Inexpensive Palette

I recently attended a impromptu drop-in life drawing/painting class a few weeks ago and after the class I had a change to chat with some of the artists and after questioning her about her palette, she gave me the details about her choice.

She explained that she had taken a workshop with Dawn Whitelaw awhile back and this was the palette that Dawn usually teaches with. She went on to say that the reason Dawn uses this palette is because it's cheaper on her art students who don't have that much money to purchase paints. She has her students purchase only 4 tubes of paint in primary hues and then has them mix their secondary hues and from there they can additionally mix tertiary if necessary.

Here is Dawn Whitelaw's palette for her students:

Holbein titanium white
Winton cadmium deep red hue (naphthol pigment)
Utrecht cadmium yellow light
Ultramarine blue (any brand)

She said that Dawn also explained that because they are inexpensive paints and have more fillers and oils, they can be used without a painting medium.

This is also great in the fact that a student can purchase a large tube of paint instead of purchasing the smaller tubes because that is all they can afford. It seems one of the biggest quirks that art teachers report are that art students only squeeze out a tiny bit of paint instead of squeezing out large globs of paint to work with. It seems that Dawn's palette might eleviate this tendancy in students because they're not paying a lot for their paint, only buying 4 tubes instead of 14 or more and if they buy large tubes then they're more inclined to squeeze out large globs of paint. I know would feel better about it.

I think this is a great idea and it was nice to see that Dawn is working on a way to help out her students by discovering a nice alternative for painting supplies for her students. I'm going to give this palette a go and blog about it once I have enough information to report.