MATERIALS: Fast Mixing
Acrylics dry fast. This can be a pro or a con when you’re an acrylic painter.
However, it does mean you need to figure out how you use your paints in a way that lets you mix colors without being super frustrated.
Annie O’Brien Gonzales says your answer might be in the craft store.
O’Brien thinks about her palette in two ways: the place she actually does her mixing and where she keeps her clean color to pull from.
The place she keeps her clean color isn’t the original tubes of paint. That slows her down too much.
Instead she’s purchased a bead box (yes, for holding beads) at her craft store and has squeezed out paint into the individual compartments.
This way, she’s a snap of a lid between her and her clean color. She can easily close up her paints when she’s not actively grabbing color, and with an occasional spritz of water (and regular use), her colors won’t dry out.
Put it to Practice:
You can absolutely keep your pigments in tubes and then lay them out as you need them. But if that is putting too many barriers between you and color mixing, think about if there are easier ways to access your clean color.
Watercolors often will keep clean color in the wells around their mixing tray. Oil painters do the same by laying out color to then pull from to mix.
But acrylic painters, because of that fast drying time, can’t just lay out all their colors on any palette and expect them to still be there.
But maybe a bead box will help you get access to the clean color you need and then learn to mix it to the color you want. This is exactly how Gonzales got so good at color mixing.