Palettes

Palettes most often come in metal, plastic or ceramic, able or not to hold standard pans/half-pans, with a great variety of shape & size. Metal palette can get deformed; plastics won’t, but can break. Ceramic are pleasant to use, but fragile and heavy; a big white plate can be used as a studio palette.

Big palettes take more space, but often come with more, wider mixing areas, thus reducing the need to clean the palette regularly.

Tip: Some artists never clean their palettes: the neutral color created by accumulation of various pigments can be used as a neutral tint, useful to reduce chroma without mudding the colors too much.

The Rolls Royce of the palette is the handmade brass palette, often with a bespoke design; see for instance:

• houseofhoffman.com;
• facebook.com/brasspaletteindia;
• lapetitepalette.com;
• littlebrassbox.com;
• classicpaintboxes.com;
• watercolorpaintboxcompany.com.

Because of the high costs and slow delivery time, both caused by manual manufacturing, some people “obviously” decided to try themselves at building them, while documenting their process:

Tip: palettes, plastic or metal, can get stained by some pigments such as PR122 (quinacridone magenta [+], PR122 (artiscreation.com), PR122 (handprint.com)). They can usually be cleaned with either a regular eraser, or with 90° alcohol.

Easel, setup

From tapping paper to a plywood board, or watercolor paper block, glued on the sides, to hand-made watercolor easel of all size and shape, through manufactured French easels there are many solutions available.

If you already have a good quality tripod and are reluctant to invest time or money in building or buying a fine easel, you can easily build something similar to:

Or, if you have a bit more time and a unused French easel lying around (…):

Resources

• A few hand-picked, free video tutorials, by established artists;
• handprint.com, the source of in-depth technical/scientifical explanations for watercolors;
• artiscreation.com’s pigment index, an exhaustive list of pigments from various manufacturers;
• badwatercolorart.wordpress.com critics many artists/paintings, for better or for worse, definitely educative;
• American Watercolor contains various articles on technical matters;
• Granulation, what and why?;
• jacksonart.com’s Everything you ever wanted to know about watercolour paper;
• The Mind of Watercolor, a YouTube channel with plenty of painting technique informations, covering a wide range of subjects;
• drawpaintacademy.com’s article on Sargent’s watercolors; see also the artsandculture.google.com for Sargent, containing a few high resolutions images of his watercolors, so does wikiart.com;
• some of Anders Zorn’s watercolors from wikiart; see also his artsandculture.google.com page.

Comments

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