Oil paint is lovely, except that it's almost impossible to know the exact right amount of oil paint to put on the palette. Too little, and the painting suffers for being skimpy with the right colour. Too much and we are throwing away money. Oil paint can be expensive and some colours could easily be $10 for half an inch of paint.
If only there was a better way.
But before I get to that, let me tell you the story of
Torrit Grey, one of the rarest and most sought after paint colours in the last few years. Even more amusing, is it's a different colour every batch. Torrit grey is made from pigment and dust caught in the air filter of one of the paint companies (the company that makes the filter is called Torrit, thus the name of the colour). They clean out the filter and make a small batch of paint with whatever random shit was in the air that year. (given they are on the West Coast of the USA, wildfire smoke is a thing). Apparently, it's always a beautiful colour and sells out extremely fast. People collect tubes from different years like famous baseball cards and the resell value of one of these is exceptional.
Let's combine these two things into one awesome, home made version of Torrit Grey.
Palette Grey
It's not my idea but I embrace it with passion. It's also an idea I don't see mentioned very often which I don't understand why. It's absolutely fantastic!
At the end of a paint session, so long as I haven't used any medium, I pile the remaining paint at the center of the palette and give it a good mix. Then I put it in one of these tiny Tiger Balm (or any other small, air tight container) jars. Mine is the 18g size which is something like 15-20ml size jar which seems to be perfect. Sometimes I'll avoid adding white as I like a darker palette grey and instead put the white
in a clove box as I know I'll be using it again in a day or so.
One of the advantages of palette grey is that each painter has their favourite paints and this influences the colours palette grey produces. Although, it always seems a little bit different as one never knows how much paint is going to be left over.
Although it's a nice colour to pop on the palette for desaturating and greying down colours. I mostly use palette grey for underpainting. Although I do like to let it dry a bit longer than normal so that it has more time to cure before putting on the next layers - in keeping with Flexible over less flexible. Either that, or avoid earth colours in the top layers to prevent cracked paint.
this one I gave it an extra month after it was touch dry.
So does it work?
I've been keeping this jar of palette grey on the go for a little under a year and I'm still enjoying it. The jar is small enough there's very little air in there to cause the paint to stiffen or cure. I think keeping a jar of Palette Grey has merit and will keep going with it another year and see how I like it.
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