Workshop Tip: Laying Out the Palette

Shuttered Window

6 X 6

                                    Here is how it might look framed.

This little painting was a group project that we did as an exercise in our workshop with Dreama.  We were given four minutes to work on our paintings and then were told to go to our neighbor's painting and then had four minutes to work on that one and so on for about 40 minutes.  It was amazing what we ended up with in such a short amount of time.

I wanted to pass along a tip from the workshop that came from one of the class members.  She is actually an accomplished artist at The Artist Attic where we had our class.  Her studio was filled with fantastic work. 

One of the things that she noticed doing this little exercise we did was that some of our palettes were not laid out very well.  ( Yes, that's me raising my hand).  When you do a search for paint palette on Google you get pictures like this:

Nice little plops of color.  Ann suggested that instead of round plops we should be laying out our colors like long worms.  That way if the end of the "worm" gets messy we can slice it off with our palette knife - thereby saving precious paint and avoiding a palette that looks like this:

One of the things Dreama stressed was cleaning the mixing area of the palette often so the colors stayed clear and bright otherwise, your paintings tend to get muddy.  Boy, can I make mud!

Very helpful hints for me.  Hope they are helpful for you too.