How To Use A Pochade Box, And Where To Get One
What is a pochade box?
Unless you paint, you’ve probably never heard of one, but the term ‘Pochade’ is derived from the nineteenth century French verb Pocher, meaning to sketch. A pochade box is essentially a small box, usually made of wood, that has 3 unique properties.
1. It has a hinged lid that acts as an easel and holds your canvas or board or other support, for painting on.
2. It has a palette contained within it for laying out your paints.
3. It has storage space within for all of your brushes, paints, thinners, e.t.c.
How A Pochade Box Works
There are many sizes of pochade box available, from tiny pocket-size ones, to ones much larger than my own, but they all work in basically the same way. The one below, I have had for many years, and it can take up to three 14 x 10 inch painting boards, which slide into slots in the lid section. It’s an excellent pochade box, and was hand made by Rowley Abbey of Abbey Easels.
Update 2019: Sadly due to ill health Rowley Abbey has stop making these beautiful pochade boxes. See the bottom of this post for alternative places to buy a pochade box.
See me using my pochade box painting outdoors here.
The palette slides in and out, in a slot build into the main body, and is designed with enough gap that when the lid is closed the paint on the palette doesn’t touch the paintings slotted into the lid.
The hinged top opens to reveal three slots that your painting boards slide into. As you paint on each board, you can rotate the order, moving the back board to the front, front board to the middle e.t.c, ..and there is enough separation between each of the boards to ensure that they don’t touch and damage your wet paintings.
If you want to attach your pochade box to an easel or tripod, you’ll need one of these brackets. I bought this camera tripod adaptor bracket from Ken Bromley art supplies, and fitted it to the underside of my pochade box myself. It’s just 4 screws and a bit of glue, dead easy ( see this bracket in use in the video toward the bottom of this post ).
Here’s the bracket on it’s own, with the tripod fast-fix taken out. In the image above this one you can see the black plastic piece, which is actually a part of my camera tripod, and it’s the piece that has the 1/4 inch threaded screw attached. 1/4 inch is the standard size for tripod adaptors worldwide ( as far as I am aware ) so the bracket should fit any tripod.
Here’s the whole set up in use, taken when I was doing a little painting in my garden last summer. If I have a nice surface like this table to paint on I tend not to put my brushes e.t.c away in my pochade box, as you can see. I didn’t need to use my camera tripod here either of course.
I paint all over the UK using my pochade box, sometimes from the comfort of my car, painting with my pochade box on my lap, as in the above image. Sometimes using my comfy painting chair as you can see here.
In the video below I’m painting high up in Pembrokeshire’s Preseli mountains, here in west Wales, and I attached my pochade box to my tripod using the bracket system described above. As you’ll see in the video, it was a bit windy up there, in fact, it was blowing a complete gale, so my whole setup was blowing about a bit ..but it was still great fun.
Watch more painting videos here.
The Advantages
For smaller outdoor work or painting plein air a pochade box is much more flexible than using a outdoor painting easel. The number one advantage is that there is very little equipment involved: a few brushes, 4 or 5 tubes of paint, some thinners, a couple of MDF boards… and you’re good to go. With this small set-up, if you’re going on holiday or a road-trip, you can just throw your fully stocked pochade box in the back of your car, and should the mood take you quickly grab it and make a painting.
Where To Get Your Own Pochade Box
There are lots of places online to get a good pochade box, but below are a few links to UK suppliers I know and trust to get you started:
Ken Bromley Art Supplies Pochade Boxes
If you’re in the U.S try these:
Judson’s Art Outfitter Pochade Boxes
Happy outdoor painting.
Chris