Make your own tiny watercolor travel tin palette from a blush compact

Inspired by this super little youtube video about how to make tiny travel tins for watercolor paints, I set about to make my 2nd tiny box, a real pocket sized on in an empty blush compact. He makes several tiny boxes in this video and I was particularly inspired by his smallest one made from a drinking bottle lid and neck. My first one was in a mints tin with 20 colors. This one has space for 9 tiny colors.

I decided to try to use just waterproof glue to build up the walls between the colors so I grabbed my Weldbond glue and cleaned up the tiny blush compact, planned out my colors on paper and got started.

homemade-paint-box

I penciled in the outlines.

make-your-paintbox

Then I patiently started to build up little walls with glue and just pushed then around with a toothpick as they dried and firmed up. The glue starts out wet and just spreads but as it dries, the toothpick pulls it together and builds it up instead of just flowing out. I used the pointy end of the toothpick too to scratch away at any slivers of dried glue ending up on the metal floor of the compact.

glue-walls-paintbox

It took about 3 layers of glue to build up the walls, shown below at probably the 2nd layer as it dried. I just picked it up and poked it around with the toothpick and then left it to dry taking a couple of days for the whole project to complete but really not much actual work time.

paint-travel-box-compact

Below is the finished tin with the paints squeezed in from my watercolor tubes. You can see the glue has dried fairly clear which took a few days. In the background is my next watercolor travel tin palette which I'll blog about next.

small-travel-paint-set

With my small 8 1/4 x 5 inch watercolor Moleskin, my folding Koi waterbrush, my waterproof Rapidograph ink pen and my new tiny watercolor palette made from a blush compact, we had a great day out urban sketching in Vancouver. Here's a sketch on the 40 minute ferry ride we took coming home to Gibsons, BC.

tiny-travelbox-paintset

Published
2014/08/07

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