What color is your palette?

[Richard Budig]

Just wondering what color palette you use, and why?

I've used a medium gray, but now, I'm back to a greenish gray. It's a bit dark, I think. My palette is a half inch thick piece of plywood, covered by glass which helps cleaning. I scrape it off every day with a razor blade scraper. I've thought of changing the greenish gray to something else, but reds tend to make flesh colors look too cool, and blue tends to make flesh tones cooler still because, I think, flesh tones look so warm against blue to my eye.

[Chuck Yokota]

My palette is a glass plate, under which I have a 1/8" ABS sheet that is painted with the same color gesso I use to tone my canvasses (a brownish grey made from burnt umber acrylic paint mixed in white gesso). That works particularly well at the beginning of a painting, to know how the color I'm mixing will appear on the canvas. I try to make things as easy on myself as possible by avoiding mental adjustments between palette and canvas.