Portable, Disposable Watercolor Palette
Need a smaller, portable, even disposable watercolor palette for sketching in your Nature Journal? Here’s an easy way to create a custom one of your own.
When I’m out and about creating Nature Journal pages, I use a small half-pan watercolor palette that holds 12 colors. It’s portable enough for most field sketches, but sometimes I want something even smaller and easier to balance. So I created this little system for those times.
Creating a Watercolor Pencil Palette: Gather Supplies
Say hello to my easy, peasy and disposable watercolor palette. It’s flat, weighs almost nothing, and clips right to your sketchbook.
Supplies needed to create your own:
- Index cards
- Watercolor pencils
- Binder clip or paper clip
- Access to a laminator (many libraries and copy shops have one)
Watercolor pencils are so versatile! Did you know that you can color with them dry, then use a watercolor brush to pick up paint just like it was a pan watercolor set? That’s how this system works. Choosing artist grade pencils can make a big difference in the intensity of the colors. For that reason, I use Prismacolor Watercolor Pencils.
Premier Watercolor Pencils (Set of 24)
Create Your Personal Palette
Just like working with fill-able half-pans, you get to create your own custom palette of colors. Because this is temporary and disposable, you can make as many different palettes as you need!
- Choose the colors you want to take along on your sketching adventure. This might vary from trip to trip depending on season and ecosystem. For instance, if you’re traveling to the beach, you’ll probably want a selection of blues; greens if you’re headed to the mountains.
- When choosing your colors, remember that you can mix them just like pan colors. You don’t need every color that you own! The more colors you choose, the more index cards you’ll need to get enough pigment to be usable.
- Don’t have all the pencil colors you’d like? You can certainly mix the dry colors right on your index card — nothing says that you have to use only pure, 1-pencil color to create your palette! (create an index card with mixed pencil colors)
- Color large swatches of your chosen colors onto your index card. Make sure to really saturate the card with plenty of pigment. I usually keep it to 6 colors plus a strip of black on one index card.
- Leave space between your swatches, otherwise you’ll end up with mud when you begin grabbing your color.
- Take 2 blank index cards, place them back to back and have them laminated. I use 2 back to back to make the mixing palette sturdier. You’ll use this over and over. This becomes your mixing palette. Pro tip: you can usually get more than one card on a sheet of lamination — use all of that space! You can give extras to friends or carry them in more than one sketchbook.
Using Your Portable Palette in the Field
When I use this system, it’s generally because I’m hiking and don’t have a lot of time to sit and paint. This is a great system for standing and sketching. I tend to use this more for creating color swatches on my page and not so much for coloring a whole image, although with a tiny sketch you could certainly use this palette for the entire image!
Using your binder clip, or even a paperclip, attach your palette and mixing palette to your sketchbook (they might blow away otherwise!). Take your water-brush and grab a bit of your chosen color from the corner of a swatch. Just like in a regular pan palette, your colors will muddy over time — if you use the corners first, there’s less accidental mixing. You can now go straight to your sketch or over to the laminated card to do some mixing — it works just like your half-pan palette!
This disposable watercolor palette system works great for me because I can carry just a tiny sketchbook with everything I need all in my jacket pocket. I also keep one in my glovebox for those unexpected adventures as I go about my day. I hope you’ll give this a try! Let me know what you think in the comments.
