Since my painting times are rather sporadic, it’s often been a struggle to keep my paint from drying out. And that keeps me from painting more often because to scrape off dried lumps of unmixed paint and replace them with all new lumps of unmixed paint (which might also get wasted) is a real financial disincentive and mental hindrance to remaining loose with the process.

Since college, I’d used the same technique: put a sheet of plastic wrap over my color blobs. This keeps them wet longer than not covering them (they last maybe 4-7 days), but that’s not long enough if you only are painting every 3-4 weeks or months. So I researched methods to keep the paint wet longer on the pallette.

Ideas Explored

1 – Put the palette with the paint on it in the Freezer

This was the main idea I found around: put the paint in the freezer, but I think you’d probably want a dedicated freezer for such a thing. At least I wouldn’t want to put my messy paint palette in my freezer, and besides, my palette is way to big for such a thing, and I don’t want to downsize. So I didn’t actually try this.

2 – Keep your paint in jars and cover the paint blobs with oil

My friend Justin Augspurg said he squeezes each of his paint colors into a little jar and then covers the blob with oil. That would keep it from drying out completely. Of course if you want a nice dry scrubby paint thickness, it would probably be hard to acheive with this method, as he says when you dip your brush in to get some color it comes up dripping with oil (as you’d expect). If you are an oily painter this might just the thing for you, but I tend to paint dryer than this method would allow for.

3 – Clove Oil!

Finally I read somewhere that clove oil can lengthen oil paint working time, as apparently it has the longest drying time of the oils. I verified this with Artist’s Handbook (Ralph Mayer), and indeed he mentions that mixing clove oil into the paint makes it take forever to dry. But I don’t want it to take forever to dry on the canvas, I just want it to last forever in the blobs before I mix it.

After working with this idea, I started using this winning method:

1. pour a bit of clove oil into the lid of a baby food jar
2. put that lid right up next to the paint blobs
3. seal the whole thing with aluminum foil (which doesn’t let any of the oil evaporate through) and seal it with painter’s tape.

Does it work?

Incredibly. I can leave my paint for months (no exaggeration), pull back the foil, and basically just start working! The only caveat is that the earthy browns still dry out (and kind of the ultramarine), but all the other colors are fresh and good. And what’s even better is that the clove oil itself hasn’t evaporated at all, and the foil is completely reusable, so once you set this up, it costs nothing to keep it up. I got the jar of clove essential oil at my local natural food store (shout out to Axis Natural Foods) for about $10.