Wet Palette - The 6 year update!

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 used this many different paints for this many minis.

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.

These silicone palettes each come with 10 'wells', they're supposed to help prevent paints from drying out and also be easy to clean.

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

It didn't seem to me that paints stayed usable for significantly longer that using them on a normal palette.

​However, this might simply  be down to how I use small quantities of paint and with larger amounts would be more noticeable.
It certainly wasn't any worse, so that's ok.

So how easy are they to clean?

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!

Pop!

Generally, dried paint simply comes off the well.

It's not perfect though.
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If the remaining paint that dried out was thin or possibly the remains of something like a wash, it can have a tendency to crack instead of peeling away cleanly when popped.

​When drybrushing I would swirl a brush in a well and a similar issue would occur when popping.

Good news is that if popping doesn't remove the paint, the palettes can be cleaned by other methods.
A trusty baby wipe seems to do the trick and is quick, easy and convenient since I keep a pack in the painting shed. ​

​So overall, I'm happy with them. Whilst lacking the usefulness of a true wet palette, they are easy and quick to clean compared to a normal palette.

In fact I ending up buying a 3rd, giving me 30 wells to paint with at once!

Now that I have 3 speed palettes, I can have 6 wells in row which allows me to use all the colours in particular 'flexible' triad at once.... Ohhh, that's just too nerdy. I think I need to get out more!