Portable Oil Palette

Materials

Process

The best palette surface for oil paint is glass and the cheapest way to get a nice oil palette is to get a glass frame from a place like Walgreens (don't waste your money on special oil paint glass palettes). After squeezing out all your colors and mixing your paint just the way you want it, the last thing you should do after a day of painting is scrape off all your excess expensive oil paint and throw it away or have it sit idle and start drying until you paint again. To preserve your muy presioso oil paint, carefully put your palette in the freezer to freeze the paint, then thaw it before painting again (this will slow down the drying process considerably).

Now, it doesn't take long for an artist to realize that storing and transporting an oil palette is a hassle; when you store it in the freezer, the oil paint can get on your food and you need to make sure you have enough room to store it flat. There are special storing palettes for acrylic paint, but—as far as I can tell—there are only messy, non-convenient options for oil paint. Enter my portable oil paint palette.

This post will show you how to make your own, relatively inexpensive oil paint freezer palette.

Materials

You will need:

• Large, plastic scrapbook box (or if you want something small, a plastic snap-lid pencil box)
• Two 8"x10" cheap front-loading glass frames (I found mine at Walgreens—they're called Format, made by MCS) . If you want to make a small palette case, get the 4"x6" frames.
• A metallic Sharpie, or something that can mark on black plastic.
• Eight 1/2" machine screws with nuts.
• Phillips-head screwdriver for the machine screws.
• Sharp, round file suitable for poking holes through thick plastic.
  

Process

Step 1

Take the two frames apart and with the metallic Sharpie mark the insides of the frames directly in the middle of each side. Then, with the sharp metal file, poke holes through the frames where marked (I only had to poke two holes per frame because the frames I used already had two holes in them for hanging).

Step 2

Center each of the two frames inside the lid and the bottom of the box and mark their position through the holes with the metallic sharpie.Then, poke holes through the box where you marked the placement of the frames.

Step 3

Once there are holes in the frames and in the box, screw the machine screws through the holes into the box. Then take the screws out and do the same with the frames. This will ensure that the holes are large enough to accommodate the screws and make threads in the plastic that the screws can follow.

Step 4

Once you make sure the screws can go through the holes, line up the frames' holes with the box's holes and from the outside of the box, drive the screws into the box and frames. Screw the accompanying machine screw nuts onto the end of the screws to secure the frames to the box (you don't want your frames to fall out when you have all your paint on them!).

Step 5

Replace the paper and glass into the frames (flipping the paper around to have a tan or gray surface showing).

Conclusion

...And that's it! You have a portable palette you can throw into the freezer or transport without a big messy paint hassle.

Please let me know if any of this didn't make sense and feel free to tweak as necessary.