My Plein Air Equipment Upgrade- Review of the Cloverleaf Palette
I bought a new palette as I prepared for our trip to Europe. I wanted something that folded up small, but allowed more mixing wells than my current palette. The Cloverleaf Paintbox came very well reviewed, so I went with it. I got from the Ken Bromley website. It has much in common with the Craig Young-style plein air palette, but it costs 70$ instead of 500$, is made of plastic, and is, sadly, far less sexy when you take it out of the package.
The good news is that it provides a very functional, light-weight, very sturdy, actual quite well machined palette. It's about 4.5" x 4.5" x 1" folded up. Then it folds out with four interlocking "wings", with approximately a 1' x 1' footprint in total. Like this.
It even has a nice little spot for your thumb to go (a complaint I had with the previous plein air palette I'd been using). The 8 mixing wells are deep enough to really open up a color, the two deep mixing wells are really quite large, and I like the little flat space to very gently mix to colors. The paint wells are deep too, which I liked.
Of course, I couldn't be satisfied with something as simple as that. So I took the hinges off (not too hard), bought some black Fusion spray paint (designed to be applied to plastic), and went to town!!
Its totally superficial, but the final two-toned product (a matte black, with some white highlights) was much more up my alley. A few paintings later and ahhhh, everything is nice and messy. Much better! :D
The good news is that it provides a very functional, light-weight, very sturdy, actual quite well machined palette. It's about 4.5" x 4.5" x 1" folded up. Then it folds out with four interlocking "wings", with approximately a 1' x 1' footprint in total. Like this.
It even has a nice little spot for your thumb to go (a complaint I had with the previous plein air palette I'd been using). The 8 mixing wells are deep enough to really open up a color, the two deep mixing wells are really quite large, and I like the little flat space to very gently mix to colors. The paint wells are deep too, which I liked.
Of course, I couldn't be satisfied with something as simple as that. So I took the hinges off (not too hard), bought some black Fusion spray paint (designed to be applied to plastic), and went to town!!
Its totally superficial, but the final two-toned product (a matte black, with some white highlights) was much more up my alley. A few paintings later and ahhhh, everything is nice and messy. Much better! :D