Innovating the Artist’s Palette | July 18 2024, 12:17

I’m thinking of creating a next-generation palette. Somehow, these aren’t available for sale.

Here’s the issue. If you leave oil paints out in the air, by the next day they start to dry out, and after a few days, you have to throw them away. If it’s a thin layer, it dries up significantly; if squeezed out from a tube, a crust forms and you still end up throwing it away after a few days because mixing the crust with the normal paint inside is subpar.

To preserve them, there are special tubes where you can scrape off the paint and put it in the freezer. It’s tedious, I don’t do that. But there are special palettes with airtight lids. I believe only Masterson makes them, and I have one such palette. But even then, the paint dries out because there is a lot of space under the lid, and that’s enough. So essentially, if you take a break for a week — you might as well clean the entire palette and squeeze out new paint.

Well, the paint isn’t cheap either. One large tube of a single color costs about $25, and I have about 25 tubes of different colors. True, they’ve lasted me a year already, and they’re still going because I don’t apply them thickly with a palette knife. Obviously, the white paint runs out faster.

Additionally, the palette from Masterson is sold as just an empty plastic box, which is difficult to clean from dried paint. Any scraper would scratch the plastic. I insert a piece of glass in it, and under the glass, a sheet of gray paper. One piece of the right size glass sells for $36, but you could buy a picture frame and use the glass from it — which ends up three times cheaper. A scraper for glass works great – it cleanly removes even the most dried-up paint. It’s sold in hardware stores — practically eternal. And you need gray paper under the glass, which is sold everywhere.

But back to drying. Here’s what I think – what if we could integrate a pump in the lid that sucks out the air? You press a button — and the air is evacuated, the lid presses even tighter, and it seems like then the paints could stay fresh practically forever.

An artist almost buys a palette once in a lifetime. What’s gonna break there, anyway? At least now there would be something to… no, but seriously, paying an extra $20-30 for such a “feature” wouldn’t be a problem at all. They could even sell the glass, scraper, and gray paper as a kit, so you wouldn’t have to buy all this separately, and in different stores.

Ordered a pump for $9, let’s give it a try.