Setting Up a Travel Palette

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve used a convenient travel palette. I don’t paint outdoors as much as I used to. But I want that to change!

Something else that influenced me was these travel sized ceramic palettes! Out of the palette material choices out there – plastic, metal, and ceramic, I really enjoy ceramic the most. They’re the easiest to clean and they don’t ever stain. However, carrying around a ceramic palette seems impractical because it would be heavy. Well, not with these metal travel cases! Look at how cute they are.

These are from a brand called Bower Bird-and I found them on Amazon. The palette on the left has a thumb ring as is meant more for plein-air painting. The one on the right is what I will fill up with paint today. I intend to use that more for in-studio purposes.

I wanted to get a smaller travel palette for both plein-air and in-studio painting. I realized that in so many of my videos, especially tutorials, you can’t see my paint palette. And several people have commented how being able to see that would be extremely helpful. So this is my solution 🙂

A Closer Look at the Travel Palette

This is the 12-well ceramic palette. I love that you can use it on its own, or keep it in the case. It has one large mixing area and 12 small wells. The case comes with a styrofoam strip to keep the ceramic palette snug in its case.

I also like how the ceramic palette is an off-white color.

The 16-well case with a decorative outer case looks like your typical metal palette that holds half or full pans. Instead of individual, smaller pans, it has one ceramic palette in the center. The sides of the metal palete has plenty of mixing areas, as well as a thumb ring on the outer case. It fits conveniently in your hand.

Choosing Colors for the Travel Palette

Choosing colors for the 12-well travel palette wasn’t too difficult because I had just recorded a video/blog about my 12 go-to colors. But I ended up choosing a couple of different colors to better round out the palette.

After looking through my color diary and swatches, I ended up choosing the following colors:

Carmine
Scarlet Lake
Lemon Yellow
Permanent Yellow Light
Cerulean Blue
Ultramarine Blue
Terre Verte
Sap Green
Burnt Sienna
Sepia
Payne’s Gray
Bright Rose

Side note: The original 48-color paint tubes are 5mL. In the palette I made over a year ago, I probably squeezed about 2-2.5 mL or each tube. So I still had a lot of paint leftover for this ceramic palette. As you can see in the half pans, I still have A LOT of paint leftover even after a year of painting with them. This is why sometimes tube paints are worth the investment!

For the ceramic palette, I squeezed a very small amount because I wasn’t sure if I would change my mind and eventually switch out colors.

I can’t wait to use this regularly and see how I like it! I’m also curious to see how quickly I use up this small amount of paint and how I would go about cleaning it out and switching out colors.

Stay tuned for follow-up posts as I use these Bower Bird travel palettes regularly!