Creating a masterpiece with oil paints involves more than just talent and skill; it requires a well-organized oil painting palette. Your palette is your canvas for mixing colors and achieving the desired tones and hues before you begin painting. In this guide, we'll explore different ways to organize your palette and the best Princeton brushes for oil painting.

Choosing Your Palette

Before diving into organizing, you will want to choose a palette. They can be wood, plastic, or glass, and come in various shapes and sizes. You can also use palette paper that can be thrown away after use. Depending on how many colors you will be mixing, you might want to choose a palette that features extra mixing surface. These areas are crucial for blending colors and creating your desired consistency.

Grouping Colors on an Oil Painting Palette

The first step to organizing your oil painting palette is grouping your colors logically. A great way to start is by categorizing your colors based on their properties, such as warm or cool tones. Arrange them in a way that gives you easy access during your painting sessions. Grouping your colors allows you to create harmonious color schemes without wasting time searching for the right pigments. Here are a few ways artists can group their colors:

• Chromatic to Neutral or Neutral to Chromatic – You can organize your palette using ROYGBIV for the bright colors and have neutrals available as a supplement. A palette based on mostly neutrals and earth colors will have an emphasis on light and dark values where the brighter colors are used for highlights and bright focal points.
• Warm and cool – With a warm and cool palette you would organize your colors in pairs or groups of primaries, with a “warm” and “cool” version of each. For example, you could put red (warm) next to blue (cool) to easily mix violet. Or you can put warm colors on one side and cool colors on the other.
• Hue or Value –You can also group bright and neutral colors together by hue on your palette. This could look like grouping bright cadmium red, with burnt sienna and English red. You could also organize the palette by value, from light to dark.
• Minimal - Especially for a travel palette, it makes sense to choose a small assortment of versatile colors that can mix all secondary and tertiary colors. Typically, this would be primary colors and one secondary color, plus white. Place the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) in prominent positions, as they are the foundation for creating other colors.
• Whatever works best for you – Your palette should work for you no matter what. In the end you can put your colors wherever you would like them to be and wherever makes the most sense for your painting goals. However, if you’re not a highly organized artist, putting everything in your paint box on your palette can lead to a lot of wasted paint.

Cleaning and Maintenance

You should regularly clean your oil palette to keep it in the best condition. A good rule of thumb is to clean it between painting sessions to ensure your colors remain true, and you can accurately gauge the tones you're creating. However, with oil painting, you can leave your colors on your palette overnight because the paint doesn’t dry as quickly as other mediums.

Best Oil Painting Brushes

You can’t forget the most important tool for oil painting, your paintbrush! Some of our favorite series to use are Aspen, Catalyst, and Velvetouch Long Handle brushes. They all are synthetic-hair brushes that retain their shape, hold a high volume of paint, and provide a smooth application.

There are many ways to lay out an oil painting palette, depending on the mixing system you use, the color scheme of your artwork, and the end goal of the painting. We hope this guide is helpful to get you started painting your oil masterpiece!