Squeezing paint into a mint tin, for art

I love tiny palettes. They're the type of thing that I see and swear I'm going to do [x] (paint) more because I have [y] (a tiny paint palette). I thought really hard about getting a fancy small wooden palette (as seen in this tiny palette mega review by Leslie Stroz), but decided against it in favor of engineering one out of a mint tin. I also love putting random shit in mint tins. I already keep my small cross stitching projects in one (you would be shocked at the amount of embroidery floss you can stuff into one Altoids tin).

First, some considerations: I am a gouache painter. Drying gouache into cakes will make the paint behave differently than it would fresh out of a tube. You're basically turning it into really opaque watercolor.

Another consideration: not all gouache will behave the same once they're dried out. I've heard certain brands are horrible for cakes unless you have some gum arabic or another binder on hand. (Apparently, Winsor and Newton gouache gets particularly crumbly and unworkable. I haven't verified this yet.) I've been using Holbein, which has held together fairly well. It cracks and shrinks some, but it doesn't crumble, so all is well!

I also keep a fresh tube of white on hand because dried white paint is practically useless. And yet white pans still come in a bunch of watercolor kits... why? Why would you do that?

Anyway, the tin! You can crowd a good number of full watercolor pans into a decent-sized mint tin, but I used half pans because I didn't want to use a ton of paint on this. They stick to the tin with the magic of magnetic tape, which makes them easy to remove for cleaning or refilling. You can also have a collection of pans that you can interchange in your tin.

Ideally, the lid of the tin should be flat without any embossing so paint doesn't get stuck in the grooves. This rules out most Altoids tins unless you're willing to tolerate the grooves or fill them in. I was displeased about this because Altoids tins are the best kind of tin, but I made do with a less glamorous tin from Trader Joe's. I tried to mix colors on the metal surface of the lid, but it's near-impossible to tell what color you're mixing.

I whitened the inside of the lid using appliance enamel (per a post from Three Star Owl). Appliance enamel is waterproof and easy to clean, but it holds stains like most plastic palettes do. I haven't made any effort to get rid of them beyond dish soap and water because I just don't care that much! Consider the palette baptized.

That's all there is to the engineering component. As I said earlier, the gouache itself behaves like very opaque watercolor once it's dried. It's not going to give you the buttery finish of freshly-squeezed paint, but you can still push the opacity pretty far.

I'm not much of a plein air painter, but I imagine this would be a fun setup for outdoor painting. I'll keep futzing with it.