Here's a beautiful wooden palette I received from South Korean artist Charlie Lee in Amsterdam a few months ago at the Urban Sketchers Symposium. Charlie had a booth at the symposium and was selling his handmade wooden palettes and watercolour boxes.
This particular one that I received had the USK Amsterdam Symposium logo etched onto the cover.
This is actually one of many designs available. Mine had three mixing wells and 12 paint wells. There are other models available on Charlie's Etsy store.
The smallest one has only one mixing well and one paint well. This is probably good for monochrome or value sketching.
And this has 24 paint wells. Other models have different number of paint and mixing wells.
The design looks really nice. The wood is walnut wood. And since it's made of wood, no two palette will look similar because of the wood grain and colour. All edges are rounded off and it's just really nice and compact to hold in hand.
That's the hinge that allows the palette to open flat.
Each paint well probably holds half the amount of paint compared to a typical plastic half pan. Because it doesn't hold a lot of paint, this palette is not suitable for long overseas sketching trips.
The maximum brush size I would use with this palette is probably a size 6. Using a big brush with such small paint wells does not mean you can pick up more paint.
The mixing areas are some sort of white plastic thingy pasted onto the circular cutouts.
Mixing area is small and quite limited. This means creating large amount of mixture for painting large areas is not possible. You'll have to constantly mixing the same colour once you run out of mixture.
I'm not sure if there's any water-proofing done on the wood. Anyway, wood is porous by default so you can expect watercolour to stain.
Price of this palette, at the time of this review, is US $37.50 not including shipping. Price varies depending on the model.
These palettes are quite popular judging by the number of customers on Charlie's Etsy store. Head on over to read more reviews. Links below.
https://www.etsy.com/shop/CharlieUSKFactory
https://www.facebook.com/CharliesUrbanPlatform/
