So Matakishi gave a me wet palette a 'little while ago' and by a little while ago, I mean more than SIX YEARS AGO!!

Six years, what the hell happened?

Anyway, I used it for a time and found it didn't quite work for me more or less for reasons mentioned in this blog. Plus, since it was A4, it was a bit too big for my painting area.
Basically, since I primarily paint stuff for RPGs other than anything else and especially when painting personalities, it means that I tend to use a wide variety of colours in small amounts each. This made the wet palette a little tricky to use.

I persevered for a while but ultimately abandoned it.

Why am I mentioning this now, earlier this year I invested in couple of these silicone 'speed' palettes from The Army Painter and at £6 each piece they won't break the bank.
Supposedly they're meant to be used with The Army Painter range of speed paints which I don't use but I was interested to see how they work with 'normal' paints.

How well does this work? Let's find out.

Pretty easy it turns out, albeit not quite perfectly.
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The simplest best way to clean a silicone palette is to wait for the paint to dry and 'pop' the well! Since the palette is flexible, a finger can be used to pop it upwards and the paint will generally just peel off the palette and can be thrown away!

A year ago I bought and constructed some modular paint racks from Hobbyzone. This year I bought some storage units to go underneath the paint racks, painting area is levelled up!

Can you spot the difference?

It may look like the clutter hasn't changed but on the extra level, the drawers on the left allow me to store up about 100 25x25mm based figures.

Little bits of other storage that put things out of the way.

Maybe next year I'll give it another level up and get more storage space.

About a month ago, Matakishi gifted me with a wet palette, since then I was been making use of it during my painting.
Since then I have been using it with all of my dropper paints. This is what I've found so far.

In case you're wondering, a wet palette (Through the miracle of science.) will prevent any acrylic paint placed on to the palette from drying out and keep it err wet.

How does this work? First there's a spongy layer that is drenched in water, then a very thin layer of 'porous' paper like grease or baking paper is put on top of the spongy layer. Paint is then placed on the paper.
Moisture is absorbed through the paper and into the paint to prevent the paint from drying out.

So is a wet palette worth it?
Obviously a wet palette only really works with dropper paints like Vallejo or Army Painter paints, unless you like to mix or thin your paints.

The Good: Wet palettes do actually work, they prevent paints from drying up for about 2 weeks. After the first 2 weeks of usage, the sponge had become dry, so I replaced the paper and 'rehydrated' the sponge.

The Bad: First off, I'm a miniature painter, I only ever deal with small amounts of paint at a time. This means I only ever put a small amount of paint on the palette at any one time.
Why is this a problem? Well on my palette I currently have 3 blobs of black , which one is the paint, which one is the wash and which one is the ink? It's pretty hard to tell. This can also apply to other paints.
Luckily, it's not too much of a problem. You just need to create a 'system' to manage how you put paints down on the palette.

So it's a bit of a mixed bag so far really.
But I'm not giving up on the wet palette yet! I'm not sure if it's saving me much paint, but it does keep paints from drying up and at least the palette can be easily cleaned (That is, the grease paper can be thrown away!).