Traveling With Paint: Climate Matters

Art supplies take up a surprisingly large portion of my luggage. The one sensible reason for this is that I usually end up painting in a variety of locations, and I have found that different paints handle differently in different climates. And, as shown above, some do not travel well at all.

I have not done scientific studies, but the main factor seems to be relative humidity, a metric of how saturated the air is with water vapour. When the relative humidity is high, paints get and stay wetter, and this can happen both in tropical regions, and in damp, cold swamps. (Climate control helps, of course, but I do not always have access to it.) Consistency seems important as well: one damp day, or one damp bus-ride, is not going to turn a dry half-pan to paste, but a damp spell might. When the humidity varies a great deal, such as when the days are drier than the nights, things seem to average out.

Anyway, here is the core of what I took with me on a recent trip through Asia:

Anyway, there is a palette of Holbein, a palette of Qor, and a palette I call “Winsor Newton and friends” which is mostly WN, with an improved selection of earths from Daniel Smith, Schmincke, and Maimeri.

• The WN palette is useful when I am in a hot and humid place, where the famously hard-drying WN paints rewet like a dream. (I tell myself that this is because of Britain’s colonial past. I know for a fact that a lot of those early Britons were into travel sketching: their works hang in many Asian art museums. But maybe it’s just because England is a damp place?) The non-WN earths fit in well there, because most earths tend to be drier.
• The Holbein palette is useful in drier climates, where WN (and some Daniel Smith!) paints turn into brush-destroying rocks. Also, Holbein does not seem to actually get liquid in humid places, just unpleasantly sticky. Note, however, that (like most Asian brands) Holbein is not very dispersive. Paints tend to stay where you put them, So…
• The Qor palette is there in case I want to use more dispersive paints, and because I know from experience which Qor colours to keep out of the wet tropics (PY184 and PB36).

Several brands I admire, like Roman Szmal and M Graham, tend to get left behind entirely because their honey content interacts poorly with humidity. (Based on recent experience, I would add Michael Harding to this category.) Other brands are allowed to join me on a per-paint basis: I have experienced paint disasters featuring Daniel Smith, Maimeri, and Old Holland (see top picture).

(I also do not carry tubes, apart from white gouache and whatever I cannot resist buying on my travels. I find that airport security can be suspicious of large collections of tubes, and I have had to “wait for a supervisor” several times.)

Anyway, I suppose I could keep it simple. I could travel with Winsor Newton (et al) only, and just do what everyone living in a dry climate does already: soak all my paints to reactivate them before I start painting. But this is annoying, especially when a quick spritz with a spray bottle is not enough. (All my WN pans are poured from tubes, and apparently the WN tubes use an even harder-to-rewet formula. They still work nicely in very damp weather, though.) Painting with a paint that activates smoothly is a joy, one I do not want to deny myself, not while I have all that paint to use up.

Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon? I feel like it does not really get much discussion online. And it never gets mentioned in paint reviews, which feels like a major oversight as it could make a huge difference to how much a specific painter might like a paint brand. Whenever I watch a review or swatching video, and the reviewer mentions something general about how the paint rewets, I really, really want to ask them about the current weather…