How to Keep Oil Paints Wet & Stop Wasting Paint (2 Easy Methods)

Hey, welcome back, and if you're new here, welcome to my channel. My name's Christina Kent, and I'm a fine artist based out of San Francisco. In this video, I'm going to do a quick tutorial showing different ways of how you can save your oil paints. If you're an oil painter, you know that oil paints can be really expensive. And if you're scraping down your palette every night and throwing those paints away because you're worried that they're going to dry on your palette, then you're actually losing a lot of money. Today, I want to show you two simple ways that I like to save my paints, whether it's to keep them wet overnight or for weeks, so that you'll never waste paint again. The first method is by far the easiest. It's what I did for many years, especially when I was painting at home, and this is the freezer method. With this method, you simply take your palette with the wet paint on it, you can wrap it with some saran wrap or put it in a box, and then you just take that and put the whole thing in the freezer. This works because oil paint doesn't dry by evaporation like acrylic paints. Instead, it cures over time through oxidation. It's a chemical process, and putting the paints in the freezer drastically slows this process down. When you're ready to paint again, you can take the paints out of the freezer. And I like to let the palette kind of thaw for a little bit before I get back into the painting. As a pro tip, and especially if you have a packed freezer and are worried about making a mess with the paints in there, you can get a special box for your palette. I like to use a Masterson palette box. And put your palette in there and put that in the freezer. And that helps keep things from getting messy. I like the Masterson box because it fits my palette exactly, but any flat, sealed box will do. I like the freezer method because it's easy, it's fast, and we don't need any special supplies. The second method is great if you don't have access to a freezer, or maybe you just don't want to have your paints next to your frozen veggies, and that is the clove oil box. So this is where you'll want to get an airtight or mostly airtight container that can fit your palette, like the Masterson palette box. Then you'll want to buy a bottle of clove oil. You can find this at places that sell essential oils, or you can buy it online. Take some cotton balls or some folded pieces of paper towel and put a few drops of clove oil onto them. Then throw those into the box with your wet paints and put the lid on top. This will keep your paints wet overnight, and for me, I've used this method for over a week and the paints have still remained wet. The reason why this works is because clove oil is an antioxidant. So as it starts to vaporize inside your box, it slows down the oxidation process of the paint and prevents it from curing. Remember though that clove oil will evaporate over time, even I've found in the best airtight containers. So if you are leaving your paints for a while, either put them in the freezer or try to add a few more drops of clove oil every few days. Other methods that can work, especially if you're in a pinch and you just want to save the paints overnight, is putting a nice tight layer of aluminum foil over your palette. This will help block out some of the oxygen and the foil blocks out the oxygen better than plastic wrap. You can also make what they call a paint taco, where you take some wax paper and scrape your oil paint mixtures onto that, then fold it over and tape the edges for an airtight seal. So these are my favorite go-to methods to save my oil paints. I hope you found this video helpful and that you won't waste any more paint and you can save your money on buying more studio supplies instead. Let me know in the comments which method you're going to try or if you have any other tips or suggestions that work for you. And if you want more access to artist advice, studio tips, and tutorials, then be sure to join my community over on Patreon. There I have exclusive content that dives into these topics and more. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.