Created a new glass palette

Background

When oil painting, a glass palette is a great bit of kit. Its great for mixing colours on with a palette knife - it's tough and durable and so easy to keep clean, either by wiping it over with a rag, maybe with some odourless mineral spirits if required, or by scraping clean with a razor blade or one of those razor-blade paint scrapers. It does take a little preparation, however, and these are my notes as I setup a new and bigger glass palette.

I recently moved my studio into a slightly smaller space in my house but I like it better because its cosy, overall a better shape and the natural daylight coming in through the window is better. I painted the walls a light grey to minimise any colour distortion when painting.

I have a long, double-section chest-of-drawers which I now use to store all my oil painting supplies. I thought it would be great to have a sheet of glass covering the entire top surface (1405mm x 485mm) so I ordered a custom piece of toughened clear glass with polished edges from a local glazing company. They could provide it in 4mm or 6mm thickness, so I opted for the 6mm version as I thought it would be a bit sturdier with its long length. It cost me £100 which I thought was fair enough - but after I'd ordered it my daughter told me I could have gotten something similar from Ikea for £35. 😒

My first glass palette was a shelf from an old fridge which I got from the local recycling center (for free) and its been great. I'd mix up a few colours and sit with it on my knees, in front of the easel, when painting. Although its small, its amazing how heavy things get when you are holding them for an extended period of time.

Any glass palettes which I've seen artists use on YouTube videos are typically larger than this small one and usually placed on a desktop, table or trolley of some kind.

The glass has to be of the toughened variety otherwise you run the risk of it breaking and you want the edges polished so that they are not sharp.

With my recent studio relocation, I now had ample opportunity to invest in a super-sized glass palette.

When mixing paints on a glass palette, you want a mid-grey background so that the full spectrum of light and dark colours can be judged more accurately. If the background is white you tend to make colours less saturated and lower in value because they stand out against the white background. Similarly, if the background is too dark or too highly coloured, then you're judgement of your paint mixtures will be skewed and they'll probably be higher in value and/or hue.

You can put paper of the appropriate grey colour underneath the glass and this is probably the most convenient option, as you can easily change it. I didn't have any to hand, so the next option was to paint the underneath side of the glass.

I had some of the light grey matt emulsion which I used for the walls and I added some black acrylic paint to get the approximate shade of grey.

I tried to match the grey of my existing glass palette and then applied it to the glass sheet, trying to ensure it was uniformly covered. You don't really need any special preparation of the glass - just ensure its clean, dry and free of any oily marks or fingerprints. Even though the surface is very slick, the acrylic paint adheres okay to it, although it is easily scratched off.

I applied three coats and gave it 4 hours to dry between each coat.

The finished result was great! The colour underneath was very uniform and no white patches of the drawer unit top showed through. I'll probably only use half of the area for a palette and the other half will have a cutting mat.

Next thing is to sort out my lighting and probably make a wall-easel on that wall behind the palette. The drawer unit is slim enough so I wouldn't be reaching over it and could paint comfortably standing in front of it.