How to make a wet palette. How to paint with acrylics. What about gray

Dear Colleagues, I am aware that the wet palette has been talked about many times on the Internet. Most likely, I won’t be able to add anything new, but nevertheless, someone here (on the site) should tell about this cunning and extremely useful technology. Well, then, maybe I still do something differently than you. ;) I note that the described technology is suitable not only for miniaturists / figure skaters, but also for all other modellers who use water-soluble paints in their work or work.

I want to clarify a couple of important points right away:

• making a palette takes no more than 2 minutes;
• paints mixed on a “wet palette”, without changing / updating, I use throughout the entire time of working on a miniature, and this is sometimes a couple of weeks.

So, I will begin to tell and show exactly how I make a wet palette in stages.
First of all, let's define the container. I used to use saucer-like bowls (no lids). This is quite acceptable, but the paint in such a container is not stored for long.

In the end, I came to a plastic container with not very high sides and a tight-fitting lid.

Next, using a paper (in my case, TWO-LAYER) towel (sold in any supermarket), I create the first layer of the base of the future palette.

ATTENTION! IT IS IMPORTANT! Using pure or purified water, I…

... I strongly moisten the towel at the bottom of the container, filling it (the container) with water no more than the height of the towel itself. Do not be afraid to make a mistake with the water level. You'll understand when you try it for the first time.

Now it's time to use tracing paper! Having previously measured the desired width (suitable for the bottom of the container), I unwind the required length, equal to the length of the bottom of the container, and cut it off.
ATTENTION! IT IS IMPORTANT! Do not confuse tracing paper with baking paper.
Having bought once a roll of tracing paper for 100 rubles. (approximate price) you will use it for years. ;)

Carefully slowly lay the cut piece of tracing paper on the bottom so that water does not get on the top of the tracing paper. Which side of the tracing paper will be the bottom, and which side will be the top - it does not matter. Set it up as you see fit.

ALL! The palette is ready. Now you can drip paint on the surface of the tracing paper and it will not dry for a VERY long time. On the same palette, stir the paint and dilute it with drops of water. And when you need to take a long break, then just close the lid tightly and after a week “your colors will not rise”, but will live. The only thing is that the pigment may precipitate, but it can always be “raised” by gently stirring with a brush.

But I will not dwell on this description, but will tell a little further.
To facilitate the process of diluting the paint (and this is a mandatory procedure, there is no other way), I use the following method (I once used pipette analogues, but this is not convenient ... it seemed to me so).

We fill the usual lid (for example, from under “coca cola”) by half (more or less - you decide) with water and place it in the corner (or maybe not in the corner - it’s the same here, decide for yourself how it’s more convenient for you ) palettes.

Now the process of diluting the paint has become very simple and fast. We dip the brush (all or the tip of the bristles) into the cap with water and then with this brush we poke into a drop of paint applied to the surface of the palette. And so we repeat until we dilute enough in our opinion.

This is how the palette looks in the process of working with it.

Well, in the end, I'll show you a couple of photos related to

All masters who paint with acrylics know how capricious our acrylic is in work. The thick consistency of the paint contributes to its rapid drying even during operation, which is extremely inconvenient and not economical. All kinds of thinners and mediums do not bring the desired result, as they significantly affect such paint qualities as hiding power, adhesion, etc. Since I work exclusively with acrylic, I found a solution for myself in the form of a palette made by myself from improvised materials. In my palette, the paints do not dry out and remain unchanged for several weeks. I suggest you try it too.

So, we need:

1. A lidded container, container or box with low walls.

2.Paper towels (multi-layer good quality).

3. Tracing paper is smooth.

4. Scissors.

First stage:

We circle the bottom of our container on tracing paper and cut out a template from this tracing paper (I cut out several pieces at once, for the future). Then we fold the paper towels in several layers (6-8) and put a tracing paper template on them and cut it out. We get blanks of 6-8 layer blanks from a paper towel, the same size as the template from tracing paper and, accordingly, the size of the bottom of our container.

Second phase:

We lay the layers-blanks cut out from a paper towel on the bottom of the container, level them along the bottom. Next, add a little cool water to the container with laid paper layers so that the layers barely cover and immediately drain this water, holding the paper layers on the bottom and turning the container over. With fingertips, with light pressure, we crush the layer to the bottom, as if wringing it out. We smooth out the bubbles and expel excess water, preventing the paper layers from shifting. We get wet layers from a paper towel at the bottom of our container, water should no longer flow from them, but they will be sufficiently moistened and aligned to the bottom.

Third stage:

On top of the raw paper layers, we put the top layer-template of tracing paper and also slightly crush and smooth it so that the tracing paper lies evenly, preventing all layers at the bottom from shifting.

The palette is ready. We spread acrylic paints on the top layer of tracing paper and use it. If after work all the paint is not used and will be needed in the future, close the container with a lid and the paint will remain unchanged. For longer storage periods, such as a week, I recommend placing the sealed container in the refrigerator on the bottom shelf. Replacing the paint after use is very simple, removing the top layer of tracing paper and putting a new one on. When replacing the top layer, the bottom paper layers can again be slightly moistened with a pulverizer or syringe (just do not overdo it, the layers should be damp, but the water should not flow) The lower paper layers change as needed.

Thus, I save my colors and significantly save their consumption. Hope my experience was helpful.

In the next publication, I plan to make a review of acrylic paints, their varieties and my experience of using them. Thank you for your attention.

Let me explain how I make my acrylic painting palette. By following these steps, you'll be able to create your own palette to keep your acrylics for months instead of minutes. What kind of magic is this? Maybe witchcraft, you say? Haha, this is just one of the many useful things I learned in art school and I thought I'd save a few helpful hints for you and just write a post like this.

Step 1. Stop! Time to make a palette! Get out a nice 11x15 inch ceramic palette like this one. These pieces are made of metal and have a solid ceramic coating. (i.e. enamelled...) I've dropped it an unknown number of times and it's still usable. Do you really need the exact same one for this tutorial? Hell yes. Just take your rectangular container, with sides about an inch wide. A container for food, a baking dish, hell, even a lasagna dish is quite suitable for this.

Step 2. Build the foundation. Line the bottom of the palette with a paper towel. I usually use 6 or so layers of paper and it works fine. Try to keep the surface perfectly flat, if you have a paper bulge in the middle of the mold, add some paper around the edges to keep the surface even.

Step 3: Get her wet! Fill the palette with water until the paper is completely wet. While holding the paper, drain the excess water, we want the paper to be wet and not turn into a bowl of soup. If the palette is too wet, it will show up later when your paints become limp, having dissolved in excess water. Read on, it only takes a minute.

STEP 4. All air bubbles must die! Place your hands in the center of the palette and, moving towards the edges, smooth the paper, trying to force out any air bubbles that may remain between the layers of paper. It may take a few strokes, but at the end you should have a nice base for your wet paper palette.

Step 5. My paper or yours? Try to buy a good tracing paper based on the size of the palette you have created. Unless you work mostly digital (in which case you may not be reading this tutorial), you just need to have a good tracing paper in your arsenal at all times. It has many (yes, yes, I said "many") uses. For my palette I use Clearprint Vellum. It's not cheap, but it's solid and reliable and worth the money.

STEP 6 Tracing paper isn't just for copying. Take a sheet of tracing paper and place it on top of a piece of toilet paper. The tracing paper layer will be the surface of our palette. Please note that the tracing paper begins to moisten, because. wet paper underneath. This is fine. As in step 4, smooth out the paper and remove any air bubbles underneath.

Step 7. Do you like it? This is our finished acrylic paint palette. A wet toilet paper backing will dampen paints that are losing moisture as there is no air underneath. Really cool science? After a few days or so, you can add some water to the toilet paper to keep the palette moist. Just bend the corner of the tracing paper and add the required amount of water.

STEP 8. Now go ahead - draw some nonsense! I just became obsessed with this palette when I realized that my paints were mixing before I started painting. Here's an example of a simple grayscale I made while painting a black and white painting from my gallery. I started with gray and started mixing in white (top) and black (bottom).

THE END!!!
When paints are not needed, I simply cover the palette with a plastic lid and put it in the refrigerator. Since paints can stay fresh for months, there's no need for wet paper garlands hanging all over the room and getting moldy.

Addition from Galka Zastava-
Try to find baking paper. It has two sides - smooth and rough. If you put the smooth side up, it works great. And I recently read a tip on WetCanvas. Put a copper coin into this palette. This is said to prevent don't-know-what from multiplying. Kind of like mold. In principle, it is not visible, but it smells very disgusting. I have dealt with the smell. If you work on something for a very long time, then, indeed, the smell appears. But I have not yet tried to put a coin
I'll show it here too just in case.
In this case, many shades of green were used, and I "stretched" the green from the darkest to the lightest right on the palette. The two dark colors on the right are Payne's Gray and Burnt Umber.
That way I always had the right shades on hand. It remained only to poke the brush in the right place on the palette.

Addition from Olena, ibid.: the idea is the same, the materials are slightly different. a box of sweets, 1 synthetic rag (for cleaning), tracing paper not soaked (NOT the waxed kind) and go to work.

Today I made myself a table-stand for my hand (from a plastic box)
I put an elastic band through the holes and put it on my hand like a bracelet - it’s convenient for me.
hand on a support, fresh places are not smeared, the pattern is visible. the box is transparent and light
Maybe my idea will help you too.

"Catalog of lessons of the Handmade section"

When creating a web design, perhaps the most important thing is the ability to choose the right colors. This can be tricky and sometimes time consuming, so today we've put together a small selection of resources to make it easier.

A bit of theory

Colors for the web are made using combinations of red, green and blue shades, this way of combining colors is called RGB (Red Green Blue).

Each color is represented by an integer from 0 to 255, and each color has a value for red, green, and blue. Black, for example, has no hue, and in RGB it is denoted as 0, 0, 0. The first digit is always red, the second green, and the third blue.

Because there are 256 variations of each hue, there are 16 million possible RGB color combinations. Most computers today can accurately display all of these 16 million shades of colors. There are so-called "safe colors", we already wrote about the need to use them.

When specifying a color, you can use the RGB value or the HEX hexadecimal system. HEX colors are indicated by six digits preceded by a # sign. HEX consists of a combination of numbers and letters; 0 is the smallest value, FF (255) is the highest. Each of these six characters in HEX corresponds to numbers encoded in RGB. Black is HEX #000000.

The 147 colors are named for HTML and CSS according to w3schools.com. There are 17 standard colors - sea wave (aqua), black (black), blue (blue), fuchsia (fuchsia), gray (gray), gray (grey), green (green), lime (lime), maroon ( maroon), dark blue (navy), olive (olive), purple (purple), red (red), silver (silver), blue-green (teal), white (white) and yellow (yellow). Each color has its own specific RGB and HEX value. Dark maroon, for example, has an RGB value of 128, 0, 0 and a HEX value of #800000; silver has 192, 192, 192 or #C0C0C0.

Create a palette

Sometimes creating a palette seems easier than it really is. Some experienced designers may create a palette from scratch; others draw inspiration from other websites or external sources (by looking at the colors on a crisp bag at a hardware store or finding solutions in nature).

Palettes are designed in a variety of ways, depending on the thought process of the designer. Some have such a trained eye that they can match colors on the fly while looking through a color book or looking at a photograph. When creating a palette, make sure to make color combinations for each element of your website.

To use colors you have found elsewhere, take a digital photograph and open it in a photo editor such as Adobe Photoshop. Zoom in until the pixels are clearly visible and use the eyedropper tool to select the hues you like, then write down their values.

Useful Resources

It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. There are many free online tools that allow users to create, download and import color palettes within minutes. Palettes can be created from a single color or by using a photograph or other image. Here are some simple services for this purpose.

A tool for creating a palette of six colors that designers can download as .atc for Photoshop, .epc for Illustrator, or email. Set the hue for each color using the slider, or specify its value yourself.

We have a large library of ready-made color combinations from five color systems. You can use the eyedropper tool to define the color. There are many possibilities (view colors along with text, generate site templates with selected colors, etc.). Using this service, you can also determine the colors of the website you like (just enter its url).

Color Palette Generator

Comments

1. Serg
   February 24, 2012 at 09:33 pm

   Great and useful collection. From myself, I can note colorschemedesigner.com, which, among other things, has various presentation modes for people with color perception diseases. You can check, for example, how people with tritanopia will see your work)

2. Konstantin
   February 25, 2012 at 8:47 am

   Ochepyatka at the very beginning - RGB (Read Green Blue) - Read Green Blue)))

   Elena17 Reply:
   February 25, 2012 at 3:30 pm

   Thank you ;) already corrected.

3. Irina
   February 25, 2012 at 10:55 pm

   Site creators!

   I love your site and read your new posts all the time.

   For some reason, recently Kaspersky (license) began to swear and block your page!

   I draw your attention to this..

   Im Answer:
   February 26, 2012 at 7:51 pm

   Thank you, we'll figure it out))

4. Elena
   February 26, 2012 at 11:50 am

Recently, a friend of mine, who knows how to paint very well and has been in the hobby much longer than me, dumbfounded me with the phrase “should I try a wet palette?” and immediately asked me a series of questions about its use. What immediately made me think about the question "Do many people use it, besides professional artists?".
Since I promised him a detailed manual for the preparation and use of the wet palette, I decided to make it for everyone and not only for the wet palette, but in general for all the palettes that I use. I hope that Dimka will supplement it with something of his own.

Wet palette. The main palette I use. Its main task is to retain moisture and nourish the paint with it, avoiding its drying.

It can be made from anything, but it is optimal to make it from a more or less hermetically sealed container. I have seen it made from a chocolate tin (at the time of writing the article in METRO 200 rubles) or cookies (I never found it, but I saw it with foreign comrades), from a sandwich maker (if you're lucky, then about 20 rubles) and from a flat tray for food products (about 100 rubles). I must say right away that finding the optimal container is not so simple.

Inside the tray, I put sponge rags (about 80-100 rubles per pack) in two to four layers. Their task is to keep moisture in themselves, as well as to raise the working plane of the palette as close as possible to the boundaries of the container.

I put a couple of layers of paper towels on them. The fact is that rags are usually colored: yellow or blue. Accordingly, a layer of napkins is needed to eliminate the influence of the color of the rags on the color of the paints on the palette.

The main ingredient of the wet palette: tracing paper

And the last and main ingredient of the wet palette: tracing paper. Any element can be replaced by anything but it. No baking paper or anything else works as well as the usual tracing paper sold in bookstores for 150r per huge roll. Hint: if your wife, or mother-in-law, or mother sewed, ask them: maybe they have a supply of the very tracing paper, it was used to transfer patterns from magazines.
Of the benefits: the paint lying on the right wet palette does not dry for weeks. The lifespan of a palette is determined only by how actively you crawl over it with a brush. It is necessary to change the working layer when paper pellets or holes in the surface begin. Moisturize by adding water to the sponge layer. I also keep a fine-dispersed spray bottle with water on hand so that before starting work and before closing the palette after work, moisten the tracing paper.
Among the shortcomings: a hermetically sealed wet palette left for a couple of weeks completely rots and the next time you open it, it pleases you with a completely inimitable amber.
P.S. I do not store it in the refrigerator and I do not understand why this should be done. Well, that is, theoretically I understand (so that the water evaporates more slowly), but I do not consider it necessary to do this. I use regular water from a filter. Here I am still going to transfer distilled to this.

Palette for acrylic stains and toning. I use it for mixtures based on matt / glaze mediums, paint and water, as well as lice and Incas (yes, oddly enough, I also use them, but not always for their intended purpose and I certainly don’t dip soldiers there). The most commonly used are ordinary school plastic palettes, pill blisters, or any container with recesses. Often foil is put into it so as not to be washed later. I went further on this issue. When painting in detachments and armies, I often did not fit into one working day in working with the induced mixture. The slurry in the worst case and most often dried up, less often thickened, and I needed a palette with which I could work for at least a couple of days.

An ice mold, which came complete with a refrigerator, turned up quite well under the arm.

And then, quite successfully, an ice mold, which came complete with a refrigerator, turned up under the arm. She ideally (with a little refinement) went under the existing tray, became wildly comfortable after cutting, and even turned out to be cellophane.

That is, the dried paint literally flies off from it after you splash boiling water on it. Such containers are sometimes found on sale, even ice molds with their own sealed lids come across. The seeker will find.

And the last palette, a simple school one itself, lying in every second book or stationery, with a price of 11 to 30 rubles. I use it to work with oil paints. I don’t wash the oil after work, I just wrap it in a plastic bag, and when the oil is completely dry and there is no clean space left on the palette, I just throw it away and take a new one.
If you know something about palettes that I didn’t write here (which means I probably don’t know), feel free to add it in the comments.