Search

Something I noticed this winter and I'm still not sure what to do with it. I started photographing my palette at the end of a session, before I clean it. Cadmium orange smeared into raw umber, a ridge of lead white, the whole thing looking like an accident. I put those up because they cost me nothing. Thirty seconds against the north window and voilà. They get roughly four times the engagement of the finished work. Every time. The finished painting is the thing I spent three weeks on. The palette is the residue. And people want the residue. My first reaction was irritation, obviously. But I think I understand it. A finished painting is closed. There is nothing to say about it except "beautiful," and then the conversation is over. A dirty palette is open. People can see the decision in it, they can imagine the hand, they can ask what that green is. It invites them in instead of presenting them with a verdict. Which is uncomfortable for me, because I was trained to believe the painting is the point and everything else is noise. And commercially, the noise sells. I have had two commissions this year that came directly from palette photos. I'm not going to stop posting the work. But I've started painting a little bit for the middle of the process, the ugly stage, the part where it looks like a mistake. That seems to be what people actually want to see. Curious whether this is only my corner of the internet or if it's everywhere.

I spent forty minutes this morning scraping the dried skin off the edge of my palette and did not touch the canvas. Barely moved a brush. The woman I'm painting has been half-finished since Tuesday and I keep finding reasons to look at the palette instead. It's a plain wooden one my teacher gave me when I finished at the atelier, worn down at the thumb, stained the color of everything I've ever mixed on it. By now the edge has a kind of crust, layers of old grey-blues and ochers, and every few weeks I take the palette knife and cut it all back. It has to be flat, otherwise the knife catches and my mixes go muddy and everything I do that day is wasted. My daughter came in and asked if I was actually working. Fair question. I let her scrape a bit. She cut too deep and took some of the wood with it and I pretended it didn't bother me. I think the truth is I was not ready to paint her hands. Hands are the hardest thing there is and I have been putting them off. The palette is honest work with no risk in it. Anyway. Back in a minute. Hand first, and the rest can wait.

Forgot my wet palette in the car last night. It was cold out, and this morning the paint had this weird rubbery skin on every single puddle. Not dried, exactly, just... bouncy. I scraped it off and the paint underneath was fine, but it threw my whole Sunday rhythm off. I'd planned to finish a little still life and instead spent the first hour messing with a palette knife trying to get a clean edge. Anyway. Note to self: carry the palette in the house with the groceries, Karen. It was sitting right next to the milk I also left out. Two for two. Anyone else have a "where did I lose the painting time this week" story? I feel like I lose more hours to setup and cleanup than I do to actual painting.

I've been mixing the same terre verte and lead white for three days trying to get a shadow on a white tablecloth right. This morning I scraped the whole thing off in frustration and started again. The palette ends up this mess of grey-greens and dirty creams, paint built up at the edges, turps everywhere. My husband came in and said "are you okay in here" like he was checking on a hostage situation. But the thing is, when the palette looks like that, when it's genuinely ugly and you don't care because you're inside the problem, that's when the painting starts to come right. The nice tidy palettes are for people who haven't started yet.

just admitted to someone that i've never actually cleaned a palette knife, i just scrape the dried paint off with another palette knife and then eventually buy a new one. they looked at me like i'd confessed to a crime. i know it's not efficient. i know the dried bits contaminate color. i don't care. there's something weirdly satisfying about the scrape sound and i've gotten to a point with some colors where i can tell exactly which layer of dried paint i'm digging into by the pitch of it. that's not a skill i asked for but here we are. also my "clean" palette is just a bigger pile of dry paint I chip off with my fingernail. i'm 33 and i paint like a feral beast and i am fine with that.

everyone's got their fancy stay-wet palettes and i'm over here scraping bone-dry acrylic crust off this little board with a palette knife like i'm archeology-ing my own bad decisions. the texture is genuinely insane at this point, there's like seven layers of dried paint built up with actual craters where i gouged out a chunk of ultramarine mid-painting. i know i should just sand it down or toss it but honestly i'm attached. it's like a little topographical map of every piece i've made since january. you can see the exact week i went through a burnt umber phase. tell me you also have a cursed palette you refuse to retire

There is a particular kind of stupid I only do in oil. This morning I had a half-figure drying on the easel, the shadow side of the neck needed to go cooler and softer, and instead of just taking the gray already sitting there I mixed a fresh one. Lead white, a touch of raw umber, viridian. Beautiful. Put it down. It was the same gray. I'd spent fifty minutes arriving at the thing I could have reached across the palette for. My old teacher in the atelier would have caught it in three seconds and made me scrape it off as punishment. He used to say the palette is a conversation you're already having, stop shouting over it. I thought that was just cruelty at the time. It's not. It's the whole job. Anyway the neck is better now. I kept the second gray, used it on the ear. Waste not. The other thing, and this is less charming: I've started noticing I do this more when I'm avoiding the actual problem in the painting, which is that the whole pose is a little too polite. The figure is sitting too nicely. I keep fixing the neck because I don't want to admit the composition needs to be broken open, and it's going to cost me a week. Voilà.

I sat down Sunday to do a small still life, apples and a white pitcher, and ended up spending half the time staring at my palette instead of the setup. I've got ultramarine, cerulean, and pthalo on there and honestly I use the pthalo maybe twice a month. It's so strong a dot of it takes over everything. Cerulean is the one I actually reach for in skies but it's $22 a tube now at my local shop and I keep nursing the last squeeze of it like it's medicine. Anyway I did not finish the pitcher. The apples look decent. I'm curious what blues other people keep on the palette, because I feel like I'm carrying dead weight and I can't decide which one to cut.

ok so I have this porcelain palette, the big rectangle one, and I got it when I went full time in March as a "you're a real artist now" gift to myself. told myself I'd clean it every single session. it is now December-ish and there is a layer of dried paint in there that has its own topography. like I can see the ghost of every painting I've made this year in the mixing wells. there's a specific grey-brown in the corner from that commission that went badly, I know exactly which one. and here's the thing, I KNOW you're supposed to work clean, my old professor would have a stroke, but I've started dipping into the old dried stuff with a wet brush and getting these colors I could never mix on purpose. like accidental neutrals. this dusty mauve that only exists because I was lazy in October. I've used it in three paintings since. my partner keeps offering to scrub it for me as a nice gesture and I keep saying no and I can't fully explain why without sounding insane. anyway I just spent 40 minutes mixing a green for a leaf and got it in two tries off the mud so. posting this instead of admitting anything to my professor. does anyone else hoard their palette like this or am I the only gremlin here

the palette is one of those cheap grey plastic ones from the art store, the big rectangle with the thumb hole. i've been using it so long that the actual mixing surface is a mound now, old ultramarine and burnt sienna and this orange i've been chasing for two years sitting under everything like sediment. i know a clean palette is "correct." i know the colors get muddy. i've been told. but every time i go to soak it or scrape it down i just... don't. part of it is laziness, obviously. part of it is that the dried layer is basically a color swatch of every decision i've made in that studio, and scraping it off feels like throwing out notes. anyway it's 11pm and i'm sitting here telling myself i'll clean it sunday. i won't.

ok so I have this little porcelain palette that I've had since my first year of uni and the stains on it are basically a fossil record of every bad decision I've ever made with paint. There's this one spot where I mixed a truly foul muddy green during a very bad week and no amount of scrubbing has ever lifted it. I used to be so careful with it, like a ritual. Now I just look at it and go "ah yes, there's the week my scholarship almost fell through" and keep painting. also my partner gifted me a proper glass palette for christmas and it's sitting in the drawer untouched because I cannot bring myself to retire the stained one. is that weird?? like I know it's just an object but it's been through the whole thing with me you know. the good paintings AND the ones I had to turn face-down in the drying rack. am I the only one who forms attachments to tools like this. I still use the same brush for my greens specifically. that one brush. for five years. I think if it snapped I'd genuinely mourn.

everyone keeps telling me to get one of those stay-wet palettes. no. I have a piece of glass from a coffee table I found on the curb in 2019, edges still sharp enough to draw blood if I'm not paying attention, and it's taped to a chunk of plywood. the paint dries on it. that's the point. dried acrylic on glass peels off in these weird translucent skins and I keep them in a jar like a freak. sometimes I glue them back onto a canvas. it's not a technique, it's just what happens when you're too cheap to buy a proper palette and too sentimental to throw anything out. anyway I cut my thumb on it this morning and bled a little on the cadmium yellow. didn't notice until it dried. it's fine. it's basically a glaze now.

Been hauling materials from the same supply place in Kalamaria for years, and yesterday some vendor who knows my face comes sprinting out of his stall all eager. Says he'll help me carry the palette of smalti I just paid for. Sir, that is 40 kilos of glass and you are wearing sandals. I told him no thanks, I've got it, I've done this a thousand times. He does not stop. He grabs one corner anyway. Fifteen seconds later he's on the pavement holding his wrist like I shot him, and I'm standing there with the whole weight on one side because he let go mid-lift. My back is going to remind me of his good intentions for a week. The thing is he meant well. That's the part that gets me. Nobody ever busted their wrist offering to carry my groceries, but touch a piece of heavy art material and suddenly everyone's a hero. I thanked him through the pain, paid for the palette again in the form of a chiropractor visit today, and now my studio smells like deep heat. I know it's not the worst thing that happened in the world today. But my knees are 45 years old and they did not need this.

I have this old porcelain palette I've been using for maybe twelve years. It's cracked, the well in the corner has a chip that I keep meaning to sand smooth, and the patina of dried paint around the edges is so thick now it's changed the shape. My students look at it like it's a biohazard. But the thing is, I know exactly where every colour lives on it. My hand goes there without my eyes. I could mix a flesh tone in the dark on that palette. And when I try a clean one, a nice new piece of glass, even, I'm suddenly a stranger to myself. The mixes come out wrong. I'm hesitating. There's something about the accumulated stain of years that becomes part of the process. The ghost of a terre verte I mixed three weeks ago still faintly in the white. The smear of lead white that's been there so long it's practically fired on. It's not laziness. It's memory.

I bought an actual glass palette two years ago. Grey, nice weight, cost more than I want to admit. It lives in the closet now because I ended up using a rimmed aluminum cookie sheet from the dollar store instead. The rim is the whole point. I work wet into wet a lot and the sheet keeps the puddles contained, so I'm not chasing a run of burnt sienna across the table at 10pm. Also it's big enough that I can keep a muddy corner on one end and clean mixes on the other, which I could never do on the glass one. It's stained now. There's a permanent greenish ring in one corner from a mix I made in March and a scratch from where I scraped it with a palette knife instead of being patient. Anyway I have a workshop coming up in two weeks, first one since last fall, and I'm already dreading being the person who shows up with a cookie sheet and a plastic cup for water while everyone else has the nice setup. Then I remember I'm 42 and nobody cares.

Okay so I have this one ceramic mixing tray, no divisions, just a flat white rectangle, and I have not fully cleaned it since maybe March. It's got this crusted ring of dried gouache around the edges, layers of it, and somewhere under all that there's a stain of a green I mixed once in April that I have never been able to hit again. Cerulean + a touch of burnt sienna + something I've forgotten. It's just a ghost of a green now, sitting there mocking me. And here's the thing, my old teacher would lose her mind. We were taught to scrape down to bare white after every session, palette knife, damp sponge, the whole ritual. And I did it for years, like clockwork, felt virtuous about it. Then I went full time and something in me just stopped. Now I mix into the dirty areas on purpose because the residue does something, it warms everything a quarter step, keeps me from hitting that chalky dead zone you get when you start fresh every time. Is that insane? I honestly can't tell if it's a genuine technique or if I've just gotten lazy and invented a philosophy to cover it. The window I keep painting (the one with the fire escape) is on like attempt nine and the last three have all been ruined by the paper going grey and I think it's the rinse water, not the paper, I was so sure it was the paper. I bought a whole new block for nothing. Anyway. Does anyone else keep a gross palette on purpose or am I the only one lying to myself here

just spent 20 minutes scraping dried acrylic off my glass palette with a razor blade and honestly that's where i do my best thinking. no music, no podcast, just the scrape-scrape-scrape and my brain finally shutting up for once. i used to be precious about cleaning between sessions. thought it meant i was organized. now i just let it build until i physically can't tell what color anything is anymore and then i have a little ritual about it. feels like progress even when nothing else is. anyway my palette currently looks like a dried blood splatter exhibit. very on brand for the colors i'm using rn lol

I keep my palette clean maybe the first hour of a painting. After that it's just layers of dried paint I mix into, scrape off, add more on top. Someone told me last week I should clean it between sessions and I looked at them like they'd suggested I set my hair on fire. I know painters who treat their palette like an altar. Wipe it down, lay fresh piles, everything in its place. I've tried. I last about twenty minutes before I start working wet into wet and the whole thing turns into a crusty ruin again. There's something about the chaos that helps me find colour faster, I think. I don't have to decide, I just pull from whatever's there and adjust. Today I've got a smear of burnt sienna that's been there since Tuesday, a pool of medium I accidentally spilled, and what might be ultramarine or might be cobalt, I can't tell anymore because it's mixed with the grey from yesterday's shadows. It's fine. The painting is coming along. Maybe I'll scrape it clean when this one's done. Maybe not.

There is a knife in my box, a cheap thing I bought in 2009 at a shop near the Saône that no longer exists, and the blade has gone soft at the tip from too many years of scraping. I use it for mixing only. It drags, it leaves ridges in the pile, and that is the point. I had a beautiful knife once, a real one, balanced, flexible, and it lied to me constantly. Every mixture came off it looking harmonious. Then on the canvas the whole thing separated into mud by the afternoon. The ugly knife makes me work the color longer, and by the time it is smooth on the palette it is actually smooth. Voilà. The good knife lives in a drawer now. I am not proud of this, it is not a philosophy, it is just what happened after too many ruined greys. Right now the pile I am fighting is a warm shadow for a woman's neck, and it keeps going pink on me. Cadmium red is a tyrant.

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