Use a bottlecap as a paint palette for small art projects

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#Do It Yourself#art#crafts#great-ideas#painting

Bottlecap paint palette

Amy Watkins (of dresser-turned-planter fame) submitted this great idea to our Flickr pool…

I had a minor, art-related baskets moment when I realized I could use bottle caps for the tiny amounts of paint I use in my paper art.

Tiny paint palettes

Can we all just take a minute to freak the fuck out over Amy’s Batman-inspired comics collage?

BLAM

Have you had any tiny (or huge) strokes of genius? Submit your own great ideas or be like our wonderful Homie Amy here and upload ’em to our Flickr pool!

About the Author: Megan Finley Horowitz

@meggyfin @meggyfin

I'm a 40-year-old potty-mouthed writer with late-diagnosed ADHD and a shit-ton of anxiety. I live in my hometown of Los Angeles with a husband, a daughter I never planned on having, and a senior rescue dog. Anything else you need to know can be gleaned from my instagram and my TikTok.

Comments on Use a bottlecap as a paint palette for small art projects

  1. So. Cute.

    My only moment of tiny genius wasn’t that genius, but here goes: I save glass bottles from alcoholic miniatures, line them up on the windowsill and put a flower or two in each one. It makes a bunch go further and makes a groovy display, especially with the sun shining through the glass. I’m more excited by it than is probably justified, but I just love tiny stuff!

    • I really like the beads in tiny bottles idea, especially if they were sorted by color like the crayons of an especially anal elementary school student (me). I have a lot of miniature jam jars that I use to store beads, but I hadn’t thought of displaying them that way.

  2. ZOMG! Perfect for painting gaming miniatures!
    (And I’m really agog over your collage. I’ve just started doing collages from comics and it’s a blast.)

  3. OK I love the collage and I love the recycling! However….
    As someone who was a painting major for a bit, I do have to offer a caution: the BEST place to use as a palette is a **mirror**. Relative color theory is why… that awesome bright yellow looks much different on the warm grey bottle cap than it will on a white paper. Using something white as a palette has the same issue. on a mirror, you only see the color itself and nothing else. This is especially important if you are MIXING colors- the warm grey will mess with your eyes when you’re trying to get just the perfect blue green for your Squirtle or the ultimate brown on that 1/16 scale Panzerfaust. Just sayin.

    • Amateur painter, here. Love the mirror palette for paintings or larger projects! I had been using clear plastic so I could hold it up and look through it, but this sounds easier.

      But for smaller projects or when I only need one color for something, I will definitely use one of those bottle caps that seem to congregate on the counter!

      • You can also acquire tiny mirrors and put them inside bottlecaps. Probably not great for watercolor, but it should work for small quantities of acrylic (mirror for the color theory issues, bottlecap to protect against spillage).

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