testing my own watercolor palette

I’ve heard that with making a dry gouache palette to use a medium so it doesn’t crack as much- also spraying the paints with water will help them reactivate quickly

Is your humidity very high? If they aren't handmade they should be dry in about 1-3 days😅

Just spray your watercolor pans or put a drop of water in it

If you struggle with getting full vibrancy from pans just drop a couple of water drops in the pans for a couple of minutes, or spray the palette with some water spray and use after a couple of minutes. It really helps. Denise always talks about how hard it is to rewet W&N pans, but I've never experienced this, despite having many pro brands to compare with, but i always spray them before, no matter what brand. I also never experienced colors swatching differently in the pan, with one exception of Van Gogh Dusk green - it was really hard to get the same texture, but that's a speciality color, so idk.

Very useful tips in the comments!

My m. Graham paints contain honey and that keeps them from drying down matte. They stay glossy and rehydrate beautifully.

what an incredible piece, it looks amazing ☺☺☺

The end result is beautiful.

I'm really loving your custom palette journey so far!! My ultimate, like, life hack (lol) for lazy cohesive colours is just a limited palette. Like I'll use some primary triad + two other colours and then everything is automatically cohesive because it uses the same paints. For example, if you use the same yellow and blue you used in the skin tones to paint the green leaves, then the colours will cohesive by default

Your ability to candidly critique your own work is honestly incredibly refreshing! It sucks that it sounds like so many people misinterpret what you're saying when you point out things you did that you don't personally like.

I love your art and I love your energy! Thank you so much for sharing both <3

Have you ever tried doing small color studies to figure out what palette you want, and doing color mixing charts? Those are definitely my go to tips for everything color related.

the ingredients do make a difference when it comes to how fast the paints are rewetting. there are some pigments that just take a little longer to reactivate and honey-based watercolour paints often rewet faster and can stay sticky for longer than colours based on just gum arabic.
some people rewet their palette a few minutes before starting to paint with a pipette or a spray bottle... I personally don't like unnecessarily rewetting all my paints...I don't know... it feels kinda wasteful to mess with them if they're not in use.

I would be careful selling original paintings with this bright pink. not because it's not pretty, but because there's a high probability that it's not lightfast. you don't know if they want to put your painting on the wall and then in 6 months of time, all the pink will be faded into nothingness.