Hi everyone, this is Pamela Koei and I'm in my studio today and I have a fun tip for you. But before we get to that, I just wanted to give you a really big thank you, say how much I appreciate you commenting below my videos and really enjoyed reading all the comments about what your favorite tools are and what your biggest struggles are. So today I'm going to be showing you just a wonderful technique that I learned in a workshop with Nicholas Wilton. It's a way to keep your acrylic paint wet longer. So keeping them fresher longer is just wonderful. For those of you who've worked in acrylic, you can just not have to throw away the paint once it's dry. So it's a great technique, it's a great tip and I hope you enjoy it and at the end of the video, I'm going to show you where to find the supplies that you need. So I hope you enjoy the video. Thank you. So what I have here is a cafeteria tray and it's about 14 by 17 inches and you do have to somehow get one of these to make this kind of work and I got mine on Amazon and there is a link in my resources at artandsexess.com. If you look at the resources, I do have the cafeteria trays there. So the other thing you're going to need is some blue shop towels and these really are the, you know, you could use regular paper towels as well, but these hold more water. And I think that's probably why Nick preferred the blue towel. And so what I did here is I have several layers of this blue towel and I actually cut them to fit this tray, which is 14 by 17. The 14 by 17 just didn't quite line up with where the sheets tore. So rather than having them hang over the edge, I just decided to cut these ahead of time and I'm putting four sheets down so you can kind of see me doing that. So that's part one is just just getting that down. Part two is when you want to take some water and you basically want to flood this. So just, you know, I have a little container here full of water and you really want it to soak into this blue shop towel and give it a few minutes. Might need more water. You definitely want too much, not too little because we're going to be dumping the excess off. And right now there's a lot of excess here. Okay, so now it's nice and soaked. You can kind of see it's like a pond. There's a lot of water in there. So I have my bucket, my big bucket here. I'm going to show you how you want to pour that excess water off. Okay. And you're going to just let it drip. So I chipped this cafeteria tray until literally that is there just a few drops coming off that corner. Okay. So now I know that this blue shop towel is four layers are really wet and that's good because that's really important that they're wet but not too wet. So then the next thing you're going to need is, you know, tracing paper. And so what I have, I found a tracing paper that actually matches the size of the cafeteria tray. So the cafeteria trays come in different sizes but I tried to find one that matched some brand of tracing paper and this is what I found. So take a sheet of that. Okay. So here is my tracing paper, just one sheet and you're going to lay it on top of the blue shop towel and this is really what's, you know, it's like a wet palette. So now when I take my paint and I've got, I'm going to just put them onto the surface here. You don't want water in the top of the tracing paper you want it below to begin with. I mean, eventually as you clean your brushes out, you're going to get water on top and that's fine but I'm just showing you that. And I, you know, how do you set up your palette? I generally put like the warm colors on one end. I'm just going to squirt some out here and I'm going to put white and black in the middle. I know you don't have to have black but in my, what workshops a lot of times we do value studies and for those we, we actually use black rather than mixing your own, you can mix your own if you like. No need to use the black paint if you don't want to but again, it is nice if you're doing value studies and just, just so you know what I mean by value studies. I did this for a workshop that I did and when I talk about value, I'm talking about how light or how dark it is. So we all know that every color has a value so it is the white is the lightest and then black is the darkest but on, on most value scales you're going to find a wide, you know, about 10 total values that they put on a value scale but of course it's infinite. So, okay, so I'm going to put out some green. This is not a limited palette. This is a lot of color but it's fine just to play around and so what I'm going to do is keep putting the paint out. So you're just going to have to take my word for the fact that once you start to mix these paints, let's say your brush is full of paint and just a few minutes you're going to see that it will be full of paint but if you lay it on this wet palette and you know, you just go home and you come back the next day to your studio or if your studio is in your house and you, you know, you come back to your studio after you've slept, whatever you come back into your studio and the paint is going to be really, it's not going to dry up on you and as long as you keep these blue shop towels nice and wet, then it permeates through this tracing paper and keeps your paints wet and also your brush. I mean, to a certain extent, maybe about a day so you're gaining a lot. I mean, normally the acrylics would be drying in about an hour, you know, on most pallets. So unless you keep putting water or polymer medium or airbrush medium. So anyways, I just wanted to show you that and that's a big thanks to Nicholas Wilton who showed us this and that's one of the things he shows in his workshops which is one of the most valuable things I think I've ever learned in any workshop of any kind. So here is my palette at the end of the day. You can kind of see that, you know, there's not a whole lot of paint on there. There's a bit of airbrush medium here. That's why it's kind of swimming and then I've got quite a bit of black here and I've got quite a bit of yellow and orange and green. So yeah, I want to, you know, save these paints, right? I'm not going to just throw it out and this is again on that wet, that wonderful wet palette after I've used it at the end of the day. So I am going to turn on the lights in the studio and go home. I'll be back tomorrow in the morning and I'm going to show you this palette and we'll see if it looks like this. Hi everybody. So as promised, here is the palette, the same one I was working with last night. This is easily 15 hours later and notice that the blue shop towel has remained nice and you know moist and if it starts to dry out, you can lift this up and just add more water underneath. But you can see that the paints are still nice and fresh. My puddle of black is still nice and fresh and my green is great and so keep in mind that this is a wonderful solution for any acrylic painter. It's going to allow you to have a lot longer work time without adding extra mediums to your paint. So you get to keep it really simple and I hope you enjoy this tip. So I hope you enjoyed that video and just so that you know, I really, really appreciate your comments. I wanted to let you know that I've been reading every single person's comment and it's been just eye opening for me to kind of hear those of you who responded about what your favorite tool is or you know what is your biggest challenge in art. I feel that there's a universal feeling between artists that we kind of struggle in the same way and it doesn't matter how long you've been painting whether you're beginner, you're intermediate, you're advanced or what medium you're working in. So I appreciate your comments and I hope that you'll continue to comment on my videos. And the other way that helps me is it helps me to know going forward what kind of video content you enjoy and you know the reason I'm doing this is to share information and I feel like we're just one big community and when you comment and when you like my videos it's nice to know you're out there. Unless you know you enjoy the video content and I just so appreciate you being there. So again, thank you so much and you will find the resources that we're talked about in this video at artandsexess.com. Go there and you click on the resources link. There's all my favorite art supplies including the cafeteria trade today and the tracing paper. So thanks again until next time. Bye.