Prep for my NSW/VIC Road trip begins!

April 13, 2021 | 16 Comments
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Well, it’s time to make it official! I’m heading off on a big road trip next week! The plan is to spend close to 6 weeks exploring inland NSW and northern Victoria. 


Most of you have seen this map before (see here) but I’ve now added a very rough outline indicating the general regions which I hope to explore. As I’ll be on my own for most of the trip, my focus will be the country towns rather than exploring national parks (doing hikes etc). It goes without saying that I expect to be doing a lot of sketching!

I’ll share more about my route as I go along, but I hope to go relatively slowly so that I have time to sketch in most of the towns I drive through. With the exception of a few big driving days when out west, the goal is to keep my journeys each day to under 2 hours of driving. But still I expect to do about 4000 kms in total!

I’m still finalising the route and accommodation for the last two weeks but the time has come to start getting together all my sketching supplies. This is what I have done so far…


I’ve ordered a pile of sketchbooks – A4 Moleskine Watercolour portrait format. I’m allowing for one per week plus maybe an extra one just to be safe!

Last year I used A4 Landscape Hahnemuehle books for my 11-week Virtual Trip to Europe but I’m excited to go back to Portrait Moleskine (as I used during my 2019 European trip) and really explore some new page layouts. The reason why I like Moleskine so much is explained in this article.


I’ve filled up lots of pans of paint. This article showing ‘8 weeks worth of paint’ was really helpful but in the end, I’ve prepared more paint this time. It’s much easier for me to do this beforehand so that I don’t have to worry about taking a heap of paint tubes and the drying time when I’m on the road. 

If you want to know more about setting up my palette check out this article: Putting together my palette for a big trip


I’m also thinking about throwing in a few larger/different brushes. I might not use any of these but if I don’t take them I know that at one stage I will want to experiment with something other than my dagger. (For example in 2019 when I was on the Isle of Lewis I started using flat brushes – I didn’t make a big deal about it at the time but there are a few clues in this article.)

Ah! it always starts to feel real once I make up a new clean palette to use!

Let me know if you have any questions about my ‘trip prep’ or the trip itself in the comment section below.

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