As an artist, I favor pastels over other mediums, but I have to concede that pastels are poorly suited for plein aire work. You have to have a good selection of colors on hand, so care has to be taken in putting together a palette. You cannot blend colors very well, so your palette has to be larger than some other mediums.
If you consider a lengthy trip with limited space, they might simply be too cumbersome. I have a family trip coming up and I want to be able to draw, sketch, and create in color - and I had to concede that I was going to have to use something other than pastels. If it was a day trip, I would and could manage it - but this will be a few weeks and I just don't want to worry about the space used and expense of fragile pastels.
I do have a history with watercolor, but I did not want to have to worry about transparency, errors that are uncorrectable, working at the speed that paper dried, and several other things that help shift me over to pastels. So I decided that I would get opaque watercolors - gouache - and use a limited palette and keep things small and portable.
And thus Dick Blick got another month and a half of my "fun money" and I got a new medium to play with. I got an 18-well travel palette a total of 15 tubes of artist-grade gouache by M. Graham and a handful from Schmincke Horadam. Dick Blick was having a sale, so I got pretty good mileage for my investment.
The plan currently is to get a well filled in the palette with each color of paint and to allow it to dry. I will get a hard box or case for the tubes and bring it along, but hopefully will not really need it. Having worked with watercolor, I have all the brushes, water containers, and other gizmo's that I will need.
Hopefully I will end up with more than pencil sketches from my trip. I will get the gouache on Monday and will post my experiments.
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