The Drone in the Box
I have a Potensic Atom SE drone. Under 249 grams. 31 minutes flight time. Folds down small enough to fit in a cycling pack.
CCS · Plein air by bike
The Cornish Cycling Sketcher.
Why I stopped driving to the view, and started earning it. Ride to the spot, paint the spot, ride home — the most honest way I've found to make work outdoors.
Ride to the spot. Paint the spot. Ride home.
Most people who paint Cornwall arrive by car. They park as close as the National Trust will let them, walk the last few hundred yards, set up, and paint the postcard everyone else painted from the same spot. I cycle to mine.
It started as a practical thing and turned into the whole point. I had a bike, two acres of Cornwall on the doorstep, and a body that has spent its whole life happier when it's moving. So one morning I strapped a small painting kit to the bike and rode out — and by the time I got there I'd already half-composed the picture in my head. Warm, awake, and I'd seen the place properly on the way in, instead of arriving at it cold from a car park.
That's the Cornish Cycling Sketcher. It's not a gimmick and it's not a fitness regime dressed up as art. The body warms the eye up — movement before making — and the bike imposes the discipline I've come to love: you can only carry what fits. One small box, a pad, a brush or two, water, done. The constraint forces the thing every painter struggles with, which is simplification.
Why the bike changes the painting
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You earn the view
Arrive having travelled through the landscape — you've felt the gradient and watched the light change for the last forty minutes.
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The body warms the eye
Movement before making. By the time you're off the saddle, the dithering is gone and you already know what you want to paint.
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The friction is the feature
A bike says no. One small box forces simplification — fewer colours, fewer marks, decide before you go.
From the saddle — the CCS journal
Notes from the road: the kit that fits on a bike, where to set up, and the places I ride to paint.
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A Plein-Air Kit That Fits on a Bike
Everything you need to paint outdoors, and nothing you don't, packed small enough to ride with.
Get out there
Want to paint on location?
Plein-air and on-location sketching come up through the year at the Cornish Craft Barn — and out in the Cornish landscape. Email me for the next date.