About Art Toolkit

At Art Toolkit, we manufacture and curate compact and rugged tools for sketching and painting, from urban to wilderness adventures. Whether through our expedition-proven art supplies and accessories, online and in-person workshops, demos, and events, or sharing resources with our community, we strive to inspire people everywhere to create art every day.

Our Products

We provide our namesake Art Toolkits—rugged, portable, all-in-one sketching kits—and manufacture compact, configurable watercolor palettes. Our retail and online shops also feature a curated selection of our favorite lightweight supplies for sketching with ink and watercolor, including paints, brushes, and sketchbooks.

Our Team

Our work is made possible by our small team of intrepid and enthusiastic artists, educators, and designers. We encourage a collaborative and open work environment where everyone’s voice matters. We’re grateful for our creative community near and far!

Our Shop

Our new retail shop, located at 1003 Water Street in downtown Port Townsend, will be opening this January. More info and directions can be found on our Contact page.

Our Founders

In 2004, upon graduating from Carleton College, artist Maria Coryell-Martin embarked on a year-long Watson Fellowship to explore remote landscapes through art. This experience inspired a resolve to continue working as an expeditionary artist with a focus on polar and glacier science, and to inspire environmental awareness in audiences of all ages.

Maria’s travels have brought her face-to-face with polar bears, leopard seals, emperor penguins, and narwhals. She was inspired to create a more compact sketching and painting kit after a memorable experience juggling clumsy sketching tools while crawling in the sand for hours to monitor walruses on a small island in eastern Greenland. Many prototypes, field-tests, and customer reviews later, the Art Toolkit and Pocket Palette have evolved into a versatile sketching and painting system for artists of all ages and skill-levels.

In 2019, Maria’s sweetheart and collaborator Darin Reid joined the business full-time, and we moved Art Toolkit out of a back room of our house and into a beautiful studio space in Port Townsend, a seaside arts and boat-building community in Washington State.

Looking ahead, we are excited to continue to innovate and refine our stable of field painting and sketching supplies.

You can read more about Maria’s adventures on the Expeditionary Art blog.