I found this wonderful new watercolor palette while out shopping this morning. The thing that I love the most about this palette is the size of the wells -- as you can see, these wells are large enough to easily accomadate a 2 inch brush.
The palette also came with a snap-lock lid to keep paint fresh, and as you can see by the label, it's actually an egg server! If you look closely at the label, you'll also see the price... $1.80. Yep, that's right. I bought it at Big Lots for a dollar and eighty cents. A great watercolor palette with 24 extra deep, extra wide wells, and in a great color-wheel shape, with a lid, for under two bucks. I'm going back again this afternoon to get a few more before they all sell out! If you go to Big Lots looking for them, look in the Food Storage Container isle, and don't expect them to be properly labeled as watercolor palettes -- they all seem to be mis-labeled in the store as egg servers!
Below is the traditional watercolor palette that I'm currently using, and as you can see it has plenty of wells but they are only really large enough to use with a one-inch brush. I mostly paint with a one-inch flat brush, and that's because larger brushes just don't fit in the wells of traditional palettes. I prefer big brushes for a couple of reasons:
1. they hold more paint and water, so I can make larger more consistant brushstokes.
2. big brushes make me look thinner, by comparison.
Well, maybe not a whole lot thinner. But they do make it easier to to paint larger paintings and keep the work fresh and vibrant.
Here's some other palettes that I have laying around the studio. These are foam food trays, and are great to have around as spares when I need extra palettes for various projects. I keep a stack of them handy in case a student forgets to bring a palatte to class, or for when I'm working on something that requires different paints that aren't in my standard everyday palette. Like butcher trays, these have the major drawback of not having wells to keep the paints seperated.
I've been thinking about placing an order for a couple of new brushes lately (my #16 round is finally worn out, after about 25 years of hard use!), and I really wanted to get some new nice large flats -- like two-inch and up -- but I haven't been able to find a good palette that works well with the larger sizes. This might be answer!
