Cleaning Your Palette: What To Do With Extra Paint
One of the best habits you can develop as a painter is putting out generous amounts of paint. A full palette gives you freedom — you can mix confidently, paint boldly, and keep your colors fresh and clean. But the downside is obvious: sometimes you don’t use it all.
When it’s time to clean your palette, don’t scrape all that paint into the trash.
There’s a smarter — and surprisingly fun — way to use it.
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Turn Leftover Paint Into Useful Colors
Instead of tossing extra paint, you can turn it into something incredibly valuable: ready-made colors for future paintings. There are a few ways to approach this depending on what’s left on your palette.
1. Mix Your Warm Colors Together
Reds, yellows, oranges, warm earth tones — these often create beautiful muted oranges, peaches, and warm neutral tones. They’re perfect for underpaintings, skin tones, desert landscapes, and anything with warmth.
2. Mix Your Cool Colors Together
Blues, greens, purples, and cool earths will give you soft teals, cool grays, and deep oceanic tones. These makes fantastic shadow colors and backgrounds.
3. Mix Everything for Unique Grays
One of the best uses for leftover paint is creating a custom gray.
When all your palette leftovers blend together, you often get:
• subtle grays
• smoky mauves
• neutral earth tones
• rich, complex darks
These mixed grays are incredibly useful for blocking in large areas, toning a canvas, or establishing atmospheric backgrounds. And every batch is slightly different — that’s part of the magic.
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Experiment and Learn Your Mixes
The more you play with your leftovers, the more you’ll start to recognize:
• what warms do when combined
• which cools work well together
• how certain pigments shift the mix
• how to steer a gray toward warm or cool
This kind of practice builds your color sense faster than any color theory chart. You’ll discover combinations you never would have mixed intentionally — and end up using them again and again.
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Save Time, Save Money, and Stay Ready
Tubing your leftover paint is especially helpful if you:
• work on large paintings
• paint frequently
• do murals or big backgrounds
• teach and need premixed colors
• love having dependable neutrals ready to go
It saves time during the next session and saves money on paint. And nothing beats grabbing a tube of your own custom color.
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How to Tube Up Your Extra Paint
Once your mixed color is ready, here’s how to store it:
1. Hold your empty paint tube upside down. Paolo uses this one from Blick
This keeps air from getting trapped inside.
2. Load your palette knife.
Scoop a good amount of paint so you don’t introduce too much air.
3. Insert the knife carefully into the tube and slide the paint in.
4. Tap the bottom of the tube lightly against the table.
This helps the paint settle deeper and removes air pockets.
5. Once full, fold and crimp the end just like a regular manufacturers’ tube.
Your homemade tube is now ready for your next painting session.
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Try It the Next Time You Clean Your Palette
Instead of seeing leftover paint as waste, think of it as an opportunity.
A chance to explore new combinations, practice your mixing, create beautiful neutrals, and save some money along the way.
Artists have been doing this for centuries — it’s a simple habit that pays off.