Zed A. Shaw, Painter

Next up, I took about 12 gigantic tubes of Lukas professional oil paints and only used 1/3 of each tube for the whole three months. That's about 30-40 paintings at 11x14. They were also real oils so that meant taking a solvent of some kind and flying with them. Nightmare.

Next trip, just bringing a bag of 6 colors, two 35ml tubes each, and a giant tube of white Daniel Smith paints and done. I can get away with just 3 colors but that's not as fun. Now, weight when flying is a huge problem. Not just when carrying things around, so...

The new box is only about 3lbs, paints are fairly light too, maybe 2lbs, I think total gear is around 20lbs including all the little cameras and stuff. You know what really ruins your day on weight? Panels. You can't really take canvas on trips so you pack wood panels.

A stack of MDF 11x14 painting panels can push close to 20lbs. You can wrap them in construction plastic so you don't need a box, but it's still a lot of weight and space. Dropping down to an 8x10 size means I can take "feather light" panels, at 1/3rd the weight.

My recording setup worked alright, because I used these tiny DJI cameras and an old gopro, but I brought 2 each so I could use them without charging. Then I got 2 GoPro Max 360s on the trip (great camera!) PLUS I dragged a full Olympus pro camera plus 3 lenses.