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Stay Wet Palette - DIY
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Message
Posted
I used to use a stay wet palette, but now can’t mess with it. Just using a tear off palette and occasional spray with a small hand pumped atomiser works for me. The Winsor and Newton tear off palette has a shiny surface, which allows any dry paint to be peeled off before starting a new session meaning each sheet can be used quite a number of times.
Posted
You paint in acrylics, Frank - and I do understand your point.... I'm not wedded to the stay-wet palette, although it does serve a useful purpose in keeping the paint moist: forget to spray the paint when you're on a roll, and all too soon it turns sticky and unusable. But I'm not saying you're wrong: the only real problem I have with tear-off palettes is that they're mostly far too small. In oil, they certainly have a place - much easier to throw away a sheet of paper than to scrape your palette clean before re-use..... and yet: again, they're usually too small, the bigger ones tend to be clumsy in the hand, the paper curls at the edges, the smooth surface of the paper lets the more liquid paint drip off, and the paper is shiny white, so I can't see the tones properly before applying the paint to the board. Is there, I wonder, a perfect choice?
Posted
I don’t paint with acrylic all that often, but when I did, I never bothered with anything other than a standard palette, often a disposable one.
Just squeeze out what you need for a session, work fast and get the stuff on the canvas before it has time to dry - simple as that!
Edited
by Alan Bickley
Posted
I'm testing out some gardeners capillary matting in my palette, in place of the expensive artists sponge! I bought a metre of the stuff for a fiver (about the same price as one palette sponge). If it works, I'll get loads of them from the metre I bought, and if it doesn't work I'll use it in the greenhouse!
Only 1 day in so far, so will keep you posted...
Posted
Helen - ingenious! There are several ways of making a stay-wet palette DIY, I use the sponge and paper in a ready-made plastic tray - i.e. the Masterson palette and its various components - because .... well, I'm too lazy to experiment with materials that might not work as well. But I'd certainly be interested to hear how you get on with the capillary matting. It ought to work - we shall see.
Posted
It’s not a stupid question! It’s supposed to retard the drying time of the acrylic, although it’s probably minimal.
I don’t paint in acrylic now, but when I did I never bothered with things like that, I just worked rapidly and got the paint laid onto the canvas! There’s more time than you may think.
Others will undoubtedly disagree... and find them advantageous.
Posted
There are all sorts of ways you can look at this - of course, it's possible to squeeze out just the amount of paint you want to use, and to use a misting bottle to keep it moist; or a flow improver/retarder. But this does require a bit of forethought, and keeping an eye on the paint - it can artfully dry in a very short time, and leave you stabbing your brush into a colour that's already formed a skin .... which has all sorts of problems, and is where the 'bits' on acrylic painters' pictures come from: a nuisance, unless you intended them.
The stay-wet palette enables you to keep working over a day or two - or three or four - with paint that will remain usable. So, I tend to use one, unless the painting is very small and I'm intending to finish it in one sitting. With a painting that requires much layering and glazing (layering = building up layers of paint to achieve depth, colour strength, and colour accuracy and texture; glazing = adding transparent veils of colour over previous coats: which acrylics are very good for) I find the stay-wet palette immensely useful.
Posted
I would waste so much paint without the sealable palette to keep it useable for a while.
I'm on day two of my experiment... I think I left a little too much water in the capillary matting (so the paints on the paper over it are now a little thinner). Not so much an issue for what I'm painting at the moment, but I'll try it with less water on the next one.
Edited
by Helen Martell