Cleaning Your Palette

Hi, my name is Stacy Minch. And today I'm going to show you how to clean your palette at the end of your painting session and preserve your paints until the next time you paint. So today I have my palette here filled with my range of colors and I'm going to show you three different ways. The first way is to store your paints in the freezer and this can be done in any kind of container. Today. I have an old cigar box that I picked up at a smoke shop so this, you can tell I've been using for a long time. It's very well used. But what I do is I grab a pile of paint, place it in here after each pile of paint, you clean your palette knife so that you don't mix the colors and just continue until you have all of your paint in this box. Then this box can be closed up and put directly in the freezer until your next painting session. Now, your paints can last depending on the paint color, probably up to a couple of weeks and still stay fresh inside the freezer. It slows down the oxidation of the oil paints. Another way to slow down that oxidation is to use a glass jar. This is just your classic canning jar. A mason jar, a cur jar actually. Um And so what, what I would do here is pick up my pile of paint and just put it right inside the lid of the jar. Clean your palette knife in between each pile of paint and continue like this until all of your paints are in your jar, not touching each other, just all around, around the ring. And then what you do is pour some water into this jar. This is a trick that I learned from my first oil painting teacher at a local university. So when the water covers the paint, it slows down the oxidation because, uh, the paint is not exposed to the air and also oil doesn't mix with water. So after you pour off this oil, you can pull the paint right back out and, um, it'll be fresh for maybe a week or two. Um, the third option you have for storing and keeping your paints fresh is something like this. This is a specific brand. It's called the Palette Garage, but you could use another sort of Tupperware container or any other container. This, um, particular one has some wool felt on each end. And if you didn't have war felt you could, um, do this another way, I'll let you know how, but what you do is you take clove oil and it should be clove leaf oil and you saturate this wool felt in here. Where's the clove oil? With this setup? You have this little L shaped piece of plastic. So you would put your paint piles on here, cleaning your pallet knife between each pile of paint. And then you slide this into the palette garage and with your clove oil on your wool belt here, you put these back on here. The clove oil also slows the oxidation. One thing with the clove oil is that you cannot let it touch the paint or your paint will never dry. So you have to make sure that the clove oil stays on the pieces of felt in there. If you didn't have this particular setup, you could use a box or something else with the clove oil just on a piece of paper towel or a cotton swab just so long as it doesn't actually touch your paint. Um, that will help slow the oxidation. For me, this method is slightly less effective than the other two. But these are three different ways that can help you preserve your paints over a longer period of time since paints are expensive until the next time that you paint.