While I have a standard bag in my car, stuffed with a drawing book, pencils, watercolour and small recycled food storage jars for collecting earth colours, resins and dye materials; I tend to change the kit I take on international journeys depending on the destination.

For this trip I will be packing my DeepDeepLight watercolours, choosing mostly sea colours tempered by sand, leaf and stone shades. I will probably avoid the brighter reds and purples as I tend not to paint town scenes. I'm much more likely to make endless drawings of where the land meets the sea.

I will take an ink stick and a small terra cotta bowl in which to grind it, and a couple of smallish brushes for the watercolours, but will make brushes in situ from found sticks, feathers, rags and grasses with which to apply the ink.

On this trip I'm also seriously thinking of taking some nice inks (in bottles) that I acquired during my artist residency at the lighthouse in Newcastle, NSW (Australia) last year. Those three colours (Payne's Grey, Sepia and White) should lay down some lovely bones for creating landscape drawings.

Graphite pencils, some conte and charcoal and a white wax crayon will probably join the collection.

I have to admit that my drawings are rarely seen by other people, usually I might show them to one or two close friends when I am sharing about a recent journey, as they are very personal and I do not consider them worth exhibiting. But the process of making them makes my heart sing, and makes a journey more meaningful.

Our notebooks and journals are not for posterity, they are for us. They offer engagement in our surroundings through the gesture of drawing, writing and mark-making, and take us back to those delicious moments, long after the journey is done and we have returned to the armchair, reminding us of the soft feel of ochre dust underfoot, or the smell of seaweed warming in the sun, the call of a bird soaring far above us in the sky, the excitement of watching ink feather through a puddle of water on the page...