I know how often I’ve raved about my little WHSmith palette (**), and don’t get me wrong, I still love it and use it, but I’ve been wanting to make a second palette for a while which is more customised and fits a few more colours. Not to mention it also had a mixing tray which is a lovely little bonus feature.

Where I bought the pan and palette: Palette Pans (**) • Empty Palette (**)

A few months ago I’d found a few sellers which sold empty water colour pallets and I decided to get two. One for de-potting my lipsticks – which I’ll blog about later – and one for a custom water colour palette. I had to buy the pans separately, and once they arrived they fit on the tray perfectly, but I decided to remove the tray all together so that I could fit more colours into the palette.

Once I took the tray out the palette fit twenty four colours instead of twelve. Fine, they’re not held in place as sturdily and rattle around the palette a little, but quite frankly it’s a slight annoyance I’m happy to accept. Especially if it means I get to carry more colours around with me.

The colours I bought (**): Paynes Grey • Cadmium Red Deep Hue • Indigo • Dioxazine Violet • Burt Sienna • The Works 12 Colour Watercolour Set • 2x Chinese White • Davies Grey

The colours are a a little bit of a mis-matched collection. Some are from the works and some are from Windsor and Newton. The works watercolours are a lot less pigmented than the W&N colours, but they’re still perfectly useable. As someone who tends to go overboard on the colours that is probably a good thing that they’re a little more muted. It’ll stop me from forgetting that they’re not acrylics, and that you have to build up the colours slowly.

The last think I did was add a swatch page on water colour paper. A few years ago I would just have skipped this step entirely, but it makes a huge difference! The purple colour for example looks like it’s a black colour in tablet form. It’s only when you add water that you realise it’s a beautiful vibrant purple. Having a swatch page allows you to see at a glance exactly the level of pigmentation you’re working with, and the finish. Now I just need to test it out on the next batch of Outsider concept art.