The twelve pans I actually refill, and the five I scraped out
After a year of carrying a 17-pan palette around, five pans had never been touched and two had been used so hard they were empty twice. This is the twelve that replaced them, chosen by what a pigment does in a mixture rather than by what colour it is on the lid.
Place card — Miradouro de Santa Catarina, Lisbon
| Kind | Field kit |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 38.7223, -9.1393 |
| Country | Portugal |
| Medium | Watercolour |
| minutes on site | 40 min |
| Tools in the bag | 12-pan travel palette · Isabey 6224 No.6 · Escoda Prado No.4 · 300 ml water bottle · cotton cloth |
| First published | 16 Sep 2026 |
The twelve, and the job each one does
The rule for keeping a pan is that it must be able to do something no other pan in the palette can do. Colour family is irrelevant; a palette with four reds that all mix the same way is a palette with one red.
| Pan | Pigment | Job | Mixes with |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yellow ochre | Warm base for stone, warm light | Everything. The most used pan by far |
| 2 | Cadmium yellow (hue) | High-chroma warm accent | Sparingly, with crimson for orange |
| 3 | Raw sienna | Warm shadow on stone, terracotta | Ultramarine for a soft neutral |
| 4 | Burnt sienna | Brick, tile, dark warm | Ultramarine — the hardest-working pair here |
| 5 | Alizarin crimson | The violet bias in cool shadows | Ultramarine for purple-grey |
| 6 | Cadmium red (hue) | The single brick-red accent | Almost never mixed |
| 7 | Cerulean | Sunny sky, warm grey with ochre | Yellow ochre for granite |
| 8 | Phthalo blue (green shade) | Strong greens, wet stone | Yellow for any foliage |
| 9 | Ultramarine | Shadow, neutraliser, skies | Everything |
| 10 | Payne's grey | The darkest value, without mixing | Alone, charged into damp |
| 11 | Sap green | Foliage, damp stone green | Raw sienna for olive |
| 12 | Burnt umber | Deep warm dark, tree trunks | Ultramarine for black without black |
What got scraped out, and why
Chinese white. Opaque white in a travel palette is a mistake. It cannot lighten a wash without making it chalky, and any lighter value is easier to get by leaving the paper alone. It stayed clean for a year, which is the giveaway.
Two more yellows. A lemon yellow and a second cadmium were in there because the palette came with 17 slots to fill. Both mixed into nearly the same orange with crimson, and neither added anything that ochre and raw sienna did not already cover.
Viridian and a second green. Viridian is beautiful and pleases nobody in a mixture that already has phthalo. The second green was a convenience pre-mix that saved thirty seconds and cost a pan.
A metallic gold. It came with the tin. It has never produced a stroke worth keeping on location.
The two pans that earn their place twice over
Ultramarine and burnt sienna, together, are the reason this palette works. Mixed roughly 3:2 they make the granite grey of Porto, the warm shadow on Lisbon's calçada, and — pushed to 1:1 with more water — the flat pale grey of an overcast sky. Mixed at 5:1 with a touch of alizarin they make the violet shadow under an awning. Almost every neutral in this log comes out of those two pans.
Payne's grey does the opposite job: it is the only pan that is used unmixed, charged into damp paper for the darkest value on a page. Buying a pre-mixed dark instead of building one is a real compromise — it flattens more easily than a mixed dark — and it is a compromise worth making when you are standing on a wall in the wind.
Practical notes from a year of carrying it
- Refill size: pans take roughly 2 ml of tube paint. A 5 ml tube fills a pan twice with a little left over for the mixing wells.
- Drying time: a freshly filled pan needs about three days to skin over. Carry it upright for that period or the paint migrates into the lid.
- Weight: the loaded tin is 218 g including the mixing wells. That is the single heaviest item in a watercolour kit and it is entirely water — a half-empty palette weighs nearly the same because the tin does the work.
- Cleaning: a wet cotton cloth once a week. Do not scrub the mixing wells with anything abrasive; the plastic scuffs and holds pigment from a previous session.