I've been doing more plein air work lately. Mostly drawing, watercolor, gouache… those sorts of things.

I was looking for a way to throw all of my supplies into a compact kit that I could throw into a bag and take anywhere with me, so I measured out all of my supplies and build a kit around them.

After testing a number of iterations for different drawing/painting outings, I think it's at a point where it might be a nice thing for other people to use.

There are two versions of this in the print profile. One version uses magnets, the other does not. The magnets do a few things, and I think they're really helpful:

1. Probably the most important: They allow you to use a magnet on the inside of the lid, to hold a piece of paper in place while you work. I use this every single time.
2. There's an optional “foot” that's on its own plate. This foot will attach (with the magnet) to the top of the lid, making the lid sit flat on the surface of the table, and gives it a little support if you're pressing down with a tool of some sort.
3. There are magnets that go into the paint trays and in the bottom of the case. In early versions, I had the paint tray built in to the case, and so a removable paint tray became an obvious necessity, but I quickly realized that having it be more securely attached would be beneficial, so magnets!
4. I have plans for creating an optional “leg” that attaches to the lid where the foot attaches, but I haven't found a lot of need for that yet, so it's on hold.

I've added pauses into the print profiles for the plates that use magnets, so you should be able to just print them and drop the magnets into the opening when the pause happens.

These are the exact magnets I purchased:

https://amzn.to/3Oxwoc3

<This is 100% an Amazon Affiliate link - Buying your magnets this way won't cost more, but it'll send a commission to me which is a great way to throw me some support. You're under no obligation to use this, or even buy these particular magnets. Any 20x5x2mm magnets should work>

Everything is held together using M3 machine screws of varying lengths. The ones I have in there now are:

Latch:

2 - M3*20

Hinges:

2 - M3*30

If you want something more secure, you could go with longer screws and nuts, but so far I'm finding that this diameter has a positive enough grip that they don't seem to back out on their own.

Here are the watercolor brushes that I've been using. Super handy:

https://amzn.to/3Vfa5M0

Last but not least, if you hate the design on the lid, you can just remove the “landscape.svg” from the Assembly on the relevant plates. This is just something I designed to give the top a little spice.