 Hey guys, I got a couple more of these empty metal palettes in just today. These are the 12 half pan palettes from Jackson's Art. They look very much like the Prima palette. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised, we'll open the Prima box here, I wouldn't be surprised if they're from the same manufacturer. Because if you look at them, they look the same. This part's a little bit different, but they're very, very similar and they're the same size. Anyway, this one's from Jackson's Art and I want to put my Holbein watercolors in it so they're not in the tubes anymore and I'm really wanting to, I think, put all of the Holbein paints in one palette and what do I mean by that? So all of the watercolors, there's 12 of them, and the gouache, the five gouache colors in one palette. I think for me that would work fine now. These are some standard half pounds. These are ones I got recently from Cheap Joe's. You'll notice right away the Cheap Joe's ones are square and these are rectangular. These are the ones I'm used to. Not that these won't work, these are fine and they both fit in here. These fit in a little, you have to just adjust it a little bit, they both fit, but if what I'm thinking about trying to do, I can actually do, the square ones won't work because what I think I want to do, these rectangular ones are a little bit tighter by the way. I think what I want to do is try to squeeze five into the middle here, if I can, and these square ones there's no way, but I think if I'd use some of these rectangular ones, I think I can squeeze them in if I can. I don't know if it would be easier to put it on a magnet and stick it in there, maybe. So I think I'm going to try to do that. I happen to have five of the rectangular ones, I'm running a little low, I am going out of town soon so I'm thinking that I might see, I'm going to be art shopping with friends so I think I might try to see if I can pick some of these up while I'm out. So let me get some glue together and let me answer the messages that are pinging me right now and I'll be right back. So I played around with the layout of the little half pans and you'll see one full pan played around with it, played around with it and what I sometimes end up doing with these small pallets is just taking that insert out. I don't throw it away, I have actually two of them. One of these is from my travel watercolor kit which I wanted to squeeze as many colors in as I could when I'm traveling and so I took it out and so now we've just taken that one out because of course we're basically doing the same thing. I'll just put it in my drawer of spare parts and you know. So what we'll do is obviously these are going to, they're going to just slide around and they're not going to stick. You could glue them down but what if you ever want to move them around or take them out, maybe you want to wash the pallet out, you want to refill them or something, you don't really want to have them glued down, maybe you want to change your mind later and you want to put this back in. You never know, I never know, I'm constantly changing my mind so I don't glue things down but what we are going to do is glue magnets to the back of our little plastic pans and then put them back in. So all I do is I take some strip magnet, you can get it at any craft store like it comes just like this on a roll and I just cut off a bunch of pieces and I use E6000 to glue them to the back of the pans. Now this magnet sheet of course is sticky but this stickiness that's on here is not meant to get wet. So to ensure that this magnet isn't coming off at all ever, you could of course sit here and peel the magnet off, it's probably the smart thing to do. I don't honestly always do that but let's go ahead and do that. This is old magnet so it's coming off pretty easily. This is also old E6000 so let's get it started here. There we go. So just get a little bit of E6000 on the back of the magnet and then put it on the back of the pan and push it down, give it a jiggle and then stick it in your pallet and you're good to go. And I'm going to do all the pans that way and I'm going to get them all glued up and then it sticks, it doesn't come off. So I'm going to do that to all of them and I'll be right back. So now we've got magnets on the backs of all of our watercolor pans and I filled in the space between the pans on the edge of the pallet with some spongy stuff. I usually keep a sheet of sponge or something around just for doing this sort of thing and then I have some place to wipe my brush off if I'm out and about and I'm painting with this pallet. I can do this and I don't have to worry about having paper towel or something with me. So that's really handy and it's not glued down so I can pull it out and wash the sponge out. Now, and I also cut a piece of watercolor paper and did a grid on it to match the pans in the pallet so that we can make it color key. Now we just have to figure out what colors we're going to put where, which is sometimes the hardest part for me. So let's get all the tubes out of their boxes and these tubes are big. These are really big tubes I've got to tell you. So I think you get a good value for your money. Now we have our two yellows, orange, red, green, violet, brown, oh this is a reddish brown, so let's put it here. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, well maybe I'll put too many pans, see. I still need it, I still didn't have enough so that's fine. And then we have the gouache and I have a little bit extra, which is fine, actually I might be able to take one of those pans out and put a bigger one in but that's fine. I have to figure out what order I'm going to put these in so let me do that and I'll do that. I went from not enough to way too many so I rearranged it one more time and now we've got it worked out and I know what colors are going to go where. So before I put any colors in the pan I'm going to write on my color key which colors are where and I'm going to put a W in front of the color name for watercolor and a G in front of the color name for the gouache so that I know which colors in the palette are which ones. So like for this first one, I need my reading glasses, we'll do a W and then it's permanent yellow lemon and then the next one is a W and it's permanent yellow light. So I'm going to do that for the whole color key and then we'll fill our pan and we'll make our swatches. I've got my palette all completely full and I've given certain colors a larger pan than others because I know from experience with the way I paint that those are colors I'm going to use more of like the yellows, the one blue when I did the swatches I just fell in love with the peacock blue which is very much like a Prussian blue and then I gave the black kind of a larger pan because I think I might be using that a lot when I paint with this particular palette. So now we're going to take our brush out, we got it wet, the paints are still very wet and juicy so you won't need too much of them to do your swatches but you definitely want to go ahead and you don't have to wait for them to dry to create your color key and I like to have my colors sort of darker at the top and lighter at the bottom so I can get some sort of idea of what they're going to look like in varying tones when I'm painting with them. That was a lot of the orange so I'm going to put a little bit on there and then I'm going to just get just water and pull it down so the top of that is darker than the bottom. I'm going to do that with each color, I like this carmine color. This is a good reason why you want to really swatch your colors because the outside of the tube if you look at the color stripe on the tube on the packaging it looks like a brownish red but when you paint with it it's very magenta-y so this is why you want to do this because they're going to look different on paper than they do in the tube packaging or even just straight out of the tube because even straight out of the tube that looks really darker, much darker than it is when you put it on paper. This is a peacock blue, I just love this color. And then what I'll do is I'll let the color key dry and the paints in the pan dry, I'll leave it open. These paints are very fresh and juicy so it's probably going to take two days or so depending on where you live and how damp it is for this to dry. If you're in a drier climate they might dry faster. You can see where I put some white out on the paper but that's fine. As long as I have some kind of an idea of what the paint looks like on the paper I'm good. I almost never get that grid on these color keys right the first time. So these are the gouaches. So here's the magenta gouache and compared to the car mines a little bit more on the yellow side but it's pretty comparable. I like both of these, I could see definitely using these together in some floral paintings. Here's the cyan which I love, a little different than the peacock blue in color. So there you go, that is how you put together a palette. Don't limit yourself when you buy these palettes to the way that they come from the factory meaning this holds 12 half pans or 6 full pans but if that's not enough space for you you can take it out. You aren't stuck using this. So think about that when you're setting it up. I'm going to just leave this out and set it aside and after the paints are dry it can be closed up. When the color key is dry, I have a few of them now, I will laminate it so that when I'm playing with my paints and I'm spritzing it with water I don't get the color key wet. So I usually laminate them or make a plastic sleeve for them or something like that so that they don't get damaged in the painting process. And that's it. So I hope you have fun setting up your custom palette and I have more color keys to do. Alright, that's it for today. Don't forget to support me if you can and are able to by shopping in my Etsy store. I'd appreciate it. I have four new stamp sets that came out today. I am filming this on Monday, February 22nd and they just literally the pre-order listings just went up today. The designs were just finalized a few minutes ago. So if you can go over there and take a look at them and buy some. If you don't want to do that then you can also click that little blue support button on my YouTube channel's main page and support me that way. That would be great and I'll keep the free tutorials and everything, the live broadcast coming. That's it for right now. Go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself like make yourself a custom paint palette. That's it for today. I'll see you later. Bye.