On the Palette

I think it is fun to see the messy side of art so I thought you might enjoy a little peek behind the scene as well. 

The Medium: I have several in-progress pieces, however this palette is for a humming bird I am working on. What you see on the palette are water soluble oil colors. Because I can't work with the cleaning solutions needed for standard oil colors I opt to use these which clean up with soap and water. You might have noticed by now there are two whites on my palette. One of the whites is what is called a mixing white. It is used primarily to mix with other colors. The other white is used by itself as, you guessed it, white. You can still mix this white with other colors. Each white gives a different result. I usually put the mixing white in the middle of the colors so I can remember which one is which. Once they are on the palette it is easy to confuse the two, until you use the wrong one and get an unexpected result.

The Tools: As you might be able to see most of my brushes are really old, some over ten years. I am quite familiar with them which is important when painting. However, I have decided, now that I am painting more often, they are in dire need of replacing. The glass bowl you see in the upper left corner is holding all the colors that are on my palette at present. The wooden box on the right holds the rest of my oil paints, not on my palette, as well as my gouache, charcoal, and other art mediums that are small enough to fit in the drawers. There are a set of shelves above this that hold all my acrylic paints as well as gesso and other items too large to fit in the box. My easel, which is made of wood, sits to the left of this table. I have one of those tall office chairs, which my sweet husband got for me. I use it instead of a stool since it can change heights easily, which means I don't have to worry about adjusting the easel height to suit the piece I am working on. Somewhere I also have a metal table top easel which I have used in the past to help with this. I haven't seen it for some time now but am still hopeful it will turn up. My palette itself is actually a large piece of glass that was the top of a coffee table until the table broke. I couldn't bring myself to get rid of such a nice piece of glass and now I am extremely glad I didn't. It works really well as a palette and table protector. I put a large piece of white paper under it to create a background to make it easier to see the colors.