I recently changed by studio palette . I have used both plastic palettes and metal palettes and I have big bias for metal palettes.This is totally a personal preference , Does one kind of palette makes painting better than the other ..NO ! .

I have been using Whiskey painters palette as my plein air palette and absolutely love it. But for studio I needed something bigger but same design overall.

After surfing amazon I found Meedan heavy metal palette the price was bargain for a bigger metal palette.

But this palette needed customization to fit my studio needs and hence the blog post.

This is first picture after unboxing it.

This palette present two problems for me. One the wells are only half pan and second these palettes waste too much space in the way how wells are organized.

I think every square cm of space inside the box is premium real estate and should be smartly allocated and used. And hence came the need to customize it.

First order of business was to take half pan and supporting metal bars out

Next came removing the middle tray , and metal on side which hold half pans in place. I used metal pliers and was extremely careful when removing it. (I do not recommend doing it , unless you don’t care if your palette is ruined in process or if you end up cutting yourself ) You have been warned.

I have one palette from Brass India Palette model name is Aqua pool and I had two trays for it . One with 16 wells and one with 12 wells. (They make great brass palettes and can found on Facebook). I repurposed (cut) those two trays to fit this palette. I used hacksaw to cut the brass color trays.

After cutting both trays to make wells that would fit in meeden palette , It was time to fit the tray in the palette. There was enough space left to fit 4 full watercolor pans too.

This is how I initially set it. But it left tiny bit of space in the box causing pans and tray to move. So I had to figure out a way to keep it snug.

I used the metal cutter to cut the metal holders

After adding those pieces tray fit was snug and color wells did not move. Time for exciting stuff now ! Colors to fill the palette

I ended up with 19 wells in total. More than enough for my style of painting !! You can easily see how big some wells are in relation to 4 full pans.

After few iterations I finally settled on 16 colors and leave 3 for “future” use

Palette looks ready to used and paint. At this point how long this palette would last would depend upon how bad it stains. How much a enameled palette stains depends on quality of enamel used and how it was cured.

Good metal enameled palettes should last you forever ! Well…figuratively speaking !