Watercolor Painting Pans and Palettes for Artists
Here are some helpful tips about watercolor painting pans and palettes for artists learning about painting in small spaces, or while traveling.
When I first started playing with watercolors, I had a metal palette with divided sections for either paper-wrapped pigment cakes, or tube-squeezed dollops of pigment.
In the photo below, you can see my old friendly palette – with half pan sections that are filled with both tube and cake pigments.
Color Options for Your Travel Palette
When you purchase a travel watercolor palette like this, you can buy one that’s already filled with a set of standard colors (like this one) or you can insert empty pans and fill them with your choice of cake or tube colors.
Empty pigment pans can be full sized – rectangular in shape, or half pans, which are square, like the pigment wells in my palette above. The square half pans leave room for twice as many colors (eyebrow wag). You can also insert loaded pigment pans in dry cakes, like these.
If you want the option to swap paint colors you carry around in your travel palette depending on the season, your location, or your moods, you can purchase empty half pans (like these), and fill them with tube paint from your collection.
The tin palette above holds 24 half pans, but I confess to having (hoarding) many more colors than that, so I keep options at the ready by purchasing the empty half pans, and filling them with all the colors I have in tube paints.
Having a stash of pans I filled and stashed in my studio gives me the choice swap out cooler yellows for warmer hues if I’m going to paint still life instead of landscape, etc.
Once your watercolor tube paint is dry in the fillable pans, you can keep all your colors in a bin in your studio, and then insert your color choices into the empty spaces in your palette on a whim.
Travel With Watercolors
- Here is a blog post from the archives about packing light when you plan to bring watercolors on a trip.
- This post has inspiration to print landscape photos taken with your cell phone as references to create small landscape sketches in watercolor.
- If you’re brand new to watercolor, here are five approaches to painting with watercolor you can experiment with.
Painting Seasons
Do you find that some seasons are more creatively productive for you than others? Fall and Winter usually increase my art-making urges, so I tend to lean into it, and get a bit more purposeful in planning. I have two linocuts, an intaglio collagraph and a sewing project in the works. You should see the mess. My poor husband.
But I’m also very glad to be working with my hands inside after a busy summer spent outdoors, traveling, socializing and doing landscape and gardening projects. While camping in the California desert last weekend, I arm-wrestled two friends to try botanical printmaking from gel plates with foliage I snipped from my yard before we left. We hung the prints to dry in the RV with cooking twine and clothes pins, and we had a great afternoon.
I hope the next few weeks are creatively inspiring for you. If nothing is happening when you’re alone with free time, put an art-making session with a friend on your calendar. Sometimes, having to show up for an appointed time is all the urge our creative selves need to Get Started.
Thanks for stopping by and I’ll see you in the next post –
Belinda
P.S. My Etsy Shop will be part of a site-wide sale November 18-December 3rd. Have a look at the art listed, and note your faves for some lovely discounts after the 18th.
