Palette Re-Arrangement

To continue with my studio changes this year, I've also reorganized my palette.

My physical palette is the center of my studio and one of my most prized possessions. It is a 2'x4' sheet of glass taped down to MDF... room to mix, easy to scrape down, and when on top of wheeled shelves, able to carry around my entire career, more or less.

While I love my palette, I've been thinking recently that I'm not making full use of all the space I have on it to mix. For the past few years, I've set up my paints with warms on one side, cools on the other, and a section for acrylics.

Cool side (and acrylics)

Warm side

As you can kind of see on the warm side, my paints eventually start creeping away from the edge, and sort of block off that back corner. As I mixed my pools of mud or lines of colors shifting from warms to cool, I recently felt more and more often that I needed more room. And my palette is already pretty large! I'm not painting murals here, either. So now, I'm going to try out keeping my paints on two adjoining sides, in an L shape.

The paints

The SPACE!

I kept my cools in the same spot, but moved over all the warms. This has netted me quite a bit more mixing room, as the warm paints are in a spot I rarely used to mix anyway. The real estate freed up is prime space close to whatever painting I'm working on, as well.

So far, so good! I thought I would keep reaching to where the warm paints had been, but that hasn't been the case so far. I'm now able to mix enough of almost all my colors to do nearly the whole piece without a lot of re-mixing, which is helping me keep my colors consistent, as well as being a time-saver.