 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're gonna take a deep dive into wet palettes What are they? Why should you use them? How should you use them? How do you get the most out of them? Hey, let's get into it. The strict techno man sir. That is Vincy V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vincy V style Wet palettes, so we're gonna talk all about it We're gonna hit everything to do with them, but right up at the top I do want to say like every hobby tool. It's not absolutely essential when you're in this hobby to use a thing I personally find the wet palette Indisposable and it's a major major part of how I work and how I hobby it doesn't have to be the same for you So if you find that after you try this or something it just doesn't work for you Don't feel bad. You're not doing anything wrong Everybody hobbies in their own way. Okay now with that disclaimer out of the way. Let's talk about wet palettes First off, what is this thing? Well a wet palette in simplest form is just some kind of container Within some kind of thing that can hold liquid water for a relatively lengthy amount of time That could be anything from as simple as a folded up paper towel or kitchen roll or a sponge or anything like that within some kind of You know piece of paper over top of it that is roughly porous and allows some form of osmosis through the water Now there are many versions of this thing You can of course start with a simple homemade wet palette That's as easy as a ziploc container and some paper towels You can make it for literally pennies or you can go get a kitchen sponge and put it in there and put some Paper on top. That's also relatively cheap. I mean, maybe we're up to a dollar now And then you just need a little bit of non wax baking paper for the top I if you're gonna use generic paper I tend to prefer something like Reynolds non wax baking paper like this sort of sheets you used for cookies in the oven Those are generally perfect They're non-stick usually but Just don't get the waxy ones or you can use something like what I use which is the The exemplar from game envy it is my favorite wet palette I have gone through most major every major brands wet palettes And this is the one I've come to that I really love for reasons we'll sort of talk about There are also traditional art wet palettes like the Masterson West wet palette. Those are all fine But I do have some issues with them and we'll talk about it as we move through the rest of the individual features So why is this thing valuable well the wet palettes valuable because there's a bunch of water sitting underneath the paper Your paint is sitting on the paper and through the magical power of osmosis Very small amounts of that liquid come up and slowly hydrate your paint Hopefully and this is the key Hopefully matching sort of the pace of evaporation of water out of your paint And so over the course of a day or a long painting session several hours Your wet palette will keep your paint hydrated and workable so that you can sit there and happily Hobby away painting a miniature for hours without the need to keep wasting paint and having it dry on Traditional dry or well palette What is it not it is not Magic it does not just like you can't put a drop of paint on it And then leave it there overnight with the thing completely sealed And then come back the next day and have that paint be magically perfectly usable or three days later and have that paint be Magically perfectly usable. That's not how this works as soon as you close the top on the wet palette You have reduced the amount of evaporation Significantly There's no light. There's no heat coming down on it. It's a sealed environment It becomes very humid and now your paint, which if it was hydrating properly with the top off is going to hydrate really fast Especially if you have hydrophilic paints, which most acrylic paints are quite hydrophilic It will then become a sort of watery mess if you just let it sit there We'll talk about how you can tackle this later on. Okay, first things first We've got to set up our wet palette. So over on the desk. Here's what we're doing We're gonna set up this wet palette now the first thing to talk about here is the sponges now I particularly love this particular sponge from game envy because it uses the sort of nylon Sponging on one side. So these are kind of half and half sponges. This is the newest version of what they have I think it's super cool. This is actually the revolution to me There's a lot of sponges out there that people will put in these wet palettes The traditional artist palette just has this ugly yellow sponge, which is very prone to mold and basically it's the same stuff as a kitchen sponge You can get them made out of things like this where it's nylon or other certain artificial materials Which does reduce the ability of microbes and stuff to find a home in them And let's be clear right up top your number one enemy with a wet palette is mold You are leaving standing water Just sitting out in the open in your house So if you have a human environment or an environment prone to mold of any kind You're gonna have to take really really strong steps to make sure that your palette does not become a moldy gross mess that will make you sick If you live in a relatively dry environment, they probably less of a concern and the wet palette will become infinitely more valuable Now one of the things I often see people do is just set up one sponge One of the neat things though about this process is that you can if you live in a particularly dry environment Double sponge. So this is what I do. My basement is quite dry so I just often have two sponges in there and That means I can fill up more water keep more sort of moisture in those sponges longer So they feed up through the paper more easily. It allows me to have more standing water Up to a higher level in the actual wet palette itself So that's the first thing you can do to adjust to your humidity and Understanding your local humidity is one of the most important parts about using your wet palette is the area You're painting relatively dry is the area you're painting and relatively humid set it accordingly If it's relatively humid a single sponge and low water is going to serve you just fine If it's really dry two sponges lots of water very very effective So find some happy medium in between there speaking of the amount of water This is another thing I often see people go wrong I look at their wet palette and they have the sponge just kind of like it got near water It met water one time on a trip out West. No, no, no, no, no We've got to get that thing Saturated the sponge needs to be completely saturated with water and then you need a good amount of standing water Basically up to an equal to the level of the sponge or right below it You want the sponge and the water level to be, you know, basically right on Okay, that's how much water should be in your wet palette because over the course of your painting session Water will evaporate. It's not just going up through the paper into your paint It's of course also just going to be evaporating from the palette itself up into the air in your room And this is worse if you have very hot painting lights or a lot of light in your area Which we all should protect our eyes So as a result The more water you have in there the less often you have to refill it the more effectively it's going to Rehydrate your paint now as we're talking about standing water. We've got to talk about mold I mentioned it earlier. Let's get into the nitty and the gritty and the gross Mold is a big problem when it comes to wet palates as I said, especially if you're in a humid or mold-prone environment So what can you do? Well, you can do lots of things So there are various liquids you can buy like cleaners that you can put in there. This is what I use This is the antibacterial agent. It prevents. I've never had mold or anything of any kind as long as I've used this stuff I love this stuff. It's really great You can also put copper into your water. You can use copper wire or Companies will sell a little copper Things you can actually set in your palette for it. You can use You can I've seen people use pennies. I don't really support it There's not that much copper actually on pennies anymore pennies are mostly made of zinc with just like a thin copper coating around the outside So I don't know how much that's actually doing. I haven't seen any kind of scientific test We probably need to get goober town on this one to do this test But a decent amount of copper in the water will actually act as an antimicrobial agent But using something like a drop of dish soap in there can also be a great Play especially if your dish soap is like antibacterial dish soap That's what you would want anything that says like kills 99 million percent of germs great perfect Okay, just a single small drop of that on the base under the sponge before you fill it up We'll do a good job Okay, so now that we've got the palette all filled up and ready to go It's time to talk about paper Now two important things when it comes to paper one in general You don't want to use anything that says wax paper on it in general as always. These are all guidelines So as I said things like baking paper that you would use for making cookies or something like that in the oven Is really your ideal thing you can cut it to size You can also buy those prefabricated sheets and some of them are almost the right size depending on your web Pallet you make especially if you use a homemade ziploc palette. So that's actually just super convenient The Use of wax paper if you live in a very humid environment That can actually be a good sort of trick There will still be some amount of osmosis and humidity traveling even through the wax paper It's not completely waterproof. Obviously. It's just mostly waterproof Um, so I have seen some artists who are in like particularly dry environments or sorry particularly human environments. I apologize Use wax paper to good effect. So again, it's about setting it to your local climate to get the best effects An important note about the paper. It needs to be smaller than the sponge This is actually one of my biggest complaints with a lot of the paper you get In the sort of hobby Space for wet palettes is that many of them are bigger Than the sponge itself. This is no good And it has to be a little bit significantly smaller because as it gets wet It will actually spread out some and look and become bigger as the as the like as the paper Loosens a little bit when it when it gets wet it will grow larger And so you need to be significantly shorter than paper when it's dry that way as it spreads out you're not Dropping over the edge. This is important because if the paper's hanging out over the sponge Then it's just you're you're you're just going to evaporate a ton more water Your paint will get dry much faster and the wet palette won't really work The paper needs to be smaller than the sponge so important so vital so many people miss it Okay, now that we've got our wet palette all set up. Let's get some paint on here The first thing I'll say is just because it's going to keep your paint working doesn't mean you need to go crazy In fact, you can do the opposite now you use you waste much less paint with a wet palette Because you're only putting a few small drops of paint on that paint is going to stay workable for hours and hours and allow you To get a lot more out of a lot less So if you're one who's thrifty like me a good wet palette can actually help you save money because you don't waste paint As it just dries and dries and dries over again Over and over again on your plastic well palette Once we have all our little drops of paint that we're going to use on the palette set up We're then going to slowly and this is my particular method You might find a different method of working But I then like to work out from those individual little pools of paint So I never actually mix in the original pool. I take a drop of the paint I put it somewhere else on the palette and then I Uh go to the next color or make my mix or thin it appropriately whatever I'm going to do So I'm working always from secondary pools of paint The original little drops of paint that I put on the wet palette Always stay clean stay original and allow me to always go back to a nice Uh original base color or tone or whatever and and that remains then workable as I make different mixes Or something like that without polluting the other colors This also is sort of the way my brain just works Yours might be a little different, but working from a secondary Pool is if you're needing to mix or thin is a very important step If you're just using the color straight, you don't need to worry about the the second pool of paint speaking of thinning Isn't that kind of the point here? Yeah a little so this is something I often hear people say Is it by using it on the wet palette? It's already thinning the paint. Well again Yes, sort of but it's not magic Right, so this is a slow process of the osmosis absorbing some liquid up into the paint If you put a few drops of paint onto the palette and then immediately start working with it within the next 60 seconds Guess what it has not thinned at all But it has because it hasn't absorbed any real water yet As you work with it over time Potentially it will become a little more thin Maybe the equivalent of having a moist brush when you go into the paint So this can be a way to Get your paints a little thinner as you're working over time But do note how long the paint has sat on the palette will be impactful to how thin That paint is and as you're working sort of with the Top off and with a lot of light It might not actually be getting that much thinner because if the rate of sort of absorption through the paper is Equaling the rate of evaporation you're probably going to stay about the same now once you've got those paints somewhere else Thin mixed etc Then we can do the roll the dab and roll or the roll and dab I guess it'd be the roll and dab But this is a good way to just sort of keep your brush working and sharp Once i've worked the paint and i've got it where I want I then i'm going to roll my brush off and on the palette wiping away the excess And then if i'm working with a very liquidy paint say a glaze or anything very thin an ink something like that I'm then going to dab a piece of cloth or paper towel that sits next to my wet palette to get that excess liquid out of there This is especially important if you're you're in a situation where your wet palette has highly hydrated your paint Then you want to be dabbing often Uh just to make sure that you get all of that paint You know off or sorry all that excess liquid out of your brush Dab dab dab Now I want to end on just some general tips These are just bonus tips that I found for years of working with my wet palette First off don't seal the thing completely at night Some palettes like the exemplar have a little vent you can actually open at the top That will do some work to still allow some air exchange and prevent the environment inside from becoming too humid You can also just not seal the top you can leave it slightly to the side or something like that Though I suppose that can be problematic if you have cats or other animals that want to climb up on things and knock stuff around So you know buyer beware on that one But leaving it uh the lid adjacent ajar open slightly will also help the the environment not become too humid and over liquidate your paints Uh in that case depending on what your local humidity is you may actually find you can come back the next day and Still find your paints completely workable and ready to go and you might get more than a day out of them Which is which has actually been really great Next up wash your wet palette regularly doesn't have to be every day But you know once a week take that wet palette dump the water throw away the paper Whatever you're doing take it upstairs get your brush that you use to clean your dishes Get some dish soap give that thing a good scrubby scrub rinse out the sponges Put it all back together refill the water take it back down. It's just a good process Again, not only does it help to keep you know mold and other things like that out of there But it also just helps it not be sort of gunky and gross paint sometimes will leak in the side of it You know dust from your room gets in there. Don't let it sit there and get gross Don't don't be the stinky kid. Don't be the stinky wet palette, right? Just some good cleaning once a week should keep you in proper working order with no issues as you're working with the Wet palette you do want to make sure you refill your water regularly I actually keep a little squeeze bottle, which I also wash once a week Next to my area that I can just sort of squeaky squeaky squeeze Into the wet palette and refill the water back up to that level to keep it nice and even with the actual sponge So make sure i'm getting that appropriate level of hydration Up through the paint finally and this is a particularly fun one if your paint does become over hydrated It doesn't mean you have to throw away the piece of paper or anything like that what I usually actually do because Overnight oftentimes to some of the paints that I use are really really hydrophilic And so they will become over liquidated over hydrated. Whatever you want to say they become just watery piles of paint You can though handle that. I take a paper towel I simply press it down on top of the paint I press it down on top of that and it simply soaks up All of that excess liquid and water and admittedly some of the paint Now usually what you'll have left is not usable sometimes it is But it will absorb all that water And then you can keep using the palette without worrying about that very wet paint running everywhere or getting into anything You can keep using all the space around it without issue. So there we go That brings us Through everything you need to know to be rocking and rolling with your wet palette Like I said this the one that I'm using and that you've seen in this video is the exemplar from game enby I really do love this wet palette. I love the sponge design. The paper is really great Everything about it's you know durable. I've never had any mold issues. So to me this one's a winner But you can find whatever works for you And that's perfectly fine I will drop a link down below to the exemplar. They didn't sponsor this video. I don't have any relationship with them I just really like the product. So there you go If you liked this give it a like Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. Don't forget. We have new videos here every Saturday If you've got any questions about the wet palette or anything I didn't answer drop that down in the comments below I'm always happy to answer every question asked If you want to support the channel, there's lots of ways you can do so share this video That's number one number two. You can check out the merch store down there. We've got lots of fun merch Number three. You want to directly support the channel? Well, there's a patreon focused on review and feedback And taking your next step on your hobby journey. We'd love to have you as part of the community As always though, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time