This is a tale in which I share how I came to use the watercolour paints and palettes that I do and a story of coincidence and serendipity which follows.

When I was a child, my Mum had two palettes from when she went to art school in the late 1970’s, which she let me use to play with when I wanted to paint. If you ask me watercolour is a sensible paint for children as even at its messiest it can usually be washed away with water quite easily. These palettes were black enamel on the outside and white enamel on the inside, folded to close but did not have a real closure to help them keep closed, they had 24 slots for paints in each palette, spaces for mixing colours, and a thumb hold with a lid that latched shut. I always felt very sophisticated using these palettes when I was little as they were clearly palettes which were meant for professional artists and not just paints for kids.

Fast-forward this story about nine years to when I was in eighth grade and we had a unit dedicated to watercolour painting. I had forgotten about the sophisticated palettes I used to play with and had not painted in years. The teacher demonstrated how to stretch the paper, and some basic techniques, like flooding, wet on wet painting, etc. Then we were set off to work on our own paintings tasked with doing some sort of landscape. Which I enjoyed immensely. This more sophisticated re-introduction to watercolour sparked something in my mind to think that I could continue to do these types of paintings at home. After-all all I needed to do was dig out my Mum’s old palettes and find a board to stretch some paper on! Which is exactly what I did!

One of the perks of growing up in a house where your parents both pursued some post-education in fine arts is that if you need tools for a project you will probably find it somewhere stashed away even if you think what you are looking for is a shot in the dark. You might get where I am going with this. I knew I would find the palettes, brushes, and watercolour paper for sure. What I didn’t know was that I would find a board that my Mum used to use for watercolour painting as well as paper-tape for adhering the paper to the board.

This made me feel like I really hit the jack-pot. I sometimes now even feel like it was destiny! But I also think that is a stretch as the likelihood of my finding all those things that we just so happened to have was very high. I digress. Even so it set me up for success from the get go.

So off I went with all the supplies I needed and watercolour painting became a loose hobby for me until I was sixteen. It was in the twelfth grade that I really dedicated myself to watercolour, even though I was still doing just copies of other artists work. I loved it. It was delicate, nuanced, and romantic. I knew I wanted to continue using the medium in University but my Mum would not let me take her palettes with me! I had used her palettes for so long I had begun to feel as if they had somehow slipped into my permanent possession. I thought of them as my own.

So the task was simple I must get my own palettes and I wanted the exact same ones that my Mum had, as clearly the palettes were good quality having been bought in the late 70’s! Simple right?

Tracking down a new version of something that is over 30 years old is always simple, right?

Admittedly it is a bit simpler when you are looking for art supplies as a lot of the companies are very old and their job is to create good supplies for years and years. However it certainly helps when you know what it is you are exactly looking for. Which was my first dilemma with this mission. I did not know who manufactured these palettes. There was no name, no logo, nothing to indicate where these palettes came from on them anywhere. All I knew was that they were enamel, had 24 slots for paint, and a thumbhole. Also online shopping was not quite the same as it is today back in 2013, the rare and hard to find was even rarer and harder to find!

The first thing I did was to see what the art supply stores in my city had to offer. All I found were white plastic palettes, basically the antithesis of what I wanted in my opinion. Next I began to search “Empty black enamel watercolour palettes” through my search engine online. After much scrolling I found a picture of a palette that was clearly by the same manufacturer as the ones I was looking for, but it only had twelve slots for paint, instead of the desired 24. Still this image and the link it connected to let me know that I was looking for a Holbein palette. Next I went scrolling through trying to find the model of palette I wanted as it appeared the 24 slot palette was a bit rare. Eventually I discovered I wanted the 1130-500 Holbein palette. Then the most difficult part of all was finding someone who sold those palettes. Despite my local art supplies stores carrying Holbein paint they did not carry their palettes.

You would think it would be simple after finding the manufacturer. But it was not. For whatever reason the 24 slot palette was harder to find. Eventually my Mum and I found two online sellers each who was selling just one of the 24 slot palette’s. I unwrapped these palettes on December 25th that year and was delighted. It felt like I was equipped with everything I needed to conquer the art world!

Like proper professional watercolour palettes they came empty and I could fill them with the my paints of choosing, it just so happened that after experimenting with a few brands of paints and seeing which tones of colours were available to me Holbein was also the brand of paint I decided to fill my palettes with, and still do to this day. I will go into why I like Holbein paints in detail another time, but a summary is that they offer the most vivid light-fast paints, with the widest range of shades.

If you thought this mad journey of scouring the world for the exact paint palettes my Mum had had for over 30 years was over you are mistaken. The real tale of serendipity comes a few months after that fateful Christmas. Ever since that eighth grade art class my watercolours were copies of the background art by Oga Kazuo of Studio Ghibli films. Hayao Miyazaki, one of the founders of Studio Ghibli was one of my hero’s and the ultimate inspiration for everything I made in those days. Needless to say I followed everything Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli did closely.

In the spring of 2014 I was reading an article about the Documentary, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, about the three founders of Studio Ghibli, which had been released in November of 2013 in Japan and was coming to Blu-ray with English Subtitles later in 2014. In the article I came across a jaw dropping photo of Miyazaki-san. Here is the photo:

Voila! Eureka! I could not believe my eyes. There was my hero, my idol, sat next to his watercolour palette which perfectly resembled mine! After all I went through to find the exact palettes my Mum had, which also turned out to be the palette my hero used was amazing. I had noticed that Holbein products had Japanese written on them, and knew they were a Japanese owned company. However who would have thought that those were the same that Miyazaki used! Now it is quite easy to find this information online if you just search Studio Ghibli materials and supplies, down to the paint colours used.

There is the tale of my palettes. Have you ever had a similar wacky crazy experience?

Heros and Palettes,

L. C. Cariou

My Watercolour Palettes’ Story

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