Wet Pallet

I've read and heard about wet pallets for a couple of years now.  I did not really feel the need to try one out.  My painting was not very good and the tile I've been using as a pallet worked just fine.

Except that it didn't and I was dissatisfied every time I used it.  We generally run 25% humidity around here.  Add in the hot lights I paint under and my paint was drying out pretty quickly.  I have always hated to have paint dry out and be wasted.

I finally decided to try out a wet pallet.  I went down to Hobby Lobby and bought this:

The whole thing was ten dollars.  It holds brushes, which is ok, the lid comes off to act as the pallet and there are two compartments inside.

The dirty water compartment, on the left, has ridges in the bottom to clean the brush; flick it back and forth once and it is clean and paint free.  The slots on the other side are, I presume, to hold your brushes bristle down in the water.  I don't do that, but I do use it as clean water for mixing in to thin my paint.

The lid lifts off and becomes the pallet.  You can see my painting tile pallet underneath it.

You can see the lid for the lid (?) off to the right.  It fits on tightly to ensure that the wet pallet stays, well, wet.  They are made of semi-soft plastic so dropping them would be no problem.

The pallet itself is just a couple of paper towels folded up and put under a piece of parchment paper out of the kitchen pantry.  If you look closely you can see that the paper is wrinkled.  This means that the paint is not always in touch with the paper towels and still has a tendency to dry out.  I'm considering buying some actual pallet paper to see if it would have this problem. I'll probably talk to some of the guys down at Collectormania, who use these things, before I do that.

So... Does it work?  Yes indeed.  My paints stay wet until they are gone.  Whey I come back to some the next day, they are still useable.  My only complaint is the wrinkled parchment paper, which I can probably fix for a small amount of money.

Total cost here is $10 for the plastic contraption and pennies for the paper towel and parchment paper.  I'm pleased with the whole set up and glad that I finally gave it a shot.  For anyone who hasn't tried this, go for it.  It is a low cost way to improve your painting.