DIY Travel Watercolor Palette from an Altoids Tin

 

Aloha Borgs, 

I don’t know about you, but I really like the idea of travel art supplies that I can throw in my purse and pull out whenever I need them. So, when I found out people were making travel watercolor pallets out of Altoid tins, I was all over it. However, as I was looking at other people’s diys I couldn’t really find one that I liked 100%, so I figured why don’t I just make my own. I’ve never made a tutorial before, so bear with me. Also, if you want me to film me making this (because I am planning on making another one as I eat the rest of the Altoids in my tin), let me know. Without any further ado, let’s get into this. 

Materials:

- Altoids tin/small metal tin (I used a tin from Bite Beauty’s lipstick travel case)

- Gum trays

- Watercolor paint tubes

- Scissors

- Glue 

Not pictured:

- Acrylic paint (optional)

- refrigerator magnets (optional)

Step One:

Place the gum trays to see how they fit in your container. Cut off the excess trays. I used Dentyne Ice gum trays, but I'm pretty sure the trays from other gum brands will work as well. 

Step Two:

Pick the colors that you want in your palette. It’s always good to have either magenta, cyan and yellow or (if you don't have those colors like me) red, blue and yellow. You can mix those three colors to create almost any color of the rainbow.

Step Three:

Once you pick your colors start filling the trays with the color. I chose to fill two trays with red, two with blue, two with yellow, two with brown, two with dark green, one with black and one with white.

Step Four:

Wait. It’s going to take a couple of hours for the paint to dry.

Optional : If you don’t want to glue your tray directly into your tin, you can grab glue the tray to a kitchen magnet instead. This makes it easier to take out when you want to refill you paint or add different colors. All I did was grab a regular kitchen magnet and painted over it with some black acrylic paint. 

Step Five:

Glue trays to the bottom of your tin or glue trays to the top of your magnet. If your gluing the trays to a magnet make sure that the glue is entirely dry before sticking it back into the tin.

And that’s it! You're done! Now you have a compact travel watercolor case that you can throw into a bag or a pocket. I let the watercolor paints dry overnight and because I chose low quality watercolors to put in my palette, the paint did crack. However, I did some tests on the colors and they worked beautifully. 

The colors after they'd dried for 24 hours

One last thing, I would suggest investing in a water brush to go with this palette, that way you won’t have to carry around a bottle of water with you. Just be sure not to fill your water brush and forget about it, that’s a recipe for disaster. 

Happy Painting,

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