Organize Your Pallet

I am a big believer in only needed three tubes of paint to keep your colors in harmony. All the ladies in the Beyond Bob Workshop got a mini-taste of mixing colors out of yellow, blue and red. Bill Alexander gets it (or "got it" since he died many years ago). I paint complete painting that way sometimes and, honestly, those sell better than those where I've had 20 tubes of paint out at a session. Color harmony is super important, so if you are mixing from only the primaries your colors are guaranteed to be harmonious. It's the best, greatest improvement in my painting over the past year. Switching to the palette topic, although I posted the pic of my Bob Ross palette (which I only use for Bob Ross classes and demos) I am much less organized on my larger 18 x 36" glass palette. I have mixes going everywhere on that one, but generally lay out my colors in the order of the standard color wheel. Makes mixing variations much easier and in case one pile dirties another it's okay since that just moves a color in a direction for highlights or shading. On my plein air glass palette I'm even less organized. I paint with only the three primaries, plus a brown, white and black. I might occasionally throw in a tube of some green to add some variations if the painting is predominantly green, The result is that I have piles everywhere. I try to keep my whites and blacks clean and in a corner of the palette, but everything else is a mess, but in my mind it is organized and accessible. That's what's most important. Chris's method is fantastic to keep things in the same place every time, and you can see that I embrace that organization every time I paint at a Bob Ross class, but note that mine doesn't mimic Bob's I placed my sap green down with my yellows because it made more sense to me since I ONLY use sap green as a mixing green. Bravo on not cleaning until you are done. I only clean them when it is absolutely necessary. Usually a dip into oil and a wiping out it more than sufficient to get your brushes clean, even if you are switching from highlights to shadows or vice versa.

I've even lately (the past two weeks) embraced not washing my brushes at all after reading an article in Plein Air Magazine by Thomas Jefferson Kits (I sat in one of his lectures in New Mexico last year). He lays his brushes in a small paint tray (ones for painting with rollers) with a pool of oil. He lets the bristles sit in the oil so they are ready to go the next time he paints. I've been trying it and my boar bristle brushes seem to be improving as they are not getting trashed by thinner and soap and are likely absorbing some that oil back into the bristles. Yeah, I know I am way off topic now, but this is a great discussion and I'm pushing it in all kinds of directions!