Palette Cleaning And Setup

Actually, my sister messed up and ended up buying me two of those Winsor & Newton Professional 24 half pan palettes.  So I’ve thrown away my plastic 16 pan palette and cut down my 16 pan squad to 12 and moved them to one of the two new tins.  So now I have two palettes.

At the top is my 24 half-pan experimental squad.  23 of those colours came in the half pans and you can see (top row, third from left) where I’ve substituted transparent yellow for the fugitive aureolin.  Next to it I have all the spare half pans from the other tin – they fit very nicely into what used to be a tub of Daniel Smith watercolour ground.

And at the bottom is my first team squad of twelve.  Top row left to right is burnt sienna, burnt umber, raw sienna, titanium white, viridian, Payne’s grey.  Bottom row left to right are the big six primaries quinacridone magenta, rose dore, Indian yellow, transparent yellow, Prussian blue, French ultramarine.  Dropped from the squad are the rarely used opaques: cadmium red, cadmium yellow, sepia and whichever of cerulean blue and cobalt I would finally have settled on.  The opaques, along with light red and that Daler Rowley tube of pthalo blue are still in tubes in that takeaway carton, along with spare tubes for the other 12.

When I look at the 12, it’s pretty clear that the colour struggling hardest to justify its place is the titanium white, as I have some white gel pens that might be better at adding highlights.  But rather than being under pressure from any of the opaques (where I would want all four in a palette and couldn’t choose between them if I had to pick one) It’s more likely to lose its place to a crazy orange or purple from the experimental squad.  But we’ll see.

Also today, I scrubbed the mixing wells in both tins with toothpaste so that paint doesn’t puddle up in them.  Just experimenting before and after tells me that this works brilliantly.  I still prefer to mix in porcelain wells but the tin wells will be useful if I need to pack light or paint standing up.

And I’ve cleaned up my existing squad.  The burnt number may have been showing some mould so I played safe and threw it all out and replaced it.  And for all the full pans, I wiped off any messy paint on the outsides with a damp cloth and they now look much cleaner.