Easel Trouble

I recently made my first video sketching outside. Since then, I've published a few more videos, some of me talking or drawing at home and some of me walking outside. I'm keen to make more outside sketching videos to practice drawing, painting and videography but one problem I need to solve to make it an enjoyable experience is to construct a proper set up for me to draw and shoot with.

Currently, I'm using a sheet of plywood slightly larger than A4 on a cheap Amazon Basic tripod with watercolor paper taped to sheets coroplast as my watercolor easel. Everything, including a GoPro to film the process, gets clamped to the plywood. I also have Nalgene containers for water that I hold in my hand.

I'm pretty happy with the tripod. It's very light to carry around and has the right height. The clamps and coroplast also work great and the clips holding my brushes is very convenient (although ideally I would prefer to have them be held the other way around).

What doesn't work so well is the plywood and the arm holding the camera. The hold setup is just too wobbly. Even though the GoPro has excellent stabilisation and a wide enough field of view, it stabilises against the ground instead of the surface of the easel. Additionally, it has a minimum focus distance of at least 30 centimetres which means my paintings are not in focus since my current gooseneck arm isn't long enough.

Another problem is transportation. Since the sheet of plywood is a little too large to fit into my backpacks, I have to carry it in a separate bag. I would much prefer a kit that fits into one backpack that's always ready to go.

One solution I've been thinking about is to replace the plywood with more robust MDF. Since my paper comes with its own backing in the form of coroplast, I might not need a full sheet to replace the plywood. If I just use a strip of MDF, maybe 5x30cm but thick enough to prevent any wobble, it should also help with camera stability since the base of the arm and the place where the MDF connects to the tripod could be closer together.

This will likely need some additional experimentation but as soon as I find the time, I'll try to build it and report back.