Pallet Cleaning Tutorial

Hey everybody. I'm back with you guys today, and I've got something that I would call kind of cool. Although I'm kind of biased in that aspect of course. :) So today I've got a little type of tutorial for you. I know that a lot of you out there in the painting and art world use pallets to hold your paint. I don't really know how many of you let the paint cake up in it like I do, but I'm going to show you a fun, creative and useful technique to clean it, if you do this. It's fast, it's easy, and it's not as wasteful as just dumping all of that excess paint into the drain. Plus, that's probably not the best when you want to keep your drain unclogged. So let's get started.

The first step is to choose which section of your pallet that you want to clean out first. But let me note first that this method of cleaning is a bit slower, but it's a cool technique in the long run. After you've chosen the section that you want to clean, you're going to dump a little bit of water into that section. Then, you take a paintbrush, and mix it around. The paint will mix with the water, coloring the water and dissolving the paint into the water. I must tell you that this doesn't work with all types of paint, but I always find that it's at least worth a shot.

Then, you just load up your paintbrush with the paint and the water, and spread it over some paper. It works the same way as a color wash does, and gives you lots of colorful, pastel like pages to use in your work.

Here's a pile of papers that I did just today off of my pallet. They always seem to turn out nice and colorful. Just a hint, darker colors work best for this technique. That gives it a bit more colored pigment to mix with the water, and it doesn't turn out as just being a hint of color on the paper that is barely even there. Anyways. That's the tutorial for today. I hope that you guys enjoyed it. One last tip though, is that you can use these papers and scrape paint on top of them, stamp on them, stencil them, spray inks, and in other words just layer over top of them. A lot of times they can turn out really well, and you can never tell that they were made from leftovers. And there's no shame in that.