Moderator Popular Post TaleSpinner Posted November 30, 2018 Moderator Popular Post Share Posted November 30, 2018 I don't exactly remember when, but sometime in the past year, Stephanie Law started a Kickstarter to produce sets of mini palettes for on-the-go watercolor painting. The set included one mini-well palette and one mixing-well palette. These stack in a tin with a cloth separators that can be moistened to keep the paint fresh. I thought that these might be just what I want as a tool to help me with the speed painting and glazing techniques I have been working on. Essentially, I get too focused on mixing the paint and not enough on painting. With these, I can lay down a drop of color and use the other palette to mix the paint on the fly. So I bought into the Kickstarter, and they came yesterday. I was very excited and had to paint something. I happened to have one of the Stephanie Law foxes from Dark Sword Miniatures, sculpted by Patrick Keith, and thought that would be very apropos for testing her palettes. After getting my sculpts to a pause point, I preped and primed the fox and went for it. So this is a review of this product. I hope you will find it useful. I broke my session into logical steps and time stamps, since I am trying to speed paint here. 6:40 pm As delivered to me and the primed mini: On opening the cover, you find two circles of paper with Ms. Law's palette bee on them. The other side of each is a blank color wheel that you can paint yourself. Further digging into the can, you find a parfait of three cloths separating two palettes, and a nice piece of Stephanie Law's artwork at the bottom (I love her art). So I decided to use a typical red fox color scheme, but with much more saturated orange than a real fox has. I put my base coat colors in the color wheel palette: I used the second palette to mix color and quickly base coated and shaded the mini. 7:00 pm 7:15 pm I continued with the highlighting. I ended up having to clean out the second palette at that point as I had filled it. I noted that it is hard to get dried acrylic paint out of the crevices of the wells. Not too surprising since it was tested with water colors. A bit of scrubbing with a brush and it was ready to go. 7:30 pm I continued the highlighting, and started detailing various points. 7:45 pm More highlighting and base work. 8:00 pm Finished highlights and touch-ups. Here is the final state of the palettes: Final Comments I really, really like these. They really push me toward being better and faster. I can adjust on the fly and really use a lot of the techniques that I learned from watching Derek S. much better. I honestly cannot believe how fast I got that fox done. I think I would have wasted a lot of time with my old wells mixing paint needlessly. I also wasted very little paint. I think in the future I might mix and paint from a piece of parchment paper instead of the larger well palette; I'll use that then for the high-use paints like base coats and liners, which I had to refill several times in the little well palette. I also really like the cloth separators that were provided. I was able to wet one and lay it over the mini-well palette while painting, keeping the paint fresh. I can see this being a way to keep paints fresh in the can too, but I fear that the can may eventually rust. I think I need more time with these to really get the feel on how I want to use them best, but I can definitely see them becoming a main-stay of my painting. Given all that, I highly recommend these palettes, and would like to thank Ms. Law for creating these for us. 26 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gadgetman! Posted November 30, 2018 Share Posted November 30, 2018 The mini colour wheel palette looks to have just slightly larger wells than my own palettes(I make them out of IKEA cutting boards... ) and for cleaning I soak them in soapy water for days on end(until I run out of clean ones) in a plastic tub that I leave on the heated bathroom floor. Then I take them up, rinse them off and give them a good scrubbing with a nail brush. If there's anything left it can be picked off with a fingernail. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slatejunco Posted November 30, 2018 Share Posted November 30, 2018 Fantastic review -- I'd love to have one of these. Thanks for your impressions. Also, that fox mini is beautiful. If I could paint as well as you, that'd be a perfect Christmas stocking stuffer for my gal. 1 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Artists Wren Posted November 30, 2018 Artists Share Posted November 30, 2018 General tips on cleaning porcelain palettes - soaking helps a lot. Water really loosens up the paint after a few hours. (That doesn't help when you're trying to swap out mid project, just for general info.) Spritzing with Simple Green can speed things up. Also a scrubber type sponge/cloth helps a lot. I have one on my kitchen windowsill dedicated for cleaning palettes to keep it separate from the one for food dishes. This palette really is itty-bitty. The diameter of a coffee mug or so. I bought it for watercolour, it didn't occur to me that it might work with mini painting! The one with the larger wells would be good for mixing glazes or washes in. For people who want something like this but with slightly bigger wells, science lab spot plates are one answer. The ceramic palettes described as flower style have wells much too large to be very useful for what we do, as do most other ceramic palettes. The best larger palette I've seen is a rectangular one I've only seen in stock at Cheap Joe's online. It's about 7.5 x 6 inches, with 27 small wells (approx the size of the tip of a small finger) and a sloped flat area for custom mixes. I use it for mixing up very precise layer blends for large areas. If you place a very damp sponge/paper towelling over it, you can keep paint workable for upwards of a week, like TaleSpinner describes. (You need to check the sponge daily to twice daily, and occasionally mix a drop of water into each well of paint.) I use a wet palette for a lot of painting now, but if I want to keep paint workable over multiple sessions, I prefer the ceramic 'reverse' wet palette approach. 10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gadgetman! Posted November 30, 2018 Share Posted November 30, 2018 Mine is circular plates cut out of cutting boards, then wells have been carved out using a 12 mm ball shaped router bit in a drill-press. (OK, I used my CNC to cut the plate and make pilot holes for the wells) But a proper ceramic palette with siilar-sized holes would be nice. And this looks like the closest yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator TaleSpinner Posted November 30, 2018 Author Moderator Share Posted November 30, 2018 2 hours ago, Wren said: This palette really is itty-bitty. The diameter of a coffee mug or so. I bought it for watercolour, it didn't occur to me that it might work with mini painting! The one with the larger wells would be good for mixing glazes or washes in. The part that surprised me the most is how well the one with the tiny wells worked for the acrylic paint. I was a bit worried about it before buying into the KS, but thought I'd give it a go anyway. The wells are very deep, as deep as they are wide, so when the paint skinned over in the dry MN air, the paint under stayed good. I was able to go back to a color and pierce the skin and keep going. The paint under the skin hadn't thickened up too much. Since I was thinning on the other palette as I went, it didn't affect anything, in fact it really sped me up as I was able to lay out all the paint I needed in that palette and not worry about it. In a larger well, I'd have had to mix up 4 to 5 times as much paint and add water or it would dry out on me. Here the size and shape of those well is what made it work so well. 8 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flit Posted December 1, 2018 Share Posted December 1, 2018 I have been using spot plates as mini pallets for a while now and really like them. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
haldir Posted December 1, 2018 Share Posted December 1, 2018 10 hours ago, Flit said: I have been using spot plates as mini pallets for a while now and really like them. As do I. I do use the plastic with like 8 to 10 wells as well. Thou, when it's time to clean I generally just start using the surface around the wells or the center part. I'd like to get my wet pallets going again, but as I've used a dry one for long it's kinda hard getting use to it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
junex Posted December 2, 2018 Share Posted December 2, 2018 On 11/30/2018 at 11:04 PM, TaleSpinner said: I think in the future I might mix and paint from a piece of parchment paper instead of the larger well palette... You may want to give polypropylene sheet a try, like a plastic folder or even a ziploc bag. Recently I've been using a piece of transparency film. I can usually wipe the dried paint off with a wet blister foam. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morihalda Posted December 5, 2018 Share Posted December 5, 2018 That is a gorgeous and fast paint job! I love the brightness of the fur. I've heard all sorts of different ways to make your own palettes, but I've never used anything more than a spare tile lying around. I have no idea how to make that not sound rude in text. I'm sorry! It's relevant! Anyways. I loved how tiny and cute these were and I've always wanted a real cool kid's paint palette, so I bought one as well. I also grabbed the perfect bee pin. Rainbow bees!!! The package has been at my in-law's house and I've been so impatient to go get it. I really like that you can prolong the paint life with a damp cover and of course having the well. It will be nice to have spots for glazes without it spreading into my other paints. 2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cyradis Posted December 5, 2018 Share Posted December 5, 2018 2 hours ago, Morihalda said: That is a gorgeous and fast paint job! I love the brightness of the fur. I've heard all sorts of different ways to make your own palettes, but I've never used anything more than a spare tile lying around. I have no idea how to make that not sound rude in text. I'm sorry! It's relevant! I didn't see rudeness. I saw nerdery. 3 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morihalda Posted December 5, 2018 Share Posted December 5, 2018 1 hour ago, Cyradis said: I didn't see rudeness. I saw nerdery. Okay, cool. There were already a lot of low budget options in the thread and I didn't want it to read like, "Well I got the lowest low budget so there" LOL. 3 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator TaleSpinner Posted December 5, 2018 Author Moderator Share Posted December 5, 2018 7 hours ago, Morihalda said: Okay, cool. There were already a lot of low budget options in the thread and I didn't want it to read like, "Well I got the lowest low budget so there" LOL. Well, back in my day we didn't have none of these fancy-schmancy pal-ma-widgets. We just put the paint on the back of our hands, and liked it! We had to glaze up hill too, both shadow AND highlights! 1 1 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kristof65 Posted December 5, 2018 Share Posted December 5, 2018 7 hours ago, Morihalda said: Okay, cool. There were already a lot of low budget options in the thread and I didn't want it to read like, "Well I got the lowest low budget so there" LOL. LOL. I saw nerdery, too. I have 3 really nice ceramic well palettes, but since I am bad about cleaning them up when I'm done with a painting session, I tend to use tiles as well. For awhile there, I was picking up a tile or two ever time I was at Home Depot for something, as I not only used them for ceramics, but my wife and I used them for polymer clay, too. When we moved early last year, I discovered how many tiles I had managed to collect over the years. I kept four for myself, and gave another 2-3 dozen to a friend of mine who was starting to paint minis rather than move them. We've only been here for 20 months now, and I've managed to build the tile collection back up to about a dozen. I may have a problem... 2 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zink Posted December 5, 2018 Share Posted December 5, 2018 Ya'll are too high class for me. My most used palette is an old margarine lid. I've got a couple cheap palettes and a home made wet palette but consistently return to my lid. Little well palettes sound interesting though. 2 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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