Painter's Miscellany #4

I have recently acquired two new painting accessories.  The first was a tiny ceramic palette and the second a "helping hand" mainly to help me glue those tricky bits that require three hands .

Ceramic Micro Palette - (£12.99)
This was bought to alleviate a recurrent problem.  Five years ago I started using a cheap plastic palette in a takeaway food carton as a "sort of" wet palette.

I like this a lot.  I get rapid access to reservoirs of my most commonly used paints without having to open a number of bottles or pots.  I don't use it for mixing or diluting paints.  I have another palette for that.  All told it's a great time saver.  However, the palette has a couple of drawbacks that have only come to light after years of use.

• Over four or five weeks the damp paper towel gets mouldy despite adding some bleach every so often.  It does a great job of keeping the paint reservoirs moist, and is easily replaced, but I know it's time to clean things when the mould spreads to the plastic palette.
• Eventually the paint dries out; usually around the edge of the wells.  So the wells have to be thoroughly cleaned.  This results in the second drawback: cleaning is a right royal pain in the you know what.  It's possible to remove all residues but it takes time and effort.

In 2019 I got fed up with my plastic mixing palette because it too was a pain to clean.  I switched to a ceramic palette like this:

This is wonderful and well worth the expense.  The ceramic is ridiculously easy to clean.  A five minute soak in hot water lifts off all the paint with hardly any effort.  It's so easy I now clean it after every other painting session.

So I decided to source a ceramic replacement for the small palette that would fit in a takeaway container.  After much searching I found this via eBay:

Here it is inside its container.

I haven't used it yet.  I'm waiting until I've used up the paint in the old version but I'm looking forward to much less fuss when it comes to cleaning it.

Helping Hand - Aldi UK (£2.99)
I don't have an immediate use for this nor do I think I'll be using this regularly but when I do it will be really useful.  Especially when I start doing fiddly glueing and drilling.  Anyway, at this price it was too good to miss.