How to be a Wandering Vagabond Artist 

Decide to Move! 

One cannot easily be a wandering vagabond when tied to a house. Put your house on the market and watch it sell quicker than you thought! Our new home won’t be ready for several months so anything we wanted to keep would have to be stored. See my previous post about creativity during chaos:

YIKES! I’m moving!!! Seriously?

Purge and Pack 

This is a good time to decide what to keep, what to sell, what to donate, what to give away, and what to throw out. The buyer of our house opted to purchase several pieces of furniture. That made packing a lot easier. I looked at various options to move from having it Bekins, to U-Haul, to PODs. In the end we opted for PODs as you load and lock the container and they move it and store it.  

A 16’ POD container is said to be able to serve a 1300 square feet home – not true! We had a 16’ container AND an 8’ container and still did not have enough room to store all our belongings.  

Sadly, my hand-painted Adirondack chairs did not make it into either POD. Our realtor is storing them for us. I really don’t want to sell them, but there’s little logic in driving another 2400 miles to come back next year to pick them up. Plus, we’d need to haul a trailer.  

Prioritize What to Take on the Road and What to Pack for Later 

I had been working on a few oil portraits and wanted to finish them before the move. In the end, I had to wrap them, planning to work on them again once the house is finished.

I opted to only pack water-based media as well as a selection of papers, pencils, and substrates. I had originally planned to bring pastels, but they ended up being packed.  

This is what I brought: 

Can you see the art supplies in the car? We had to take pictures to document how to load it again. 

Finally – Make Art!

To be a wandering vagabond artist, one simply MUST make Art! I admit I wasn’t able to do much but I did manage to squeeze in a few lessons from the Kaleidoscope Taster Sessions – you can join at

https://www.willowing.org/product/kaleidoscope-2022-t/?id=2&mc_cid=4ccee7aa4a&mc_eid=41d7a25a61: How to be a Wandering Vagabond Artist 

I made the colorful cat from a lesson by Idilko Karsay at the Make Create Express Retreat.

https://www.artismagic.online/make-create-express

I also found a face in an old book I use to scrape leftover paint so as not to waste it.

Next Stop – Montana!