Finished Folding Oil Palette with Pastel Box Option

I put the final finishes on my folding oil painting palette last weekend, even adding some mini super magnets to latch it closed. I also added a brush holder which attaches to the magnet in the right wing when it is open

 

 My "Palette Garage" which holds my oil paint piles, sits nicely on the top edge. The large middle section will be used to mix my colors so it will not ever look this clean again!

But I wasn't done yet! A month or so ago, I had tried to downsize my plein air pastel palette, shown in the right in the photo below. Although I have a very nice Heilman pastel box (shown at left), I wanted something a bit smaller. I used this new tiny collection of pastels just once. Just a bit TOO small. I needed larger pieces of pastel.

I like to look around several thrift stores occasionally and found a case that was about the perfect size! It was a cassette tape case for 16 cassettes.

I figured I could find a way of using this for my new pastel plein air setup. It's a bit smaller than the Heilman:

Because it is really difficult to find an exact size of box to fit into this, I decided to construct my own from foam core board. I enjoy building things with foam core. I made the small boxes with lids, and the larger box with some divisions to get the pastels secure, and a lid that would stay on from the pressure of the small boxes when closed. Here they are in place, with only a couple pastels inside.

Once they were ready, it took a long time to decide how to load them with pastels. I wanted to use some larger pieces and more hard pastels. I use a lot of blues for skies, so added plenty of those. I use few reds, oranges or yellows, so kept those to a minimum.

For the harder pastels, I assembled a set based on Michael Chesley Johnson's "Extreme Limited Palette for Pastels". My set, close to Michael's, is on the left below. I still wanted a few more hard pastels, so selected the others on the right side. I also added a black, grey, and white pastel pencil.

 Here it is compared to the Heilman:

Add with the lids on:

 Here it is sitting on the new oil painting palette setup:

I'll have to give one of these a try this weekend. Hmmm, which will it be?