In order to find more time and make more sketchbook style art, you need to have materials you can take anywhere and you need to find time anywhere you can. This means that you need to have a variety of art materials to suit your painting situation. You can have a large palette for studio painting, a medium portable palette for travel sketching and you'll need a couple of sizes of paint palettes for differing social paint situations. You simply cannot take a large messy palette filled with paint into the lobby of a 4 star hotel and hope to paint peacefully while seated on the damask sofa in the lounge area.

You'll need to have a pocket, purse or briefcase size set of painting materials for painting in small, nice situations where you don't want to stand out and call attention to the fact you are painting. You'll also want to not splash paint on the white linen tablecloth, or on your dates tuxedo or your evening dress or afternoon outfit.

My solution is to come up with an Anywhere Art Painting Kit that has a very small, light weight palette and a small light weight sketchbook of watercolor paper. With these materials and a brush, preferably a water brush so you don't have to deep your paint brush in your water goblet when you need to dampen it, you can draw and paint "journal style" (this means in a small journal or sketchbook) anywhere from your mother-in-laws kitchen to the Whitehouse.

The materials in the photos above can be taken to places where you want to look nice, and not paint obtrusively I think my purse looks much nicer then my Kermit the Frog messenger bag that I carry my supplies for painting in informal situations. I am bringing the palette on the right next time, because the one on the left has paint wells that are too small to tell what color you are using. I enlarged the color wells in the one on the right so the color shows better. Its frustrating to dip into what you think is brilliant blue for your sky and paint your sky with viridian green.