Palette Shop — Artist painting palettes and mixing | palettishop.com
Four surfaces, four different jobs — here are the measured sizes, weights and capacities that decide which one suits oil, acrylic or watercolour.
Wooden palettes are the reference point everything else is measured against. The standard oval with a thumb hole runs about 200 x 300 mm (8 x 12 in) and weighs 150-300 g, which is why it can be held at arm's length for a whole session. Oil paint stays open on it for 6-8 hours at 20 °C, and if the loaded palette goes into a refrigerator at 2-8 °C, that stretches to 24-48 hours.
Disposable paper pads trade durability for cleanup. A typical pad is 240 x 320 mm with 40-60 sheets of 120-160 gsm paper, coated on one side so paint sits on the surface instead of soaking in. When a sheet is used up it tears off, and the next clean surface is already there — no scraping, no washing.
Plastic comes in two distinct shapes. Well palettes — typically 12 wells holding 5-10 ml each — keep fluid colours separated, which suits watercolour, gouache and fluid acrylic. Large flat plastic palettes do the opposite job: one open area that takes 20-30 pea-sized dabs of about 5 ml, built for mixing rather than separation.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Glass and mid-grey surfaces are chosen for judgement rather than convenience. A mid-grey palette is calibrated to roughly 18% reflectance, so a mixed colour reads neutral against it; on white, every mix looks darker than it will dry.
Matching surface to medium is then straightforward. Oil is undemanding — wood or glass, with the refrigerator trick for overnight storage. Watercolour and gouache want wells. Acrylic is the demanding one: on any open surface here it skins in 10-20 minutes at 20 °C, which is why the stay-wet setup at /keep-acrylic-paint-wet exists.
One more tool belongs on every surface above: a palette knife with a 50-130 mm blade for mixing and cleaning. Blade lengths are compared at /palette-knives.
Further reading