Back to Penang!

Note: I wrote this blog post before I went to Penang last week, but didn't have time to post it till now (after I came back), hence the present and future tenses. Correcting the tenses would take too much effort and lose the effect, so I left them as they were.

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Last year I visited Penang for the Sketching George Town event organized by the Urban Sketchers Penang for the George Town Festival. I told myself then that I had to visit Penang again and go to the places I missed during that trip. Well, the time has come! I'm heading to Penang this weekend!

I packed a lot of gear last year and didn't use some of my materials at all (like my colour pencils). I also packed several sketch pads, since we needed to sketch on loose leafs that could be put on display for the event's exhibition. This year I'll be bringing less materials and will be using primarily my moleskine travel journal. This is what I'm packing this time for my day pack (I took out the markers at the last minute and left them at home).

You may have noticed I have 2 watercolour sets. The 2 white palettes are filled with ShinHan Professional Watercolours squeezed from tubes. They're really nice and intense, and I'm bringing them because I need to finish a couple more pieces with them. The other set is my smaller travel set. It's a Schmincke set with 12 colours. I added a few more Holbein colours squeezed from tubes, and one Rembrandt Cerulean Blue which I bought to try. Quite a few of the colours are opaque. Not my favourite, but I can't waste them. They didn't come cheap. (They can be useful though).

As you can see, I have a nice SLR. After much deliberation, I decided to take it along. But if you look closely, it's not a DSLR. It's a Canon EOS 300. It was my present from more than 10 years ago, and is the last generation of entry-level SLRs produced by Canon before they went digital with the 300D. I took this baby to Penang when I visited in 2001. Now I'm taking it back together with my trusty G12. I'm hoping it'll be fun. I miss printing photos from film and displaying them in albums. Hard copy albums are such communal and fun things. Digital albums might reach a wider audience, but it's not really that social - everybody just sees it on their own from their own PC or device. There's no real interaction with others viewing the pictures in the same place at the same time.

As for clothes, I like my clothes fresh, so I'm packing 5 sets of clothing for the 5 days I'll be there, 1 set of indoor wear, 1 set of sleep wear, and the set I'll be wearing there. I don't really pack light, but I'm not planning on washing my clothes there. It shouldn't exceed the carry-on luggage allowance though (actually it did, and I ended up purchasing extra baggage weight).

I'll post my sketches from the trip soon after I've scanned them.