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Messy oil painting palette help?
I'm a beginning oil painter&have 3 problems with handling my palette:
When I do a wash (which is how I have been starting my paintings) the paint is really runny. It goes all over the place. I use one of those pads with individual sheets of wax paper. Should I have little mixing cups or something for this stage of painting?
Secondly, I never seem to have enough room on my palette. It's a 9 x 12" paper palette. Is this too small, or am I just totally lacking in discipline and that is why I run out of room all the time? I don't mix HUGE quantities of paint each time.
Finally, if I just squirt out blobs of yellow, blue, red etc and am mixing say a golden brown, how do I grab paint out of each blob of color without contaminating it from the previous color? Especially this happens when I have mixed my custom color, and I'm thinking it needs to be warmed up with more yellow (for example) My palette knife is all messy from mixing. Am I supposed to wipe it every time?
Thanks!!
Okay, this is just ME and my limited knowledge of the other artists that I have met and studied with over the years, but live and learn and no knowledge is wasted. Some of the artists I have known have used HUGE palettes,(they had them custom made by carpenters, or just bought a piece of 1/4 plywood and cut out a palette and oiled it and started using it). Some even bought at a flea market and used the top of one of those 1930's style kitchen tables that have an enameled tin top as their palettes - they actually NEEDED a 3 X 5 foot surface - the table top - to blend paints. I had a friend who's rule for mixing paints was to take paint off of the blob of tube colors on her palette from the front when she was blending light colors and from the back when she was mixing a dark color - that way the "tainting" at least was less drastic in the tube blob on the palette. Yes. ALWAYS wipe your knife - that's a no brainer. I do my sloppy washes first, before I put my blobs of tube color on the palette. Make a runny mess, do your wash or "wipe out" wipe off your palette and then squirt your tube blobs on. You're doing fine...it's called finding your technique.
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