Acrylic's one real drawback is speed. It skins over on the palette faster than most people can use it, and a color you mixed twenty minutes ago is often gone. Almost everything about choosing a palette comes down to how much you care about that.
Start here: do you need one at all
If you are painting a numbered canvas, probably not. The paints arrive already mixed, in individual sealed pots, in the quantities that design needs, and there is nothing to lay out. Working straight from the pot is the intended method and it wastes the least paint.
You need a palette when you start mixing your own colors, or when you want to thin or blend, and that is when the rest of this matters.
Stay-wet palette
The one that solves the actual problem. A shallow airtight tray holding a layer of damp sponge or paper towel, with a sheet of semi-permeable palette paper on top. Water moves up through the paper from below and keeps the paint workable, and with the lid on, mixed colors survive for days rather than minutes.
If you mix your own colors at all, this is the single most useful thing you can own. Two warnings from experience: do not let it get so wet that the paint thins itself, and do not leave it sealed for weeks in a warm room, because it will grow mold. Change the paper when it does.
Making one for nothing
A plastic food container with a lid, a few sheets of kitchen paper dampened until they are wet but not swimming, and a sheet of greaseproof or parchment paper on top. That is the whole thing. It works nearly as well as the bought version and costs whatever the container cost.
Glass
The best mixing surface there is once you are mixing seriously. Nothing absorbs into it, so colors stay true, and dried acrylic lifts off a glass surface in a single sheet with a blade. Many painters put a piece of gray or mid-toned paper underneath, because judging a color against white is misleading and against gray is not.
Use tempered glass with finished edges. Ordinary window glass breaks into shards, and a palette is exactly the sort of thing that gets knocked off a table. It does nothing about drying speed.
Disposable palette paper
A pad of coated sheets. You tear one off and throw it away. Genuinely convenient, no cleaning at all, and the running cost is the trade-off. Best for people who paint occasionally, worst for anyone painting several times a week.
Plastic trays and wells
The cheap molded palette with thumb hole and round wells. Fine for holding small amounts of separate colors and poor for mixing, because the wells are too small and too deep to work a color properly.
The real problem is staining. Acrylic bonds well to plastic, so these discolor permanently and dried paint is hard to remove without scratching the surface. If you buy one, buy a smooth flat one rather than one full of wells.
A dinner plate
Worth saying, because it is what a lot of experienced painters actually use. A smooth white or gray ceramic plate is non-porous, easy to clean, heavy enough not to slide, and already in the cupboard. Dried acrylic peels off glazed ceramic much as it does off glass.
Use one that has left the kitchen for good rather than one going back in the cupboard afterwards.
What not to use
Bare wood, unless it is sealed. Traditional oil painters use wooden palettes and season them with oil, which is exactly the wrong surface for water-based paint. Raw wood absorbs water out of acrylic, so it dries even faster, and paint keys into the grain permanently.
Paper plates and cardboard, for the same reason: they soak the water straight out of the paint.
Keeping paint workable
Beyond the palette itself, three habits do most of the work.
Put out less than you think. A pea of paint used up is better than a spoonful skinned over.
Mist with a spray bottle. A fine mist of water every ten minutes buys real time on any open palette. Mist, do not soak, because water added to acrylic cannot be taken back out and over-thinned paint loses its covering power.
Cover between sittings. Even a plate under an upturned bowl keeps a mixed color usable overnight.
Cleaning
Wet paint comes off anything with water. Dried paint is a different matter, and the method depends entirely on the surface.
Glass and glazed ceramic: let it dry completely, then lift the whole film with a blade or a plastic scraper. It comes away in one piece and is oddly satisfying.
Plastic: soak in warm soapy water and work it gently with a cloth. Expect staining and accept it. Do not attack it with a solvent, which will craze the plastic and achieve very little.
Stay-wet paper: replace the sheet.
Whatever the surface, do not tip acrylic sludge down a sink. Let the rinse water stand in a jar until the solids settle, pour off the clear water, and bin the residue once it has dried.
If a kit pot runs low
A palette does not help with this, because you cannot match a kit color by mixing, and a generic white will not be the same white. There is a matched extra paint set for every design we sell.
If you are mixing because you want to depart from the numbers deliberately, our piece on personalizing a kit covers what you can change without breaking the design, and the color wheel covers what happens when you mix.
