My new favorite gouache palette setup

I’ve finally found a setup for my gouache palette that I really like.

Here’s a video version of the post in which I show the palette in detail:

My favorite gouache palette setup

My favorite gouache palette setup

Watch this video on YouTube.

As some of you know, I’ve been painting more with gouache paint last year. What I didn’t mention is that it always felt like a huge ordeal compared to watercolor – since gouache is best used fresh, this means squeezing out new paint every time you want to paint. You can let your paint blobs dry and reactivate them, but they get crumbly and aren’t as nice to paint with.

During my first steps with the medium, I tried out all kinds of palettes I had, and ended up with a simple flat palette that I cleaned every time after painting. I added a strip of paper towel for the paints to sit on so that they stayed moist during painting. It worked, but still felt a lot of hassle and a lot of unused paint went to waste. Paint is expensive, and I didn’t like it. And I never took it with me anywhere.

I happened to buy an airtight plastic palette at some point that I saw another artist use. I usually like metal palettes better, but I figured I should at least give it a try. And somehow this made painting with gouache much easier and more practical – the paint stays moist in between sessions (if you paint every few days at least), and I don’t have to throw away paint any longer, which is a big plus.

What I use now is a Mijello Fusion folding palette with 18 wells and three mixing areas. It closes airtight, although it’s not sold as a stay-wet-palette. It still works that way, which means the paint stays fresh and moist. I sometimes add a tiny drop of glycerin to help my older, dryer paints. I’ve only had mold problems once with one color so far, the ivory black. The palette has a clear plastic insert that you can take out for cleaning, so cleaning has also become a lot easier. It’s always a big mess to clean palettes with integrated wells under a sink because water gets everywhere on the paint. Now I take out the insert, clean it with a brush and then under water. It’s just a bit fragile, so it already has a crack.

Overall I’m really happy with this palette. The only thing I don’t like is the size – it’s huge. I mean, it’s ok for studio use, everyone loves a big mixing area and big painting wells, but I’m not sure if I want to put it in my bag. For plein air painting (which I haven’t tried yet with this palette) I will have to think of a system to fix this palette to my support board and still have a place for the sketchbook! But I’ve seen other painters carry around palettes that were of a similar size, so it’s definitely possible. I’m simply not accustomed to it. The palette doesn’t have a thumb hole, probably because it wouldn’t be airtight otherwise. So it’s a bit less practical than the other watercolor palettes I use regularly. But it also means wet paint will stay inside the palette when you close it.

I’m really happy that I have discovered this kind of palette. Mijello have a number of similar ones with different layouts and wells. I chose the smallest one with 18 wells. There are similar plastic palettes than you can get for a very good price, but these are usually not airtight.

When I start a painting session, I add a little water on the paint with a spray bottle, and refill any wells that need new paint. When I’m done, I simply close the palette, and the paint stays fresh for the next session. In autumn 2020, I painted with gouache at least every few days and it worked great, now that I haven’t used the palette in over a month of course the paint has dried and cracked and I will need to replace it before use. But this is still much better than throwing away dried paint after every session.

So enough talking about this great new palette, what colors did I put in it? I’ve filled the palette except for one well, which I’m currently using as a place to put my clamp in. Here are the colors:

Zink white (for mixing)
Titanium white (for opaque white)
Lemon Yellow
Permanent Yellow Deep
Yellow Ochre
Chrome Orange
Cadmium Red Light
Carmine Red or Purple Magenta
(empty well that I could put Dioxazine Violet in)
Ultramarine Blue
Phthalo Blue
Viridian Hue
Sap Green
May Green
Burnt Siena
Raw Umber
Burnt Umber
Ivory Black

For me this is a well-balanced palette that gives me more than enough choices. You can of course use a more reduced palette – when I was still working with fresh paint for every session, I used 6 colors at the most. I find that I usually use a limited number of colors for each painting, it keeps the gamut (range of colors) smaller and often paintings seem better composed with limited colors, because all of the mixes work well together.

All paints in my palette are either Winsor & Newton Designer’s gouache or Schmincke HKS Designer’s Gouache/Horadam Gouache. I still have one tube of Royal Talens Extra fine, which is also nice, but increasingly hard to get in Germany. With this kind of palette you could probably even use cheaper gouache paint that doesn’t reactivate at all or is very crumbly, because the paint stays moist for so long, but I don’t bother anymore with the cheap stuff because it’s usually difficult to paint with.

For gouache, I don’t pay as much attention to single pigment paints as with watercolor – I have a couple of three-pigment mixes, but they perform really well for mixing. If you use colors that play well together when mixing, this is not a huge deal.

A note about the whites: if you only want to use one white, choose the titanium white. It’s more opaque and can cover dark areas. I added the zink white because I still have a large tube of it, and I find it a good white for mixing – it’s a bit more gentle and doesn’t cool down the color as much as the titanium white. But it’s also less opaque and won’t cover dark areas as well as titanium white.

I hope this is a helpful overview for those of you wanting to try out gouache. I have found that painting with this setup means I’m fighting less with gouache as a medium (which can be finicky) and can concentrate on the act of painting – which is hard enough. It’s important to find the tools that work for you. I still find myself going back to watercolor very often, because I’m more comfortable with handling it.

Have you tried out gouache? What does your setup look like? What’s your experience with different palettes?