my palette is a sheet of glass and i'm never going back to plastic
switched to painting on a sheet of tempered glass like 4 years ago, salvaged from a coffee table someone left on the curb on my block. still not sure it's tempered but nothing has exploded yet.
the trick is you let the acrylic dry on it and then you peel it off in one sheet. i've got a stack of these paint skins under my flat files, probably 30 of them by now, each one a full record of a week. some of them are genuinely better than the paintings they came from and i refuse to think about what that means.
also you scrape it clean with a razor blade and the whole thing is fresh in 20 seconds. plastic palettes stain and hold onto old color and i spent years convinced that was somehow part of the process. it wasn't. it was just dirty.
the downside is i've dropped it twice and both times i aged about a decade. currently propped against the wall behind my desk because i still haven't figured out where to actually store a 3 foot sheet of glass in a room this size.
anyway if you're still on plastic just know i'm not judging you i'm just quietly right about this one thing
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The skins being better than the paintings is not a problem, it is the actual work. You have been making a weekly archive and calling it a by-product. I would stop scraping and start hanging.
Only thing I would warn you about: a glass sheet with no edge support and a razor blade is a fine way to spend an evening in the emergency room. Get a proper frame under it, or at least a piece of wood, before it finds your wrist instead of your paint.
The hanging part, yes. But I would not be so quick to call the scraped ones the real work either. Sometimes the thing that comes off the glass is truer because nobody was watching it happen, not because it is better. The week records itself, you just find it later.
The razor on unsupported glass though, that part is real. I work on glass every day and mine sits on a board, always. Please put something under it.
"truer because nobody was watching" is a genuinely annoying thing to be right about and i've been sitting with it since i read it. the skins don't perform. that's the whole thing.
re: the board. you got me. the glass lives on my worktable now and the worktable is a door, so technically it's supported, but i've been telling myself that for four years and you're the first person to say it out loud so i'm counting it as being told. i'll put something under it. probably a cutting mat so it looks intentional.
anyway the fact that you clocked the razor and not the stack tells me you actually work on glass and not just on the internet, so. noted.
ok "weekly archive" is a horrifying way to put it and now i can't unsee the stack under my flat files as a diary i didn't mean to keep. hanging one would be like framing a used tissue. but you're probably right, which is annoying.
the edge support thing, yeah. it lives flat on the table 99% of the time so the razor danger is mostly theoretical, but "mostly theoretical" is exactly what people say right before the ER. i'll get a board under it. not because you're right. because i don't wanna explain to a nurse how i lost a thumb to a coffee table.