You propably all know the traditional wooden palettes that artists use – on one hand they hold their brushes and on the other is a wooden palette resting on the forearm, secured by the thumb through a hole.
There are certain disadvantages with these hand held wooden palettes:
- Color – the wood color is not neutral which in the end means that all your mixed colors will be influenced by this. By trying to compensate for the warm tone of a wooden palette your color judgements propably will not be as exact as they could be. So a neutral palette is the better option.
- Hard to clean – due to the texture of a wooden palette you will have problems cleaning them perfectls. And when your paints have dried on the palette it’s harder to get them off the wood. With a glass palette you can easily use a razor blade and scrape off all the residues.
- One arm occupied – while painting you will often use a Mahlstick to rest your painting hand on it while holding it with the other hand. With a palette holding on the arm you are not able to hold a Mahlstick.
The solution to these disadvantages is a glass palette which rests on a table and has a neutral background. I found such a glass palette for few bucks at IKEA.The STRÖMBY is ideal for my purposes. It is not too large and not too small and has a sturdy aluminum frame. You can place a grey medium value paper behind the glass or you can place Munsell Color Chips behind it or place what ever I want behind the glass – if it’s a photo reference or a value scale. Make sure you buy a picture frame with glass as some of IKEA’s picture frames have transparent plastic which is likely to scratch with use.