Geoff Hunt is a past president of the Royal Society of Marine Artists and the current chairman of the Wapping Group of Artists
I’d been delighted with the handmade brass paintbox I ordered from Craig Young in 2015 (see my article in The Artist, June 2015 issue), and by now I had stacked up over three years’ experience painting with this box outdoors. It was great to use once on site, but there was no denying that it was fairly big and heavy – heavy to carry, taking quite a lot of space in the bag, and uncomfortable to hold in one hand for any length of time. Also, I’d been developing my ideas about what I wanted from a plein-air watercolour box, so the time had come to call Craig again. This time it was going to be a smaller box. I commissioned a customised version of Craig’s so-called ‘Paintbox’. In my version, there are no flat mixing flaps, and the middle group of individual paint wells is omitted so as to free up a more flexible mixing space (above). Armed with this, I decided to try it out for the first time with a trip to Cambridge. I had done a bit of sketchbook work there earlier and been mightily impressed. It looked well worth another trip.