DIY Watercolour Palette

I love watercolours, they are a challenging medium to experiment with but they also allow us to have a looseness to our work that can’t be replicated in other mediums.  If I find myself overworking an artwork, I’ll transition into watercolours for a bit to help relax.

They can also be an expensive medium to invest in.  I live in the country and buy my supplies online, so I take advantage of all the sales.  However I know that isn’t always easy for everyone and sometimes you want to just buy one thing to use for the next ten years.  My business advisor asked me how much I had to spend a year on supplies to run my business.  Well..... like any creative I could spend every cent....

Now I’ve started running a lot more watercolour workshops I’ve had to expand into acquiring more supplies as I promise you everyone will want the same colour.  This is a DIY palette I recently created which makes it easy to transport and choose a colour.

i have a lot of wet tube watercolours and when I do use them I tend to squeeze out too much which is a waste.  They are difficult to transport and a pain to clean up after during a workshop.  So I bought this empty palette off of eBay and filled each compartment with a colour, trying to keep similar colours together.  I have let it dry and when I need to use the paint I just add a little bit of water like you would a dry palette.  When I’ve finished I just pack it away and the water evaporates, making the watercolours dry again.  It is working great!

A smaller size would be fine for beginners, I just opted for a large one as I already had a large stockpile of colours that I wanted to use.  Most of these colours are Art Spectrum.