I have found, that a lot of people still has problems with preparing this awesome piece of equipment and because I recently made my new own palette, I took few photos and decided to describe how to make the palette work.
First of all, you will need something flat, with higher edges and (obviously) water resistant. This piece will be main part of your palette. I highly recomend to have something, that can be covered or closed. You will se why.
The wet palette works like this: On "normal" palette, the paint is on dry, flat surface that makes it dry. Wet palette, as the name says, is wet and thus prolongs the drying time of the paints. The pallete has three main parts: Cup, something, that holds water and palette surface, where you put paints. The medium, that holds water, is usually paper towel or sponge, the top cover is almost exclusively baking paper ( I haven´t seen anything diferent so far). The baking paper is resistant enough not to dissolve in water and yet it lets some moist go through it. Therefore you can put paint on it and it stays wet and still you dont get through the baking paper with your brush.
I used some plastic pieces that were originaly top covers of some soup cups - one smaller as palette itself and one larger as cover.
As you can see, I put a little bit of putty in a small hole in smaller cup - it was there beause of the hot steam, coming out of soup. Now I have botom of palette. You can see the inner circle (Dark Angels ahoy!) in the smaller cup - that will be filled with paper towel (I will replace it with sponge later, because I like it better) like this:
Try to fit the water holding material in the palette, it will help in several ways, which I will explain later. Pour some water in - you want the towel wet, but not standing in the water:
As you can see, the towel will gain some volume and fills the inner circle from side to side. Now cover the towel with baking paper. It is most important to cover all the towel - from edge to edge (yeah, I made it hard by choosing circle shape).
Touch the baking paper to stick with the towel - if you have good amount of water, it will stick and you can even find some little water drops on the top of baking paper. If water pours through the paper, you made it wrong and put too much water in.
Here you can see, that my larger cup fits on the smaller one and covers it completely.
Now the important parts and some observations:
Why I required you to fit the towel and the paper from edge to edge? The problem with wet palettes is drying - you dont want them to dry out as long as possible, because when it dries, it is the same as usual palette, which means your paint dries. How does palette dry: by exposing it to the air - the water vaporizes. In wet palette, we keep the water in the towel (sponge) under the baking paper. Baking paper works mainly as palette surface, but also like the cover and protection from evaporating.
If the baking paper doesn´t cover all the towel, the water will evaporate from the towel and the palette will dry out much faster. Well, even through the baking paper the palette will ultimately dry out, but much much slower.
Thats why you want the top cover - something to close the palette as much air proof, as possible. That will further preserve your palette from drying out. Here you can see my two days old Vallejo acrylics on wet palette - yes, the pigment of the colour separated from binder, but after little mixing, everything works just fine:
1. The nice part is, that you only need to change the baking paper on top (when it becomes too painted or damaged) and you have new palette. I recommend changing it when the baking paper is painted too much - the acrylics are basicaly plastic when they are dry, which means they let almost no water through the layer of colour. So, when you put some acrylics on top of dried ones, the water from baking paper doesn´t get through the dry paint - you made normal palette from your wet palette :-)
You can of course change the towel too, but it holds pretty nice for a very long time. Sponge is even better, it lasts forewer.
If the palette dries out, just raise the baking paper, pour water in, put baking paper on and your wet palette is once again ready to go.
2. I have used (made) several wet palettes so far and I highly recomend making one with low edges - for me it is much more comfortable to use the palette with low edge, than to curve my hand every time I want to touch paint with my brush. This is matter of taste however, you may see it otherwise.
3. Keep your palette from direct sunlight, warm places and "windy" enviroment, these increase the rate of drying.
4. I havent found "bad" and "good" baking papers so far, all of them work for me. It is all about the amount of water and proper towel/sponge as far as I see it.
If you have any more tips or questions, I would like to hear them. So far, the wet palette is awesome part of equipment for more advanced brush painting methods and brush painting in general. Considering that it is so easy to create, I can only recommend you to make one too!
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