

Option three is a watercolour sketchboard, a bit bigger so it can handle larger sheets like an Arches block or similar pads. It's square at 29 cm (11"), mostly because I had a square piece of matte board handy. It loosely follows Doug's Sketching School design. The extra space means there are two configuration options: one end suits a bigger layout with a full size palette and room for a water container, while the other works better for larger pads but has less room for a palette and no space for water.

All three are light and fit neatly in the bag, so I'll take them all out and put each through its paces. With some creative use of clips, they can all handle pretty much the same tasks. Tripod mounting and a water bowl are the exception for now, but maybe I'll sort that out later.

Hopefully just a Hiccup

 After a bit more testing and reloading Linux from my USB key, I'm starting to think the real culprit was corruption on the laptop's hard drive all along. So I took the plunge, reformatted the whole disc to clear out any lingering issues, and did a fresh reinstall of Mint Cinnamon.

So far, so good!