Portable Painter Watercolor Palette Modification

Hi everyone, this is just a quick video to show you a

modification

I made to my

portable

painter

's

palette

. Viewer Mel B suggested to me that he could change one of the things that bothered me about this

palette

and my last review about it, so thanks Mel. and I'm going to explain to you very quickly what I did and why. Well, this is the

portable

painter

, which is a great little travel palette. I really love these things, it has little water wells and this is a new one that I haven't changed yet on this side, we have three mixing wells and I like that a lot, but on this side the wells are divided into many more small sections and I don't like it very much, it gets a little complicated.

I like to mix small colors like that and if I do it, I'll do it in a corner of a larger one, so this gets cumbersome for me. Your mileage may vary of course but what I did was modify one of these and this is a new one and this is the one I use, get this stuff out of here now however you can, I got my trainer from Windsor and Newton, it's like falling apart, This is the side that comes to the three wells and what I did was I modified the other side by cutting out these sections.

There are dividers in these sections and Mel B suggested using a dremel tool and that's what he was planning on doing, but while I was loading my dremel I thought I'd give it a try. I used it with one of these, a little Swiss army knife, and it worked great, so this is what I used and by the way, if you don't have a Swiss army knife, they're great. I mean, I use this thing all the time for everyone. Anyway, this is the sheet I use and I'll show you what I did on the other palette here.

Okay, so we have all these sections and I wanted it to be three sections, so what I did was I used a hair dryer and warmed up each section before cutting it, maybe 30 seconds or so to get the plastic nice and warm and soft. and then I came in and I hope I can show you this. I won and made vertical cuts. What I did was I cut each of these little crosses and this cross beam here to make little vertical cuts here here here and then what I would do because my blade is nice and sharp and flat, you can see it can get real. flat with that deck when I went in and I glued it down and I cut out all these sections and basically I was able to get a plus sign out of here and I did that too on this vertical cut here vertical cut here and remember this is soft plastic when heated with the hair dryer and obviously I should also mention that if you're working with a sharp blade like this, be very careful, this is something only for adults and adults who can do this without getting hurt, but yeah, again. vertical cut here vertical cut here came in from the side, you can see how it gets nice and flat and he slid it all the way through, you know, he cut all the way through and took that section out, he did the same thing on this one and he cut it out. flat from here, so what I ended up doing was leaving very slight ridges in the three wells and what you can do, I probably could have left it like that mm-hmm, but what I ended up doing was getting some fine sandpaper and a kind of sanding. those below and I don't know, let me see if I can move this, you might be able to see just a little bit of the remains, maybe right there you can see the remains of those bars that separated these areas pretty well. before once I was done I took some fine grit sandpaper and sanded it all down so it's nice and flat and then I used this Novus scratch remover and it may not be necessary but I noticed that when I first did it Once, the sandpaper made it rough. to where I was getting more stains than I wanted so I used this to polish it a little bit smoother and it's the Novus Fine Scratch Remover.

I bought it on Amazon, you can also use brass, oh and I think this is some old, old cannabis. It looks different today, but it also has about the same amount of sand. You can know that you put it on a cloth, rub it and keep working. In a way it's almost like liquid fine sandpaper and you just keep wiping it, rubbing it, wiping it and speeding it up, so Brasso or not, you could probably keep using this and get these nice shiny things like this side, it's so good, it's so good for polishing and moving, removing scratches. and rough surfaces, so now that this is all, get this out of here now, if these wells are open, I can get nice juicy washes on these and this side and it's much better for the way I work now.

I'll show you One more thing here, real quick, this is a separate thing. I showed you my 250 palette in my Holbein review and since then I have loaded it with color and been using it for smaller paintings and as a travel palette, but it still has the same problem of not closing, so what I did was take a little bit of fake leather and gave it a little bit of wings, but I sewed it up, so this little case keeps it closed so it's snug but it slides in. It keeps it closed and tight. I put a couple of magnets inside this and they magnetized to the tin palate and that keeps everything nice and protected and the palate closed when it's in my bag, so I thought that was fun.

I'm not really telling you how to do it, I just winged it, but yeah, this is all hand sewn and this is just fake leather that I bought from Walmart anyway, let's get back to this, so now I have my six wells and as you can see . Now I can do nice big juicy washes right in these areas where I couldn't before, so it's nice, now you see a little bit of beading there, but yeah, it's cool. Now I really like this thing a lot more as another portable side note. The painter sent an email to people who own this and have signed up.

I guess I don't know if it's a registration thing or some way to get on his mailing list and he asked people who are using this if they were interested in maybe a smaller size laptop. painter or maybe even a larger size portable painter so I think that's great, we may get another size portable painter at some point so I'm all for it. I would buy another one if it was different enough and offered. There's enough difference with this one so anyway that's all for today. I just wanted to quickly show you what I did to modify this guy.

There will be more videos soon so everyone stay safe and I'll watch them next time.